The Rhetoric of Seduction; or Materiality under Erasure
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
The Rhetoric of Seduction;
or Materiality under Erasure
MARCUS R. PYLE
She doesn’t “speak,” she throws her trembling body forward;
she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her
voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the
“logic” of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself
bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking;
she signifies it with her body.
—Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually
produced.
—Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
And what is more sensual and significant than gapes? . . . It is intermittence, as psychoanalysis
the body? Even a body laid bare still obscures has so rightly pointed out, which is erotic.”1
parts of itself. It is impossible to view a wholly Perhaps this tactical manipulation of the body
constituted body all at once. From a catalogue is a way female characters in opera regain auton-
of angles and perspectives, the viewer is left to omy within narratives that render their bodies
piece the body together—the gaze tires itself try- partial.2 The body-in-pieces, instead, becomes
ing to capture the body in toto. Is the body, then,
only ever fully grasped via synecdoche? What
happens when someone strategically deploys 1
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard
the fragmented body in order to seduce, ensnare, Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975 [1973]), 9–10.
2
Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women,
or entice? Roland Barthes asks, “Is not the most trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
erotic portion of a body where the garment Press, 1988).
194 19th Century Music, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 194–208. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN: 1533-8606 © 2020 by The Regents of the
University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/
journals/reprints-permissions. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2020.43.3.194.weaponized. The voice, deployed as material Nietzsche puts forth a theory that the “material MARCUS R.
PYLE
appendage, represents itself as whole, seemingly world, including the body, is nothing other than Rhetoric of
without acknowledging its component parts the flux of . . . appearances.”4 With Carmen, an Seduction
(resonant cavities, tongue placement).3 It emits aesthetic and epistemic shift that rejects invisi-
itself from the body and penetrates the ear of bility becomes tantamount to opera. The drama
the other; or, in Lacanian speak, it launches onstage is viewed as what Nietzsche described
one body into the body of an other. Thus, in an as “bodily permeabilities and a communication
act of strategic narrative essentialism, the char- through impulse and force, gesture and move-
acter becomes more than what the composer or ment.”5 From this, we begin to see the (proto-)
author imagined. modernist femme fatale as she who embraces
To say “rhetoric of seduction” is to discuss the fragmentation of the Self and launches her
the language of the body—a textualized, mate- body into the bodies of Others. In order to
rial body, a body that speaks itself into existence, seduce, the femme fatale must fragment herself
a body that penetrates its listening objects with and disseminate herself. The femme fatale is
its voice. It is my intention, by focusing on she who uses her voice as body, as material, to
femmes fatales’ episodes of seduction, to reeval- seize upon the other, crack herself up, and infil-
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
uate the material manipulation of the voice. By trate sites of restricted access—the orchestra
understanding voice, considered here as a mate- and the motivic material of other characters.6
rial bodily appendage, we can begin to under- Carmen traces the life of the eponymous ciga-
stand how the femme fatale uses the force of rette worker who exemplifies the travels and tra-
her voice to exploit the symbolic boundaries of vails of life as a smuggler and fugitive and who
authorial agency. That is to say, by voicing, the lures the soldier Don José into a messy love tri-
femme fatale becomes wholly subjective in a angle. Ultimately, propelled by machismo and
way that contends with authorial agency and ardor, Don José stabs Carmen to death while
the narratological apparatuses that seek to rele- musing, “I was the one who killed her! / Ah!
gate her to the condition of a mere object. The Carmen! My adored Carmen!”7 In the world of
femme fatale, wielding her body—her voice, opera, the femme fatale trope peaked during
her hips, her eyes—and reclaiming or essential- the fin de siècle—specifically within the period
izing its synecdochic portrayal, becomes her from 1875 to 1937, beginning with the produc-
own site of authorship. tion of Carmen and ending with Alban Berg’s
Throughout this article, I will address two Lulu. Though Carmen inaugurates, sonically
operatic women—Carmen and Salome. My rea- and textually, many of the tropes that come to
sons for choosing Georges Bizet’s Carmen be utilized in depictions of the femme fatale, it
(1875) as a precursor to modernist femmes fa- is Salome that thrusts the fatal woman in the
tales, most especially Richard Strauss’s Salome consciousness of everyday life—spawning global
(1905), are provoked by Nietzsche—“the middle Salomania. For Salome is considered the
man,” so to speak. Nietzsche, who by the pre-
miere of Carmen had grown disenchanted by
Wagner, saw Bizet’s opera as the aesthetic and 4
philosophical standard bearer of opera. Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 116.
Nietzsche, as Gary Tomlinson contends, rejects 5
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter
the “metaphysics” of Wagner (by which he Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage,
means the lofty philosophical underpinnings) in 1968), §1067.
6
“Voice” is framed throughout this article as bodily material-
favor of opera that “dances” and foregrounds ity, an extension of the body, a “vocal appendage.”
the body as a site of subjectivity. Tomlinson Understanding voice as an extension of the body—either as
argues that with this move to bodily materiality, appendage or as bodily fluid—has roots in voice studies theo-
rists such as Brandon LaBelle, Kaja Silverman, Emily
Wilbourne, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Janet Beizer,
the latter of whom traces depictions of the voice as bodily
fluid (especially female bodily fluid) in Romantic French liter-
3
Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and ature by Bachelard and Flaubert.
7
Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (New York: “C’est moi qui l’ai tuée! Ah! Carmen! Ma Carmen
Bloomsbury, 2014), 1. adorée!” (act IV, sc. 27).
19519TH seductress and femme fatale par excellence. The body, through a voicing-body. Their femmes
CENTURY eponymous character is a virginal young prin- fatales are wholly reconceived as representative
MUSIC
cess, enamored of the incendiary prophet John of subjectivity.
the Baptist, who is kept hostage in her stepfa- Examples of voice as an index of subjectivity
ther’s, Herod’s, cistern. Her insatiable desire for or presence can clearly be found in Carmen;
John the Baptist, and his unceasing rejection of Carmen’s singing voice and dancing body stub-
her flirtations, leads Salome to seek alternate bornly refuse to be implicated in a system of
means of possessing his body. She performs a excessive lack. Instead, Carmen links singing
striptease, the “Dance of the Seven Veils” for to thought and rationality—hers is a phone
Herod, and in return demands the head of John semantike, a signifying voice. (We may then
the Baptist on a silver charger. In considering ask what exactly Carmen’s voice signs off on
these two operas, I will be concerned with the or, rather, signs out of.) We see this phenomenon
specific deployment of woman, as seductress again in Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1877)
and femme fatale, in opera generally during the where Samson experiences the ecstasy of being
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. inhabited by the “misleading voice” (voix
By focusing closely on two scenes, the mensongère) of Dalila in her aria, “Mon coeur
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
“Seguidilla” from Carmen, and the “Dance of s’ouvre à ta voix.” In this aria Dalila weaponizes
the Seven Veils” from Salome (1905), I will her voice as a material sexual object, tumescent
seek to show how the agential subjectivity and penetrating. The voice becomes a site of
and material presence of the femme fatale opening. This phenomenon, of a body signing
character are depicted—sonically, dramaturgi- and singing itself, arises in moments when the
cally, and metaphysically. voice qua voice destroys the fabric of sound and
the sounded world of the opera characters—
S ONIC , D RAMATURGICAL , M ETAPHYSICAL when it becomes what I call “phonocidal voice.”
This phonocidal voice must not be taken as a
Sonic depiction consists in the ability to reify perpetuation of lack by understanding it as a
Self through sound, specifically through voice source of destruction and eradication. Instead,
and voicing. Reify here has a positive sense; it the phonocidal voice is a source of deconstruc-
denotes a character’s acquisition of an awareness tion and erratication. It is a voice that, in Jean-
that lies outside the sphere of influence of the Luc Nancy’s words, is “everywhere producing
composer/author. The femme fatale manifests and reproducing” and “infinitely mixing the
her materiality under imminent threats of impenetrable with the impenetrable.”9 Voice
erasure by manipulating the other characters’ becomes phonocidal when, as voice, it finds a
voices and contorting their perceptions of way of bringing the character whose voice it is
the stage world. Adriana Cavarero laments, to what Lawrence Kramer, referring to Salome,
“Whether in studies on orality or in studies on describes as “the extreme limit of knowable
the vocal nature of the text, there are still no and communicable experience”—a level of real-
voices that, in communicating themselves, com- ity that is outside of and ex-centric to the sonic
municate their uniqueness. Rather, there is only world of the incorporeal dramatis personae.10
voice: a voice that is doubtless rooted in the My decision to focus on the material body
fleshiness of the body, but a voice of everyone in rethinking operatic tropes aims to conjoin
and no one.”8 It is precisely this generalization two opposing fields of operatic scholarship—
of the voice that I will argue against. Each opera the corporeal and the dramaturgical performed.
to which I refer, working within modernist The voice of the femme fatale, aside from
conceptions of phenomenality and philosophy,
depicts a unique coming-to-presence through
9
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus,” in Thinking Bodies, ed. Juliet
Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994), 22.
8 10
Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Lawrence Kramer, “Opera as Case History: Freud’s Dora,
Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman Strauss’s Salome, and the Perversity of Modern Life,”
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11. Opera Quarterly 31, 1−2 (2015): 100−15, here 110.
196personifying a dramatic character, is an actual contends that the noumenal is represented MARCUS R.
PYLE
bodily entity that affects other bodies. What is by the orchestral music in the opera, which is Rhetoric of
the opera singer without voice? What is the oper- usually unheard by the opera’s characters. Seduction
atic character without voice? As part of the total Drawing on Kantian metaphysics, Abbate descri-
(izing) package of opera, the body must be con- bes the divide between what is empirically know-
sidered. As Linda Hutcheon, in her plea for pay- able and thus perspectively available to the
ing attention to operatic corporeality, writes: dramatis personae—the “phenomenal”—and
“Opera is an embodied art form; it is the perfor- the pure, noumenal thing-in-itself. Occasionally,
mers who give it its ‘phenomenal reality.’ . . . in rare moments of musical narrative—sites of
And it is specifically the body—the gendered, “multiple disjunctions with the music surround-
sexualized body—that will not be denied in ing it”—the noumenal is breached and the drama-
staged opera.”11 tis personae are allowed to hear the music that
At the same time, dramaturgical considera- embodies it. With these moments of imagined
tions also demand our attention. Archival and speech or presence (prosopopoeia), Abbate creates
historical annotations, stage directions, and a space in which we might ask: What do these
choreographies may illuminate how the com- operatic characters hear? Do they hear what we
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
poser conceived of the femme fatale. By explor- (the audience) hear? What are the effects of “pure
ing the way the composer (and to a certain vocalizing”—music that exists outside of plot
extent the librettist) sought to depict the and text? The femme fatale seems to have not
action of the onstage presence, we can come only the ability to breach the noumenal but also
to understand that the femme fatale is imbued the ability to alter it, seduce it, and in so doing
at times with the power to govern the orches- to assert herself as a material agential entity.
tra. Dramaturgical concerns, often left on the Abbate thus theorizes a character who can
sidelines of operatic critique, demonstrate the “hear” at exceptional moments. Going further, I
ways in which Strauss, Wilde, and Bizet hoped theorize a woman who can “manifest” at excep-
their femmes fatales would be deployed in the tional moments. My argument is that not only
staged drama. It is therefore necessary to take can the femme fatale hear the music of the nou-
into consideration not only the text and music, menal, but she can also govern it. When that hap-
but also the mise-en-scène, the archival addenda, pens, the femme fatale reifies herself as a site of
and the marginalia that reshape our understand- authorship and composition. This affirmative
ing of the roles that our femmes fatales play in reification destabilizes the central authority of
the metaphysics of opera. the composer and imbues the femme fatale with
Without a doubt, the modernist femme fatale musical agency. Richard Taruskin argues that
is endowed with certain sonic metaphysical noumenal music is not necessarily out of earshot
privileges. In Unsung Voices, Carolyn Abbate or imperceptible to the stage characters; rather,
argues that the “voice” of operatic characters is the characters live within it and “that is precisely
a site of multiplicity and at times betrays the sup- what makes the music ‘ambient’; its locus is not
posed narrative context of the orchestra.12 Abbate ‘without,’ but in a supremely literal sense
suggests that “narration”—by which she means within.”13 Nevertheless, there is a symbiotic
diegetic instances or breaches—can, at times, relationship between the voicing of the femme
present itself falsely, disassociated (disembodied) fatale and the out-of-earshot orchestra. It is my
from and incongruent with the orchestra. She argument that the femme fatale, in an effort to
manifest herself, has, at certain moments, the
ability not only to hear the orchestra that is oth-
11
erwise out of earshot, but also to appropriate it,
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “Staging the to co-opt it, to outsource her voice into it, and
Female Body: Richard Strauss’s Salome,” in Siren Songs:
Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. to (re)orchestrate it.
Mary Ann Smart (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000), 206.
12
Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical
13
Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Richard Taruskin, “She Do the Ring in Different Voices,”
Princeton University Press, 1991), x. Cambridge Opera Journal 4 (1992): 187–97; see esp. 196.
19719TH “L A T ERRIBLE E SPAGNOLE ” and music/phone was framed as ineffable, seduc-
CENTURY tive, illogical. Carmen deconstructs this binary,
MUSIC
The enchantment and the most powerful effect of however, in her dialogue with José. Her binding
woman is, in philosophical language, an effect at a together of logos and phone reads as dangerous.
distance, actio in distans; but there belongs thereto It summons up a fear of formlessness that has
first and foremost—distance.14 inflected modernist depictions of femmes fatales
generally. Jean Baudrillard, Freya Jarman-Ivens,
Carmen: chanteuse, singer, and song15—bodily
and Mary Ann Doane, in their theories of seduc-
charmer who thinks in music, fugitive who lures
tion, conceive of the femme fatale as a represen-
the corporal into narrative with her deceitful
tative of unknowability, a lack of substance,
song and dance. In search of a corporal and cor-
“pure artifice.” On stage, however, the femme
poreality, Carmen is the Urtext of the femme
fatale enacts a coming into material presence by
fatale who voices the boundaries of meaning.
coopting and manipulating the other character’s
As a dancing woman who always “gets outside
voices and their perceptions of the stage world.
herself,” she signs and sings herself into material
Immediately following Carmen’s rejection
existence. Self-undermining and undecidable,
of being relegated to phone alone, José begins
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
she reifies herself while under erasure. So she
untying her arms and begs her to promise
dances the seguidilla, syncopated and not sure-
reciprocated love. That she is untied, unbound,
footed; the seguidilla with its salidas, or false-
immediately after rejecting the fixity of
starts (faux-pas) and its coplas, bridges or links.
belonging to either logos or phone and being
Carmen, signing and singing, binds not only
made to promise herself exclusively to José, is
word to word, but genre to genre, song to dance,
significant. Carmen must either commit to
inside to outside. Her singing and dancing desta-
being imprisoned or commit to being exclusive
bilize the myth that the stage-world is disjoined
with Don José. It is here that the narrative and
from and inaccessible to the orchestra. And it is
dramaturgical apparatuses strive to renorma-
the body of Carmen, of the femme fatale, that
lize her transgressive body.
reconciles or (re)incorporates the stage-world
With this in mind, we may echo Susan
and the orchestra. Therefore logos, as Carmen
McClary and ask: “Why was Bizet determined
performs it, consists in the material joining of
to compose this opera in the opéra-comique
two worlds, one embodied, the other not.
form—featuring spoken dialogue and easily
During Carmen’s imprisonment and her
excerpted songs and dance numbers—when he
seduction of Don José, José shouts: “Stop! I told
was so critical of the form?”17 As McClary
you not to talk to me!” Carmen replies: “I’m
argues, the form enables Bizet to amplify the ten-
not talking to you, I’m singing to myself; and
sion between speech and song. I would add that
I’m thinking. . . . It’s not forbidden to think!”16
it also allows Bizet to thematize Carmen’s limi-
Traditionally logos applied to what were consid-
nal position in regard to speech and song, the die-
ered masculine figurations such as reason and
getic and extradiegetic. When Carmen seduces,
rationality—in this case Carmen’s “thinking”—
she conjures the orchestra to “sing for herself,”
to sing herself, to draw attention to her vocalic-
body. It is as though Carmen demands of José,
14
“La Terrible Espagnole” is from Jean-Pierre-Oscar “Do you see what I’m saying?” with the synes-
Comettant (Le Siècle), quoted in Susan McClary, Georges thetic outline of her gyrating body. Voice,
Bizet: Carmen (New York: Cambridge University Press, body, and dance are imbricated and exploited
1992), 112. “[Carmen enters as] la terrible espagnole who
leaps like a tiger-cat, writhes like a snake . . . ingenious in order to explode the boundaries of meta-
orchestral details, risky dissonances, instrumental sub- physical oppositions. McClary suggests that
tlety, cannot express musically the uterine frenzies of “Bizet does not have Carmen dance merely to
Mlle Carmen.” (Italics in original.) The extract is from
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882] (New York: gratify the ballet-loving Parisian public: her
Vintage, 1974).
15
swinging hips—which are alien to ballet—are
“Carmen” etymologically—and probably pointedly—
means “song.”
16
“Je ne te parle pas, je chante pour moi-même; et je
17
pense . . . il n’est pas défendu de penser!” McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen, 45.
198a crucial issue in the opera.”18 Opéra-comique creates a space in which we might ask why the MARCUS R.
PYLE
form allows for the re/creation and decontex- musical idiolect of the Dance of the Seven Rhetoric of
tualization of the femme fatale. The excerpted Veils in Strauss’s Salome sounds so jarringly Seduction
dance numbers of opéra-comique are synec- out of place. For whom are these femmes fatales
doches that threaten to mutilate and disseminate really dancing? By asking these questions, we
the vocalic-corporeal Carmen. The catchiness of begin to undermine the to-be-looked-at-ness
their “kitsch” tunes spurs our mind’s ear like of the femme fatale; we move away from the
an intrusive parasite. In order to become a trans- operation of the gaze and toward a vocalic frame-
gressive figure, Carmen must first create a dis- work. And we begin to untangle gnarled concep-
tance between her object(s) of desire and herself. tions of the voice and consent (we don’t have
By synchronizing the orchestra with the gyra- earlids after all), so that voice stands an entry
tions of her hips and by making the otherwise point to musical hermeneutics, to the role of
out-of-earshot orchestra audible, she creates seductive voice in opera, and to voice as a way
metaphysical distance . . . disdanse . . . Dis! of manipulating selfhood.
Danse!
Carmen embodies a paradoxical logic; she B ODILY C HARM /B ODILY H ARM
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
achieves material existence only in the moment
that she escapes from the narrative stage-world. Salome, the character and the story, presents a
Perhaps this is how the sensual wires of palimpsestic view of feminine agency, the power
Carmen were crossed. Her body, as site of infec- of voice, and shifting ideas of Self. We are presen-
tion, is cross-contaminated with all sorts of ted with a story of necrophilia, thinly veiled
senses; this synesthesia becomes a figure for incest, seduction, suicide, murder, and blas-
the going-between of the femme fatale. Opera phemy. We are also presented with a story that
understands itself as a genre of self-severance, has, over the years, garnered fervent criticism,
hell-bent on immunizing itself against being has been banned from various opera houses and
misled. Nevertheless, opera is susceptible to theater stages, and has been met with charges
intrusions from the Other-world. The call from of indecency and degeneracy. In equal propor-
the Other-world, from what Abbate calls the tion, the various renderings of Salome have been
noumenal, is represented by Carmen’s body, lauded as a vanguard not only in the sense that
which deconstructs the seemingly hermetically Strauss’s Salome was deemed a compositional
sealed (hermeneutically sealed) interiority of modernist manifesto,20 but also in that they
the operatic stage-world. Body and text are inter- began to represent a female anti-heroine who
twined where the text conjures the subject of reflected growing discontent among Austro-
the poem in the seeing and not the saying of Hungarian women. As Bryan Gilliam has eluci-
the text.19 dated, Strauss’s compositional oeuvre changed
The theoretical formulations put forth in this with Salome; Strauss featured women as central
article allow for broader explications of the characters from Salome onward.21
femme fatale’s tropology. Not only does this This shift, Gilliam argues, is motivated by
framework allow me to critique an unhealthy three factors: “personal and artistic attraction to
dependence upon the divided worlds of the opera the female voice”; the “huge marketing potential
stage—the conception of noumenal and phe- of writing for women”—especially with the
nomenal as separate entities—but it also under-
mines the rigid parallel oppositions of voice and
text, music and language, excess and lack. It
20
Richard Strauss’s Dresden premiere (1905) was attended
by luminaries such as Gustav Mahler, Giacomo Puccini,
Alexander Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban
Berg. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the
18
Ibid., 56. Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
19
“Carmen,” the name, puts us within the semantic field 2007), 14.
21
of the carmen figaratum, a synesthetic literary form that Bryan Gilliam, Rounding Wagner’s Mountain: Richard
visually depicts the subject of the poem by using text Strauss and Modern German Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge
placement—a sort of sacred Renaissance calligram. University Press, 2014), 61–63.
19919TH growing popularity of the femme nouvelle;22 and and vanquished.”27 From these contemporary
CENTURY the centrality of women as a means for Strauss to voices, it is clear that the femme fatale and the
MUSIC
distance himself from Wagner, “whose world- modernist compositional style associated with
view focused more on male heroes, with the depictions of her are bound up with ideas of
woman serving as a redeeming force.”23 Salome material presence. It is necessary to acknowl-
presented a figure that could be rallied around as edge that these critics are indeed addressing the
a symbol of social agency and social change— music and the physicality of its dissonant and
a character that paralleled the political message excessive sonorities. Nevertheless, this fore-
of suffragists.24 The purpose of the next two grounding of the body and its sensual material
sections is to undertake a critical genealogy of properties are often lost in current discussions
the story and the character Salome, looking of the femme fatale.
particularly at the way in which her voice—as In the “Exergue” of Derrida’s Of Gramma-
both a metaphor and a pure, uncanny (unheim- tology, Derrida contends that philosophy has
lich) phenomenological entity—is transformed always been predicated on the “metaphysics of
throughout various literary and operatic depic- presence.” That is, philosophy, without ques-
tions. How does Salome, through voicing, tioning the binding structures of inquiry, has
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
transgress and fashion Self (and indeed manip- agreed that there is a primary presence, an origi-
ulate and destroy the self/other binary), seduce nary Truth. If we blindly follow logic or reason
other characters, and usurp patriarchal power? far enough we will arrive at a universal, unmedi-
Recent conceptualizations of the femme ated answer. Derrida continues to state that
fatale and her function as a narrative trope are there is no unitary unmediated Truth; instead,
sometimes divorced from the historical dis- there are only supplements—supplements that
course surrounding the figure. Robert Brussel both substitute and/or augment a partial pres-
remarked of the 1905 Dresden performance of ence. Mary Ann Doane takes up this line of
Salome that “it was difficult to judge the work thought to argue that “woman is truth only inso-
other than physically [italics in original].”25 far as it diverges from itself, is not reducible
Reviewing a Parisian performance of Salome in to the evidence of self-presence, multiplies its
1910, Adolphe Aderer writes: “[The music of surfaces, and produces frames within frames.”
Salome] entered us like a brutal invasion.”26 In Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory,
Similarly, Pierre Lalo complains of Salome that and Psychoanalysis, Doane asserts that the
it creates “the fever, the delirium, the fury deception of the femme fatale is unconscious,
which acts on the listener like rapid and violent blind, and “absolutely necessary in order to
shocks and leaves him debilitated, annihilated, allow and maintain the man’s idealization of
her” as his perfect object.28 The insistence upon
the woman’s inability to control her own body,
plus the fact that “she does not know,” is rooted
22 in a system that seems to assert that there is a
See Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle
France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University transcendental essence that propels her actions.29
of California Press, 1989), 63−74. See also Chris Weedon, In this sense, the conception of the femme fatale
Gender, Feminism, and Fiction in Germany, 1840–1914
(New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 12.
23
Gilliam, Rounding Wagner’s Mountain, 62.
24 27
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde “Cette Salomé nouvelle ne déchaînera pas sur vous la
and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Ann Arbor: frénésie qui possède la Salomé allemande, la fièvre, le
University of Michigan Press, 2011), 106. délire, la furie qui agissent sur l’auditeur comme par des
25
“Il était difficile de juger l’œuvre autrement que physi- chocs précipités et violents, et le laissent à la fin terrassé,
quement.” Robert Brussel, “Théâtre-Lyrique de la Gaîté,” anéanti et vaincu.” Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps
Le Figaro 56, no. 113, 3 (23 April 1910): 5. (Italics in origi- (4 May 1910), 3.
28
nal.) Cited in Megan Coe, Composing Symbolism’s Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film
Musicality of Language in Fin-de-siècle France (PhD diss., Theory, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991),
University of North Texas, 2016), 95. 59.
26 29
“La musique . . . entrait chez nous comme une brutale Ibid. Doane’s italicization of “know” possibly signals
invasion.” Adolphe Aderer, “Premières Représentations, that the femme fatale is an instinctual being—one who
Théâtre-Lyrique de la Gaîté,” Le Petit Parisien 35, no. 12, operates through some bodily epistemology of feeling, of
229 (23 April 1910): 2. “divin[ing].”
200according to Doane is still implicated within materiality of the femme fatale’s body, and par- MARCUS R.
PYLE
the metaphysics of presence. Doane suggests that ticularly of her voice, and argues instead that Rhetoric of
there is something wholly Other—perhaps the the femme fatale’s “agency” is a pre-coded un- Seduction
omniscient master hand of the composer or consciousness that she merely acts out. Doane
the gaze of an other—that compels the femme writes, “Her dissembling is not a conscious
fatale to act. However, this thesis is compli- strategy. She has no knowledge of it or access
cated by a number of cases that will be addres- to it as an operation.”32 But if we work with
sed below. the voice as opposed to the gaze, if we question
The default view of the femme fatale is that of the certification of her subjectivity by the other,
a cold, calculating woman who stands for we may find that the femme fatale can exist for
“destruction rather than creativity.”30 She is herself. She can assume her self because she
charged with being a symbol of the degeneracy can hear herself singing. And it is her radical
and disintegration of European society—a mani- self-sufficiency that enables the re-presentation
festation of masculine anxieties. In the same of herself in various contexts, in various media,
vein, it is theorized that this disintegration and in various worlds (noumenal/phenomenal, stage/
fragmentation allow the female body to act orchestra). The femme fatale trope is the cut that
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
as a tabula rasa. But the presence of the body binds.
cannot be ignored. We are compelled to consider
the materiality of the femme fatale’s body,
especially—to return to Salome—as Strauss G AINING V OICE AND E XCEEDING S ELF
makes a point of featuring the Dance of the
Seven Veils and of narrativizing the bodily The literary origins of Salome derive from a
charm of the young seductress. The femme few short biblical passages, Mark 6:17–29 and
fatale is no longer one who functions as pure Matthew 14:3–11.33 In these mentions, she is
spectacle—lacking substance or essence. She merely referred to as the “daughter of Herodias.”
does not represent psychic lack, but instead Already we see that she is a subdued character,
represents pure presence in a way that accentua- lacking a name, lacking a voice—a lackey. She is
tes the artificiality of all other characters. The depicted as a silent nigh-marionette controlled
claim that the power of the femme fatale resides by her mother. Salome dances for her stepfather
in her “unknowability” is one that I consider to (Herod), at her mother’s insistence, and when
be a critical misreading of the modernist (and he asks what Salome would like in return,
even postmodern) femme fatale. On the con- she scuttles off to ask her mother who says,
trary, the femme fatale represents pure material “The head of John the Baptist.” Until the
presence. Doane equates the femme fatale (and Oscar Wilde play (Salomé, 1891), the muffled
woman writ large) with a figure who lacks meta- agency of the daughter of Herodias remained;
physical Truth. She writes that there is “a cer- Salome acted primarily under the influence
tain slippage . . . by means of which the female of her mother. Just as Salome was rendered
body becomes an absolute tabula rasa of sorts: narratively mute, her dance was euphemized,
anything and everything can be written on understated, ignored, or altogether extracted
it.”31 So we have a sense that the femme fatale from the telling of the story such that
herself is either everything or nothing. Doane Salome’s body could easily be ignored. Udo
seems to argue that the femme fatale is a no- Kultermann writes: “While Wilde had given
thing with the ability to become more than what the figure Salome an identity, Strauss gave her
she is. However, this formulation ignores the the chance of a voice and dance, both defining
32
Ibid., 59.
30 33
George Ross Ridge, “The ‘Femme Fatale’ in French For a detailed account of the literary origins of Salome, see
Decadence,” The French Review, 34, no. 4 (Feb. 1961): Mario Praz, “Salome in Literary Tradition,” in Richard
352–60, here 353. Strauss: Salome, ed. Derrick Puffett (New York: Cambridge
31
Doane, Femmes Fatales, 170. University Press, 1989), 11–20.
20119TH in extreme and challenging forms within her harbors the potential for deconstructing the
CENTURY person a new dimension of female reality.”34 trope of the femme fatale. The concept, as
MUSIC
I understand this dimension to be a paradoxi- derived from the Marquis de Sade, Georges
cal voice (the Dance has no spoken or sung text) Bataille, and Michel Foucault, refers to the
that is granted to Salome through the inclusion exploitation of excess in a way that brings into
of the Dance of the Seven Veils. The Dance reifies question the discursive limits inscribed on a
her as both a femme fatale and as a figure of subject.37 In transgressing—literally “crossing
liberated femininity. Voice granted to Salome in over”—the transgressive subject gains critical
a nonvocalized instance of dance underscores insight into the imposed practices that are scrip-
the possibility of a voice being outsourced to the ted onto Being. Therefore, I argue that Strauss’s
orchestra. The coopting and expansion of the Salome uses her chameleon-like ability to voice
phenomenological Self to parts of the accompa- in order to accentuate the discursive limits of
nying orchestra (what Abbate would refer to her identity, where, as Alfie Brown observes,
as the noumenal) allow for Salome to give voice “moments of transgression encompass a renun-
without vocalizing. She annexes the sonic ciation of one’s identity by breaking those limits
domain of the orchestra in order to seduce. That that guarantee the identification of the subject
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
is to say, although Salome is seemingly mute, within the social body.”38 This notion of excess
she voices herself via the orchestral accompani- and taboo is a way of redrafting or calling into
ment, which is usually thought to be extradiege- question boundaries of self. Salome and the
tic, out of earshot for the characters. femme fatale reject erasure as a termination of
Another point of Kultermann’s claim is that self and reformulates it as a “constant erasure
Salome toggles between depictions of virtus of stable meanings and beliefs.” The result is a
and voluptas, innocence and harlotry,35 danger- productive evaporation of self, an “a-logical
ous femininity and transgressive femininity. He explosion of signs,” and a “desire free from fixed
writes that what Strauss and Wilde give to subjectivity.”39
Salome is “a conscious and successful personal-
ity [that] no longer [fit] into the social frame of L ACK R EVISITED
subordination and passivity, it was [this] grow-
ing awareness of specific powers which when Within a sonic bodily framework, we may begin
used appropriately could lead to the achieve- to reconceive of voice as distanced from ideas of
ments of goals.”36 Salome became the figure of psychological lack; voice is no longer bound to
the femme nouvelle. Petra Dierkes-Thrun, lack.40 By arguing against this theoretical main-
in Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the stay, we can begin to ask how reconceptualiza-
Aesthetics of Transgression, argues that tion beyond and outside lack might liberate
Wilde’s Salomé does not produce a story operatic stagings, alter onstage depictions of
indebted to the social codes of the fin de siècle; femininity (dangerous or otherwise), and reimag-
rather, it transgresses—exceeds the normative ine the role of body as more than spectacle. The
forms and styles of the Victorian era—and pro- femme fatale, particularly the modernist mani-
duces something wholly Other. Wilde’s play festation of her, rejects becoming an embodi-
presents a narrative outside the norms of sexual- ment of lack. Nevertheless, lack is something
ity, gender, metaphysics of transcendence, and necessarily tied to desire. For example, the voice
modesty—a narrative that disrupts the tropolo- of John the Baptist—acousmatic, emanating
gies of its era’s concepts of woman.
The idea of transgression by means of the
37
body, gender, sexuality, and excess is one that 38
Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity, 9.
Alfie Brown, “Losing the Self: Transgressing in Lawrence
and Bataille,” Études Lawrenciennes 43 (2012): 259–80.
39
Chrysanthi Nigianni, “Butterfly Kiss: The Contagious Kiss
34
Udo Kultermann, “The ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’: of Becoming-Lesbian,” in Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed.
Salome and Erotic Culture around 1900,” Artibus et Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Historiae 27, no. 53 (2006): 197. University Press, 2009), 169−70.
35 40
Ibid., 194. Alice Lagaay, “Between Sound and Silence: Voice in the
36
Ibid., 211. History of Psychoanalysis,” E-pisteme 1, no. 1 (2008): 53–62.
202from the cistern—is the dramatization of an fanfare and without Salome’s knowing it until MARCUS R.
PYLE
abyss that is plentiful. It is an abyss that is too late; (3) Salome, ever-determined to die Rhetoric of
not empty. It is an abyss that excites desire in alongside Jean, commits suicide. It is almost an Seduction
Salome. This deconstruction of presence/ inverted Oedipal tragedy. Salome progresses
absence and lack/plenitude is what the trope of from an initial relation to the mother that is
the femme fatale embodies in her drive toward “too full,” to a relationality that is fissured by
material presence. According to Doane, the sys- an alignment with her object of desire (Jean).
tem of lack and phallic acquisition is such that: Subsequently, with the modernist figuration of
“The initial relation to the mother [Herodias] . . . Salome, she exists insatiably in search of her
is too full, too immediate, too present. This object of desire, as evidenced by her dissatisfac-
undifferentiated plenitude must be fissured tion even after kissing the head of John the
through the introduction of lack before represen- Baptist in the final monologue of Strauss’s opera.
tation can be assured, since representation This hermeneutic of the genealogy of Salome
entails the absence of the desired object.”41 We extends the conception of lack outlined by
can understand the coming-to-voice of Salome Michèle Montrelay who writes that “the repres-
over the course of her musico-literary genealogy sion that ensures that one does not think, nor
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
as a progressive departure from a metaphorical see, nor take the desired object, even and above
system of lack. Salome as a “foil” character, at all if it is within reach: this object must remain
first nameless and ventriloquized by her mother, lost.”45 At its most developed, the figure of
morphs into a character who defiantly remarks, Salome translates that necessary lack into a
“I do not heed the voice of my mother. ’Tis point of affirmation.
for mine own pleasure that I ask the head of At this point, it seems that the development
Jochanaan.”42 of the Salome trope coincides with a struggle
The portrayals of Salome in the Romantic era, toward possession of the symbolic phallus.46
some bleeding into the post-Romantic/modern- In order to become a transgressive figure,
ist era, depict Salome as the virtuous “little within the psychoanalytic theory of lack,
Immaculate Conception” who innocently asks Salome must first create the distance dividing
that John the Baptist be absolved and not exe- her from her object(s) of desire. Toril Moi
cuted by Herod.43 In Massenet’s Hérodiade explains, “Anything that is not shaped on the
(1881),44 Salome admits her love of the prophet pattern of the Phallus is defined as chaotic,
(here named Jean) and Herod spitefully senten- fragmented, negative, or non-existent.”47 But
ces her to death alongside him. Salome pleads it is precisely the broken up and fragmented
with Herodias to pardon him since he raised object that allows for re/creation and decon-
her in the absence of her mother who, at this textualization in the modernist era.
point, is yet to be revealed as Herodias. As the Salome is portrayed in seminal scholarship
scene progresses, Jean’s death becomes increas- elsewhere as something of a Freudian/Lacanian
ingly imminent. Poignantly, Herodias remains phallic mother.48 Kramer reads Salome’s final kiss,
silent in response to Salome’s request; and it
is her silence that is the impetus for three plot
points: (1) Salome threatens to stab and kill
Herodias who, in a fit of panic, reveals that she 45
Michèle Montrelay, “Inquiry into Femininity,” m/f 1
is Salome’s mother; (2) Jean is executed without (1978): 89.
46
This would seem to be the case when Abbate argues that
the Dance of the Seven Veils is precisely so gauche because
it reveals that underneath the veils Salome possesses a
penis. Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or the Envoicing of
41
Doane, Femmes Fatales, 171. Women,” 267.
42 47
Oscar Wilde, Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, trans. Lord Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary
Alfred Douglas (New York: Heritage Press, 1945 [1891]), 44. Theory, 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 66.
43 48
Richard Ellmann, “Overtures to Wilde’s Salomé,” in See especially Lawrence Kramer, “One Coughs, the Other
Richard Strauss: Salome, ed. Derrick Puffett, 19. Dances: Freud, Strauss, and the Perversity of Modern Life,”
44
Hérodiade is based on the story “Hérodias” (1877) by Musicological Annual 45, no. 2 (May 2009): 33–44, here 38.
Gustav Flaubert. The libretto was penned by Paul Milliet Kramer connects Salome’s dance with an effort to wield in
and Henri Grémont. bodily form the sovereign power of the word.
20319TH as both a stylized (symbolic) act of fellatio and maximal effect, she summons an onstage orches-
CENTURY an appropriation of phallogocentric institutions tra to amplify her seduction aria. The onstage
MUSIC
of power—writing, rationality, speech, and orchestra, which is heard by the dramatis perso-
logos—by a character who has been preoccupied nae, features harp, theorbo, strings (including
with the prophet’s mouth. Salome has not only viola da gamba), and winds. Cleopatra conjures
narratively usurped language, but has symboli- the orchestra and places it in the immanent
cally seized the phallus for herself.49 stage-world of the characters, in order to signal a
The depiction of Salome as one who pounces way out for Caesar—a way out of an imminent
on her objects of desire—who implicates them assassination plot, but also a metaphysical way
in a system of a disadvantaged “power differen- out of the stage-world.
tial” by wielding the phallus under the cloak of In this seduction aria, Nicola Francesco
a nurturer—leads to perceptions of her actions Haym, the librettist for Giulio Cesare, defers
as dangerous, disingenuous, meretricious. It is to the ocular as the superlative sense. Perhaps
the sensation of being lied to, of witnessing a Haym’s regard of the ocular is merely owed to
bait-and-switch, that is so perturbing. Diane historical context, that of Greco-Roman antiq-
Davis writes that “the nourishment the Mother uity. After all, Heraclitus wrote: “The eyes are
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
offers is not free-flowing nor freely given; it is as more exact witnesses than the ears.” This ocu-
paralyzing, as fixating, as solidifying as the larcentrism, however, began to crumble during
Father’s Law.”50 Such vociferous and ferocious the fin de siècle and fractured during the mod-
backlash toward Salome could be symptomatic ernist era.53 Even so, we may discern similari-
of Julia Kristeva’s formulation that “the Phallic ties between Cleopatra’s “V’adoro pupille” and
Mother is even more dangerous than the Dalila’s voice-centered “Mon coeur s’ouvre à
Primitive Father precisely because . . . her phal- ta voix.”54 Both are synechdochal laudations
lus is always veiled.”51 of a lover’s body; both women describe the pen-
etration of their bodies by the piercing gaze or
S EDUCTION AS S ELF -R EIFICATION mellifluous voice that is metaphorically linked
to Cupid’s arrows (Cleopatra: v’adoro, pupille,
The subject is neither prior nor exterior in relation saette d’amore; Delilah: la flèche est moins
to the outside; it is (if we choose to speak of the sub- rapide à porter le trépas, que ne l’est ton
ject, that is) much rather, sujet au dehors, as we can amante);55 both, too, describe the tumescence
put it in French [and in English: “subject to the of the bosom at the sight or hearing of the
outside”].52 Other. But the similarities end at a crucial
One of the earliest examples of seduction as a point. The Saint-Saëns aria is not simply vocal
rather than ocular. It decisively moves away
process of self-reification and exhibition of
from the ocular and toward the vocal, the sonic,
dominion over the noumenal orchestra is the
the bodily. Saint-Saëns’s femme fatale has done
seduction scene of G. F. Handel’s Giulio Cesare
her job well. More fully than Cleopatra, she has
in Egitto (1724). In this scene, the start of act II,
seduced the characters onstage away from the
we see a disguised (read: veiled) Cleopatra sing-
stage-world toward a totalizing abyss.
ing in an effort to seduce Caesar. Cleopatra
praises Caesar’s eyes (“v’adoro pupille”) and for
49
Lawrence Kramer, “Modernity’s Cutting Edge: The
53
Salome Complex,” in Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of Skin: Architecture and the
and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, Senses (London: Wiley-Academy, 2005 [2007]), 15. See also
2004), 138. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
50
D. Diane Davis, Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University
Laughter (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, of California Press, 1994).
54
2000), 219. Translation: “My heart opens to your voice.”
51 55
Ibid. Cleopatra: “I adore you, eyes, bolts of love” / Delilah: “the
52
Jean-Luc Nancy and Roxanne Lapidus, “Rühren, arrow is less quick in bringing demise than your love is”
Berühren, Aufruhr,” SubStance 40, no. 3, 126 (2011): 10−17. (trans. mine).
204“I NVISIBLE D ANCE ”: T HE M ETAPHYSICAL D ANCE Witches Sabbath movement in Hector Berlioz’s MARCUS R.
PYLE
OF THE S EVEN V EILS Symphonie fantastique. The allusion is apt, Rhetoric of
given that Berlioz’s piece with its famous idée Seduction
Affirmation of the Will must be properly called fixe is a musical portrait of obsession, or mono-
Affirmation of the Body.56 mania, as the nineteenth century called it,58
while the Dance of the Seven Veils is the bodily
The Dance of the Seven Veils represents an and sonic working out of a monomania for the
exceptional moment in Salome and in post- head of John the Baptist. Strauss uses a variety
Romantic opera writ large because it forms an of leitmotivic technique where Berlioz uses the
extended period of vocal silence that represents idée fixe. Strauss’s Dance is fixated on the idea
the climax of the narrative structure. The of recontextualizing, reinterpreting, and trans-
Dance was the last thing Strauss composed for forming motivic material.
this opera; the opera score was finished 20 June In the literary lineage of the story of Salome
1905 and the Dance was completed sometime by Heine, Flaubert, Huysmans, Laforgue,
in August of that same year. Though it may seem Massenet, and Mallarmé there is no mention of
counterintuitive, within an argument champion- a veil. Wilde differentiated himself by adding it,
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
ing the materiality of the voice, that I should now almost certainly on the basis of two paintings
turn my focus to an episode of silence, it is by Gustave Moreau that show Salome’s body,
within this Dance that we witness the voice but not her face, covered in a diaphanous veil.
being transmitted to the orchestra. It is not that Wilde, in the Dance, creates an intertextual col-
Salome is silent per se, rather she has embodied lage that Theodore Ziolkowski has linked to the
another voice—a voice that is wordless and inef- Sumerian myth of Ishtar and Tammuz (which
fable, pure song. “Pure song” becomes that mentions seven gates of the underworld)
which is “spotlighted as a diegetic insertion (or wherein Ishtar must shed an article of clothing,
intrusion) . . . that transcends the opera’s narra- or a worldly possession and symbol of power, to
tive altogether.”57 Salome becomes a type of pass through each gate.59
music that stupefies and seizes control of the Wilde writes, in the illustrated version of the
orchestral forces, the onstage characters, and play, a dedication to artist Aubrey Beardsley that
the metaphysical confines of the operatic stage. reads, “For the only artist who, besides myself,
The one-act opera Salome is implicitly divided knows what the dance of the seven veils is and
into five scenes. The Dance of the Seven Veils can see that invisible dance.”60 Elsewhere, Wilde
functions as a climactic interlude between the writes that “[Salome’s] dance was more metaphys-
two parts of scene 4; it furthers the drama. It is a ical than physical.”61 The lofty statements seem
diegetic display of a dance; all of the characters at odds with the absence of specificity in the
onstage witness it. Historically, the Dance was Wilde script; all he writes is “Salome dances the
often performed by a body double and the audi-
ence beheld the (sometimes quite distinct) multi-
plication of bodies that resulted. It has since 58
“Monomania was named by [Jean-Étienne Dominique
become customary for sopranos to perform the Esquirol] around 1810, and by the 1820’s ‘monomania’ had
Dance themselves. already percolated down to the nonmedical French intelli-
The structure of the Dance is a closed one: gentsia and [had] been incorporated into their language.”
Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism,
introduction, three subsections, and coda. The and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca: Cornell
instrumentation is elaborate and includes a large University Press, 1996), 68.
percussion battery. In its use of two harps and E b
59
Theodore Ziolkowski, “The Veil as Myth and Metaphor,”
Religion & Literature 4, no. 2 (2008): 61–81.
clarinet, it mimics the orchestration of the 60
Richard Allen Cave, “Staging Salome’s Dance in Wilde’s
Play and Strauss’s Opera,” in Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s
Salome, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (New York: Rodopi,
2011), 146.
56 61
Richard Strauss, Diary Entry (4 February 1893, Luxor, Maria Marcsek-Fuchs, “Literature and Dance: Intermedial
Egypt). Encounters,” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature,
57
William Cheng, “Opera en abyme: The Prodigious Ritual Image, Sound, Music, ed. Gabriele Rippl (Boston: de
of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt,” Cambridge Opera Journal Gruyter, 2015), 579. Originally quoted in Richard Ellmann,
22/2 (2010): 115–46, here 129. Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
20519TH dance of the seven veils” as a stage direction. dancing body of Salome, unaccompanied, liter-
CENTURY (Salomé danse la danse des sept voiles.) When ally or figuratively undressed. For the audi-
MUSIC
considering the veil, we might ask what Salome ence, the music has at once become pure
is revealing. What is Wilde imploring us to see (or ambience, and the audience—who has up to
not see), and how does Strauss orchestrate this point been uninitiated into the drama—
Wilde’s artistic vision? With no explicit mention is interpellated in the zoned out, “music-
of musical accompaniment in this moment of the drowned” world of the stage.
play, we may question if any incidental music
was meant to take place at all. With Wilde’s men- S TRAUSS ’ S D ISTANZ
tion of the invisible dance and its metaphysical
quality, it seems reasonable to assume the dance The individual is not a substance, but exists and
was performed in silence or that some dramaturgi- constitutes itself by entering various roles.64
cal deceit ensued or was desired.
Strauss, on the other hand, took great care to Looking more closely at Strauss’s conception of
supply music—and not just any music. Strauss the dance scene, we find more evidence that he
writes a ten-minute orchestral tone poem to is distancing (this time, dis-tanz) himself from
Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-pdf/43/3/194/397757/ncm_43_3_194.pdf by guest on 29 June 2020
accompany the onstage dance in a musical the legacy of Wagner and high Romanticism. In
style that drastically contrasts with the musical the manuscript, Strauss drafts a kind of choreog-
style surrounding. That the Dance is written in raphy for Salome during the Dance. A stage
a high Romantic style, reminiscent of (kitschy?) direction reads: “Salome rises to her full height
Wagner, has implications for Strauss’s modernist and makes a sign to the musicians. They subdue
aesthetic vision.62 The implications of Strauss’s their wild rhythm instantly and lead on to a soft
move are threefold. First, Strauss differentiates and swaying tune.”65 This functions as a rejec-
himself from Wagner, in a textbook case of the tion of the veiled orchestra that Wagner created
anxiety of influence. Second, he chooses to repre- as part of his Gesamtkunstwerk vision. The
sent the moment of this striptease and tawdry orchestra, which Wagner hid visually in a pit
drama with a waltz. Salome dances to this fren- below the stage, is now summoned by Salome
zied waltz which connotes propriety, but histori- as though she were shining a beam of moonlight
cally connoted lewdness, as it was described as upon it. Strauss demands that we view Salome
an indecent gyrating dance that drew people too as conjuring up authority over the orchestra
close together.63 The waltz also suggests cultural and even perhaps appointing the orchestra as a
associations with Vienna, where Strauss envisio- character within the drama. The orchestra is no
ned the premiere of the opera. Could this com- longer heard as an extradiegetic source of sound,
bination of lewdness and cultural iconicity be no longer as motivically depicting the uncon-
Strauss’s way of commenting on the current scious motivations of characters, pace Wagner.
sociopolitical climate of Austria-Hungary at the Salome draws attention to the artifice of the stage
turn of the century? Third, perhaps Strauss was drama—a metatheatrical move. She underscores
orchestrating silence—as a way of remarking Strauss’s affectation. And the music, kitschy
that the style of high Romanticism had become though it may be, was meant to mollify the
ubiquitous. The music of the Dance positions Viennese audience. It is in this way that Salome
the audience to hear it as the characters do, with implicates the audience; so when Herod closes
the addition of our awareness of its anomalous- the opera, shouting “Man tötet dieses Weib!” is
ness. We are placed in the subject positions of he not addressing the audience as well as his
the stage characters who only witness the
64
Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans.
Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York
62
Robin Holloway, “Salome: Art or Kitsch?” in Richard Press, 1996), 95.
65
Strauss: Salome, ed. Derrick Puffett, 145−64. “Jetzt richtet sich Salome hoch auf und gibt den
63
Mark Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Musikanten ein Zeichen, worauf der wilde Rhythmus
Dances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and Early sofort abgedümpft [sic] wird und in eine sanft wiegende
20th Centuries (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), esp. 3, 22. überleitet.”
206You can also read
