Performing Salome, Revealing Stories ed. by Clair Rowden (review)

Abstract

Performing Salome, Revealing Stories. Edited by Clair Rowden. (Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera.) Farnham, Surrey, Eng.: Ashgate, 2013. [xvi, 217 p. ISBN 9781409445678 (hardcover); ISBN 9781409445685, 9781409474227 (e-book), $109.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. One could be pardoned for assuming that this book is study of single operatic work, Salome, based on Oscar Wilde's play. It is, however, much more than that. This book presents series of essays dedicated to charting history of play's operatic and balletic stage settings and its development as opera on film. This detailed historical, cultural, and analytical survey is presented by authors from various disciplines, both within and outside of performing arts. The diversity in approach and perspective is strength of this volume, edited by Clair Rowden. Contributing scholars come from musicology, comparative literature, film and audiovisual studies, gender studies, English literature, and performance studies. Each author crosses disciplinary boundaries with ease, with reference to dance, stage design, political history, and institutional history. Interdisciplinary dialogue is used to assess various approaches to staged and filmed versions of Salome, which, despite its potential to shock and offend, has become repertoire staple. Fundamentally, book reveals as much about cultural context of these settings as it does about musical work. Much previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on Dance of Seven Veils, both for its structural placement and explicit content, but Rowden's book draws out themes of and transformation across entire work, and importandy, illustrates how collaborative content in each reworking of this famous story has impact on its retelling. As she notes in introduction: the embodiment of Salome is focus of this volume (p. 1). The public perception to that of [Wilde's] private life (p. 2) informs attitudes about work's reception, and also about interpretation of Salome. Is Salome gazing at Herod through Wilde's eyes? Is Salome feminist (p. 11)? Wilde is presented as transitional figure (p. 4) who utilizes decadent style to develop new approach to drama. Notably Modernism's discontent with bourgeois institutions, mores and morality, values and hopes is explored to reveal that performance of Salome is a self-conscious which has been used as a vehicle for manipulation of concepts of performance and representation (p. 5). This original book is negotiation of multiple meanings, tensions and agency between its different interpretative layers (p. 7). Each version reveals something of its context through interpretation of challenging content (with reference to biblical figures alongside lurid sexual acts and incestuous desire, which was perceived as inappropriate for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European society). The main issues in book all concern transformation in some form: notably, ways in which Wilde's play has been reinterpreted within opera (chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7), adaptions that resulted in response to censorship (chapters 2 and 4), and changing ontology of Salome as work and character over last century (acknowledged in all chapters). The response of music to text (Richard Strauss), and of dance to music and text (Florent Schmitt), reveals instability in meaning and interpretation (see chapters 3 and 5). In view of gender performance, Salome might be seen as an erotic autonomous female, stripper presented for male gaze as so hotly discussed in late-nineteenth-century works, or re-gendered image of Wilde himself, displaying lust and homoerotic tendencies. But there is also an allegory in ways mediums interact, as music and dance are able to work with and to replace Wilde's text, and in modifications to character (Salome as flirtatious innocent or temptress). …