Salomé, Psychotic, Neurotic, Perverse

SALOME, AN OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE MYTH

FROM OSCAR WILDE TO RICHARD STRAUSS

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne

Oscar Wilde signed this play as an English author exiled from Great Britain to France on sexual charges, after a spell in prison for his liaison with the young Lord Alfred Douglas. This play was written for Sarah Bernhardt. It was created in Paris, in French, in 1892.

The French text is easily available since it is in the public domain. But not so for the English translation attributed to Lord Alfred Douglas, I luckily had in an old edition of Oscar Wilde’s complete works. Another translation, which is essentially a corrected version of Lord Alfred Douglas’s exists under the sole name of Oscar Wilde. The differences are essential and we will use them to show the conscious work of Oscar Wilde on his text in English as compared to Lord Alfred Douglas’s, and with a reference back to the French text when the two English versions show clear and significant differences.

Then the opera by Richard Strauss (created on December 9, 1915) appears essential because Richard Strauss knew the original play he supposedly discovered in French. He had it translated and reduced in German. Strauss is also using the real music of the text to transpose it into his own music.

Yet the music of a text is not only creating sound patterns and rhythmic patterns. It can have a wider understanding: syntactic music, semantic music, and hence symbolical music. Then all musical elements come together. Strauss uses these patterns to create a comprehensive musical world.

Oscar Wilde’s version is extremely brutal, bestial maybe even cruel, even though the poetry of the text is extremely refined. It is that dimension we found fully realized in Philip Jordan and David McVicar’s Covent Garden, London, 2008 production of the opera.

I./ SALOME’S OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER: THE NEED TO TOUCH

Salome does not only stand in herself but she is also defined by the way people look at her.