Salome’s Silent Spaces: Canonicity, Creativity, and Critique

“Nun wohl! Ich lebe noch, aber du bist tot, und dein Kopf, dein Kopf gehört mir! Ich kann mit ihm tun, was ich will.”¹ These are, of course, the words of Salome, Princess of Judea, in Richard Strauss’s opera. But while the head of the Baptist continues to be demonstratively dead, Strauss’s Salome lives—and is still alive and kicking, due to the position of his work in the Western operatic canon. One of the youngest additions to that elite club, Salome has joined a seemingly fixed list of those relatively few works that are reproduced over and over again in opera houses worldwide. Indeed, opera in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries appears as the quintessential art of repetition. Opera claims this position over spoken theater or film by its comparatively limited inflow of new works. And unlike the literary canon, which is sustained by being read, opera demands readings that involve physical, performing bodies. New productions of canonized operas thus take place somewhere between past historical documents and the present incarnation, between already existing and ongoing creations, between something fixed and something open, and between staged bodies and bodies on stage.

The consequences of opera’s dependency on physical voices and acting bodies have been discussed at great length during the last decade, as opera studies has grappled with performance studies.² As a reader of these intriguing texts, I have often missed more of a focus on concrete productions and embodiments, and also how opera’s ever-ongoing re-creations relate to the logic and operations of canonization. In other words: the relationship between reification and volatility in the contemporary culture of operatic performance has gone underexplored. This is a broad topic on which I have just recently embarked, using the contemporary performance history of Salome as my case.

In this article, I concentrate on one short musical interlude from Strauss’s opera: when the head of the prophet appears from the subterranean cistern of Herod’s castle and the spectacle of the prophet’s head is about to appear in all its g(l)ory. The scene follows an intense stretch of musically represented “silence”: low E-flats in tremolo strings and the uncanny high B-flats, played sforzando, in the contrabasses, supported by Salome’s description of the silent cistern: “Es ist kein Laut zu vernehmen. Ich höre nichts.”³ This silence, ended by Salome’s agitated accelerando calls and marked “schreiend” (screaming) to bring in soldiers, builds up enormous expectations that are met in turn by a moment of actual silence. Here, a fermata general pause occurs—one of the remarkably few places in this score where Strauss’s dense orchestral texture stops, as if the music deliberately gives way to the image before us. Except for a crescendo roll in the bass drum, the measure in the score contains only written text describing this extremely physical scene: “Ein riesengrosser, schwarzer Arm, der Arm des Henkers streckt sich aus der Cisterne heraus, auf einem silbernen Schild den Kopf des Jochanaan haltend, Salome ergreift ihn.”⁴ All at once, it seems like the music holds its breath and leaves room for a materiality that only a concrete production can offer. While the audience expects something spectacular to appear, they do not know how it will do so.

In David McVicar’s production from 2008 (Royal Opera, London), a character that hardly exists in the libretto, the executioner Namaan, dominates on stage at this very moment. I have chosen to focus on this somewhat odd operatic figure to shed light on the hierarchy of texts constituting the background of every concrete embodiment.⁵ The existence of these texts as a potentiality for performance points to a co-dependent relationship between page and stage. My claim is that the combination of silent side texts and embodied retellings offer the possibility for a canon critique from within. This point was strikingly demonstrated in Stefan Herheim’s production of Salome from 2011 (Salzburger Osterfestspiele, restaged at the Norwegian Opera & Ballet, Oslo, in 2013), in a telling spectacle...