Comic Book Opera: P. Craig Russell’s Salome in a Production by Table Top Opera

An anarcho-syndicalist artistic collective dedicated to eradicating pretentiousness and bad rhythm from classical music.¹

The above quotation is the motto of Table Top Opera (TTO), a chamber ensemble dedicated to multimedia projects based at the Eastman School of Music. Among TTO’s major endeavors thus far are collaborations with the award-winning comic book author P. Craig Russell based on his treatments of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 2012 and Richard Strauss’s Salome in 2014.² Our article provides an introduction to Russell’s comic book Salome as well as to TTO’s production and investigates some of the theoretical issues they pose for opera generally and Salome in particular. We use the term “comic book” because Russell himself uses it. Scott McCloud established “comic” as the umbrella term for works consisting of graphic narrative and sequential art in his iconic Understanding Comics, and that usage remains standard, with the understanding that it covers a wide range of subjects and styles.³ The term is not unlike the designation “opéra comique,” which denotes the medium (opera with spoken dialogue) but not necessarily the subject matter.

P. Craig Russell’s Salome

The third of his eleven operatic adaptations, Salome (1986) was a perfect choice for Russell, a keen amateur musician, who counts Strauss as his favorite opera composer:

Among other attractions, I appreciate the opera’s stylistic variety. I’ve considered adapting Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten, using Hofmannsthal’s prose treatment, and on my shortest list of favorite Strauss compositions, Daphne. I’ve also considered Capriccio but instead of words/music, staged as a conversation about the relative importance of words and pictures, the end result of which would be the suggestion to create a graphic novel. I don’t know where I’ll ever find a writer with the wit to pull that off.⁴

Salome also appealed to Russell’s long-standing fascination with the work of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and other “decadent” Symbolist artists. Russell came across the fairy stories of Wilde in the late 1970s while living in New York City and has subsequently adapted eight of them for comic books.⁵ His interest in Beardsley dates back even further to his student days in Cincinnati.⁶ It was then that he also encountered Philippe Jullian’s book Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s.⁷ When adapting Salome, Russell was clearly inspired by Beardsley’s illustrations for the first English translation of Wilde’s play, as the comic book image of Jokanaan’s head is an obvious allusion to Beardsley’s.⁸ Note the composition of the panels, in which the dripping head is presented on a platter at left, perched atop the fingers at the end of a long arm in Russell’s image (see fig. 1) and atop an unabashedly phallic symbol in Beardsley’s (fig. 2).⁹

Figure 1.

Jokanaan’s head on a platter. Russell, Salome, 134.

Another reason Salome was a fitting subject for Russell is that it intersected with two of his other operatic projects in the mid-1980s: Debussy’s Pelléas & Mélisande (1985) and Dukas’s Ariane & Bluebeard (1988). The three works are closely entwined: the operas Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907) are based on plays by Maurice Maeterlinck from 1893 and 1896, respectively; Wilde’s Salome was premiered in Paris by the Théâtre de l’ɶuvres, the same group that premiered Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande.¹⁰ The three operas are frequently described as Literaturopern, meaning the composers set preexisting if abbreviated literary texts rather than libretti written specifically for opera (although Maeterlinck wrote his Ariane with an eye toward an operatic treatment). Russell was especially interested in these operas’ female leads: “after the neurotically passive Mélisande and the hysterically vengeful Salomé, Ariane was . . . a psychologically healthy counterweight to the other...