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Dec. 15th, 2016 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretSalome by Richard Strauss, performed at the Met
Another opera off the bucket list!
So basically Strauss is a genius and everything he ever wrote is guaranteed to be amazing. Strauss's Salome is adapted from the Oscar Wilde play, Wilde's masterpiece of late 19th century decadence. It is all about lust and the pursuit of pleasure, contrasted to John the Baptist's ultimately futile stand for morality and God's will. It is a drama designed to unsettle or perhaps even to horrify, to challenge moral ideals about sexuality and human relations.
The music is sectioned and structured by Strauss's brilliant post-Wagnerian technique. There are passages that are pure tone-poem, with the music doing all the heavy lifting of telling the story. There are passages where leitmotifs carry character information, and passages where orchestral underscoring changes the meaning of the sung words in sharp, striking ways. And then there is the Dance of the Seven Veils, which is one of the most powerfully erotically charged pieces of music I've ever heard, in any genre. It of course stands alone, as it has for the whole past century as a titan of the concert repertory, but in context it means more. Salome's sexual power as expressed in the Dance is part of a narrative arc of her growing knowledge of her own power and unhappiness.
In general, I think that is what the opera is about- power and unhappiness. Power exists in many different forms in the opera- political power, sexual power, military power, intellectual power- but power does not bring any of its wielders happiness, and so they end up wielding their power in increasingly destructive ways in pursuit of pleasure.
Strauss was not exactly a friend of the Jews- I have mentioned an anti-semitic joke in "Arabella"- and there are further jokes at the expense of the Jews in Salome, jokes that are mostly extraneous to the narrative and that I wish the Met could have found a way to excise. I have a lot more trouble reconciling this than I do the anti-semitism in Wagner. Wagner's music is totalitarian, Nietzschean. I deal with Wagner by acknowledging his power to write effective music, but totally rejecting that music. But Strauss is cosmopolitan, thoughtful, open-minded. I find him likeminded, and that makes it harder to make sense of his anti-semitism.
I guess the one joke at the expense of the Jews that I was not bothered by was one that may have been added by the director- when the Dance of the Seven Veils begins, one of the Jews at court eagerly jumps into a seat to watch. The criticism of religious hypocrisy was well felt.
Another opera off the bucket list!
So basically Strauss is a genius and everything he ever wrote is guaranteed to be amazing. Strauss's Salome is adapted from the Oscar Wilde play, Wilde's masterpiece of late 19th century decadence. It is all about lust and the pursuit of pleasure, contrasted to John the Baptist's ultimately futile stand for morality and God's will. It is a drama designed to unsettle or perhaps even to horrify, to challenge moral ideals about sexuality and human relations.
The music is sectioned and structured by Strauss's brilliant post-Wagnerian technique. There are passages that are pure tone-poem, with the music doing all the heavy lifting of telling the story. There are passages where leitmotifs carry character information, and passages where orchestral underscoring changes the meaning of the sung words in sharp, striking ways. And then there is the Dance of the Seven Veils, which is one of the most powerfully erotically charged pieces of music I've ever heard, in any genre. It of course stands alone, as it has for the whole past century as a titan of the concert repertory, but in context it means more. Salome's sexual power as expressed in the Dance is part of a narrative arc of her growing knowledge of her own power and unhappiness.
In general, I think that is what the opera is about- power and unhappiness. Power exists in many different forms in the opera- political power, sexual power, military power, intellectual power- but power does not bring any of its wielders happiness, and so they end up wielding their power in increasingly destructive ways in pursuit of pleasure.
Strauss was not exactly a friend of the Jews- I have mentioned an anti-semitic joke in "Arabella"- and there are further jokes at the expense of the Jews in Salome, jokes that are mostly extraneous to the narrative and that I wish the Met could have found a way to excise. I have a lot more trouble reconciling this than I do the anti-semitism in Wagner. Wagner's music is totalitarian, Nietzschean. I deal with Wagner by acknowledging his power to write effective music, but totally rejecting that music. But Strauss is cosmopolitan, thoughtful, open-minded. I find him likeminded, and that makes it harder to make sense of his anti-semitism.
I guess the one joke at the expense of the Jews that I was not bothered by was one that may have been added by the director- when the Dance of the Seven Veils begins, one of the Jews at court eagerly jumps into a seat to watch. The criticism of religious hypocrisy was well felt.