• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1222 0

Billow suggested separate bedrooms for the good of the State. But against her conviction that a good German husband and wife should sleep together, his proposal was in vain. Already offended by Strauss’s earlier opera Feuersnot, whose theme, bawdily expressed, was the necessity of a maiden yielding her virginity to restore fire to a village, the Kaiserin had caused its cancellation, at which the Intendant of the Royal Opera had resigned in protest. The Kaiser himself had removed the imperial coat of arms from the Deutsches Theater when it performed Hauptmann’s Die Weber to a cheering Socialist demonstration in the mid-nineties. A decade had passed since then and to suppress on moral grounds an opera by Germany’s leading composer would now have subjected the Kaiser to the sharp-tongued wit of Kladderadatsch and other irreverent journals. Accepting the compromise the Kaiser said, “I am sorry Strauss composed this Salome. It will do him a great deal of harm,” upon which Strauss said that it had enabled him to build his new villa at Garmisch.

Outside Germany where taste was more prudish, Salome became “the storm center of the musical world.” In New York a tense audience at the Metropolitan Opera on January 22, 1907, awaited the rise of the curtain with “foreboding,” soon amply fulfilled. The music, when critics could tear their attention from portrayal of “a psychopathic condition literally unspeakable in its horror and abnormality,” was acknowledged marvelous but perverted to means that “sicken the mind and wreck the nerves.” The opera’s theme, not humanly representative as the material of music should be, was considered variously “monstrous,” “pestilential,” “intolerable and abhorrent,” “mephitic, poisonous, sinister and obsessing in the extreme.” Its “erotic pathology” was unfit for “conversation between self-respecting men,” and the Dance alone “ought to make it impossible for an Occidental woman to look at it.” Rising in “righteous fury” the press agreed that popularity in Germany settled nothing for America and the Metropolitan bowing to the storm withdrew the production.

London did not even attempt it until three years later. A license was at first refused but this was overcome with the help of Mrs. Asquith, who invited Beecham, conductor at Covent Garden, for a visit in the country to enlist the help of the Prime Minister. By playing for him the march from Tannhäuser on the piano, the only piece of music Mr. Asquith knew, and assuring him that to like it was not a sign of philistinism, and by explaining that Strauss was “the most famous and in common opinion the greatest of living composers,” Beecham won his support. In consultation with the Lord Chamberlain, changes in the text were worked out transforming all Salome’s expressions of physical desire into pleas for spiritual guidance and, as extra precaution against sacrilege, requiring her final song to be sung to an empty platter.

In Salome Strauss had found his lode but where was there another Wilde? One appeared, and with a subject which promised to outdo Salome. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a young poet and prodigy of Vienna, was already famous at twenty-six when he first met Strauss, ten years his senior, in 1900. The grandson of an Italian lady and a converted Jew ennobled as a baron, he embodied Vienna’s cosmopolitan strains. When at sixteen and still a student in the gymnasium, he read his first verse play to Arthur Schnitzler, the listener felt he had “encountered a born genius for the first time in my life.” Two years later, in 1892, under the pseudonym “Loris,” he enraptured Jung Wien, the literary avant-garde of Vienna, with two verse plays, Gestern (Yesterday) and Der Tod des Tizian (Titian’s Death), whose worldly knowledge and sophisticated weariness led Hermann Bahr, leader of the young literati, to suppose the author must be a titled diplomat of fifty. He was incredulous to find him a boy of eighteen, “a strange youth … fired by the slightest stimulus, but only with his intellect, for his heart remained cold.” Self-indulgent, already a man of the world,