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Salome: FROM SCRIPTURE TO STAGE
BY JOSHUA BORTHS
Interestingly, “Salome” is never named in this story from the New Testament, and the events of John the Baptist’s death account for only a paragraph or so in the gospels of Matthew and Mark. And yet, the story of Herod’s daughter and her infamous dance has loomed large for millennia, capturing the imaginations of historians, theologians and artists alike. For—despite its brevity—this mysterious episode captures not just the tensions, desires and politicking of an ancient world gone by, but the darkest impulses of our own.
Salome, as named by the Jewish historian Josephus, was the daughter of Herodias and Herod Antipas’s brother, Philip, making her part of an incestuous, insidious family who violently ruled Roman Palestine at the start of the first century. After all, Salome’s grandfather, Herod the Great, notoriously ordered the Slaughter of the Innocents, and her stepfather would turn Jesus of Nazareth over to Pontius Pilate before engaging in a series of disastrous rebellions. As summarized by Jewish historians, the lineage of Herod was thoroughly corrupt. Herod the Great and his descendants were not interested in faith, religion or spirituality. They were interested in political power.
Around the year 30 AD, Herod fell in love with his brother’s wife, Herodias, and together, they plotted to kill her husband. The prophet, John the Baptist, spoke out against this palace coup. In the ancient world—as in our own—the role of the prophet was not to foretell, magically predicting events of an unknowable future; it was to forthtell, speaking truth to power, despite great personal risk. Therefore, John preached against the incestuous marriage of Herod and Herodias; he spoke out against fratricide; he raged against the moral decay of the royal court. Herodias wanted him dead. Herod, however, was wary and “afraid” of John, so Herodias used her daughter—Herod’s stepdaughter—as a pawn to murder the prophet.
Centuries later, beginning in the Renaissance, depictions of Salome and the head of John the Baptist became popular as artists explored this story of extremes: innocence versus corruption, life versus death, spiritual truth versus worldly desire. By the 19th century, Salome not only entranced visual artists, but also writers, poets and composers, such as Jules Massenet who wrote the opera Hérodiade in 1881.
In 1893 the Irish playwright and celebrity Oscar Wilde published his one-act play, Salomé. Since English law banned depictions of Biblical figures onstage, Wilde wrote his play in French, creating quite the scandal in the process. At the same time, though, Germany was on the cutting edge of artistic and psycho-sexual developments, and unlike other European nations, German intellectuals were entranced by Wilde’s provocative work. It was quickly translated by Hedwig Lachmann and taken up by composer Richard Strauss, who brilliantly transposed Wilde’s subtext, decadence and decay into his ever-evolving musical language.
While Salome had always been central to the story of John’s death, focus has traditionally been placed on the prophet himself. Wilde, Lachmann and Strauss, however, change this perspective, and Salome becomes the focus of her own drama. Tapping into anxieties of modernity, Salome depicts a world where unconscious and mysterious desires abound, exploring how little we can truly comprehend about ourselves and those around us. Like the moon, which is only visible by reflecting the sun’s light, Wilde posits that, through our subjective reflection, we can never really know one another at all.
In any production of Salome, therefore, thousands of years of history, theology and art collapse into one singular moment, and the work itself becomes a form of prophesy. Premiering less than a decade before WWI, the opera Salome speaks to a world about to be consumed by fire. Salome, the opera, “forthtells,” depicting the dangers of a society on the brink, consumed by its own self-interest. Salome warns us against dancing for death.
