Strauss is also using the real music of the text to transpose it into his own music.ģYet the music of a text is not only creating sound patterns and rhythmic patterns.

He had it translated and reduced in German. The differences are essential and we will use them to show the conscious work of Oscar Wilde on his text in English as compared to Lord Alfred Douglas’s, and with a reference back to the French text when the two English versions show clear and significant differences.ĢThen the opera by Richard Strauss (created on December 9, 1915) appears essential because Richard Strauss knew the original play he supposedly discovered in French. Another translation, which is essentially a corrected version of Lord Alfred Douglas’s exists under the sole name of Oscar Wilde. The English translation attributed to Lord Alfred Douglas is included in Collins’ Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. The French text is easily available since it is in the public domain. It was created in Paris in French in 1896. Haut de pageġ Oscar Wilde wrote this play in French, for Sarah Bernhardt.

Richard Strauss amplifies the text and the subject with his music and his German libretto. That also leads to an end that looks like some form of expiatory justice. This exploration of the relation between Salome and John the Baptist leads to a deep reflection on the value of life when it is entirely dominated by obsessive carnal desires. And yet she is killed like a plain outlaw by some soldier on Herod’s order. She provokes Herod, John himself and everyone else around her and pushes them to the extreme limits of decency. Salome is the archetypical monster in Christianity. Oscar Wilde uses these elements to create in French, and then in English in his own translation of the play, a style conveying and expressing these traits. Salome is deranged by an obsessive compulsive disorder that leads her to touch everything she desires, repeat things over and over again and count things around her. No female character, more than Salome, carries in herself so much power to debunk and rebut any establishment.

Salome oscar wilde book