The Taste of Love: Salome's Transfiguration

The Taste of Love:

Salome's Transfiguration

In this article i offer a rezeptionsge-schichte of the premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome within a framework informed by postcolonial theories of race. In 1905 audiences at Dresden's Königliches Opernhaus interpreted the work as a Judenoper, but not in the way that Sander Gilman has argued. Taking a postcolonial perspective on early-twentieth‑century European imperialism leads to new conclusions about Strauss's Salome a century after its premiere.


In this study I go beyond the recent writings on Salome that have focused on constructions of gender and Orientalism to identify the rhetorical features and musical signifiers of Jewishness, exploring the subjective and collective meanings of Jewishness as a category of racial and national identity.¹ This essay is in part a response to Gilman's trenchant discussion of Strauss's opera.² I concur that Strauss constructed musical signifiers of racial difference to establish a distinct Jewish identity that enabled his audience to understand the work as a "Jewish opera." While Gilman, in "Strauss and the Pervert," concentrates his discussion on the link between Oscar Wilde's homosexuality and Strauss's presentation of the stage Jews as representative of the avant-garde, I argue not only that Dresden audiences understood the work as a Judenoper but that Salome served as a metaphor for the Judenfrage (Jewish question). Between the Jewishness of Herod's court, where the Jew was constructed as the unchanging racialized Other, and the Christ-like figure of Jochanaan stood Salome, a signifier of transformable cultural Hebraism.


In the opera contemporary audiences heard a redemptive quality in Strauss's music that distinguished the work from previous Salome representations. Gilman acknowledges, in passing, the redeeming nature of Strauss's music, yet he insists that "the charge of perversion 
remained."³ After an extensive examination of the Dresden reviews and early monographs I argue that the notion of perversion was far less important to Dresden audiences than was the notion of transfiguration.


In the closing scene of Strauss's opera Salome's death was not identical to the death of Wilde's Salomé. The Jewish princess Salome, through the music of Strauss, transcended her Jewishness and was transfigured. Some critics further interpreted her transfiguration as a conversion to Christianity. For them, Strauss was not perceived as a "pervert"; instead, he stood as their prophet. Within the context of European imperialism Salome, like many of opera's female protagonists, stood as a placeholder for national and imperial ideologies.


The Jewish Question


In Salome the musical representations of the protagonists were produced by a complex set of interdiscursive processes in which constructions of language, culture, and nation invoked a racial narrative. In Europe Christian hostility to Jews revolved around a series of related theological and social issues. During the nineteenth century the religious concept of the Jew fused with the secular notion of a Jewish ethnicity in which Jews were perceived as being a nation apart. During the 1840s the "Jewish question" emerged in Germany, addressing the problems of the existence, integration, and emancipation of Jews into Christian societies and states.⁴ Germans questioned how this "foreign" nation of Jewish people could live symbiotically within German society.⁵ In 1869 Jews living in both Germany and Austria-Hungary were granted emancipation. Religious freedom, including the conversion between Judaism and Christianity, was guaranteed by law.


The emancipation of the Jews was met with a mixed response. A playwright and friend of Richard Wagner, Heinrich Laube, expressed a common concern: "What bothers us about the Jews—their foreignness—can only be transformed by a thorough nationalization of the Jews among us." He provided two commonly held answers to the Jewish question: "Either we must be barbarians and root out [austreiben] the Jews to the last man—or we must assimilate them. The latter alternative must come to pass inevitably."⁶ The German obsession...