Richard Strauss’s Salome constitutes an operatic adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play. The popularity of this biblical account spans several hundred years with portrayals in mediums including folk tales, poetry and musical adaptations. The identities of the characters evolved over time, with emphasis on different personalities and relationships with each variation. Beginning with Gustave Flaubert’s short story Hérodias (1877), retellings dramatized the exoticism of the characters by virtue of their ethnicities and geographical location. By the end of the nineteenth century, Salome had developed into the Oriental femme fatale of Wilde’s and Strauss’s renderings.
Early twentieth-century audiences became familiar with Salome’s story through a multitude of interpretations including Strauss’s opera. In this thesis, I examine the identities of the main characters of the tale. The characteristics of previous realizations betray the origins and meanings of these identities. Although the characters differed in each interpretation, audiences always saw them as part of a faraway time and place. The Orientalist underpinnings of early twentieth-century interpretations demanded that the characters be constructed to conform to exotic stereotypes.
Chapter 1 reveals the development of the story, with an emphasis on Salome’s identity and her relationships with John the Baptist and Herod. Chapter 2 compares the Salomes of modern dancer Maud Allan and composer Richard Strauss. Chapter 3 demonstrates that the characters in Salome were understood mainly through contrasts of identity.