16 Salome

The role Salome is given in the New Testament is a minor one, where she is not even named, yet she and her story have been the focus of a significant amount of music. Salome is the name given to the daughter of Herodias who dances for Herod Antipas and then asks for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. There is no hint in the biblical text of any kind of romantic attraction between her and John the Baptist, but elaborations on her story have sometimes added such an element. A great deal of attention has been focused on her in music, painting, and literature despite the relative paucity of material about her in the New Testament Gospels.

Alex Ross’s New Yorker article about Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, which is built directly from Oscar Wilde’s text rather than a libretto, raises important questions about the composer’s motives for setting that controversial work as well as the place of same-sex attraction and anti-Jewish sentiment in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wilde’s story incorporates not just elements of the story of John the Baptist in the Gospels but language drawn from the Song of Songs as well. You can watch as well as listen to Strauss’s entire opera online.^[1]

There is also a video with a complete score and another with piano reduction for those who wish to dig into the written music. Wilde’s story was turned into a movie in 2013 with a film score by Jeff Beal. The 1953 movie Salome introduces romantic elements into the story that are different from Wilde’s treatment. The film score is by George Duning. One can also find copies of the 1923 silent movie Salome on YouTube with various musical scores created to accompany it, as beginning film score composers often use silent films that are now in the public domain to illustrate their creative abilities.