Boundless desire

A hand rests on a child's thigh - she knows she's not allowed to. It rests there anyway. Herod slips in the blood of a dead man - he did not order the murder, so why a dead man? Large wings rustle ominously inside the palace - a phantasm? An omen of death? Finally, the severed head on a silver platter - the dead flesh that Salome nevertheless kisses.

Everything in Salome is cruel. Decadence oozes out between all the lines: Wine, red as blood, fills the cups of the rich; plump fruits dripping with juice lie in masses on the tables, ready for someone to sink their teeth into the flesh; jewels and gold adorn the women's décolletés. Involuntarily, one thinks of Tannhäuser's haunting first words in Venusberg: "Too much! Too much! Oh, that I might now awake."

There, too, the excess is cruel: Venus, the most beautiful of all goddesses, born from the genitals of Uranus, the father of the Titans, hurled into the waves of the sea. So beautiful that she does not tolerate dishonor: rejection means war. Carnal lust is her domain. The Italian director Romeo Castellucci once staged the Venusberg as a mountain of flesh made of pink silicone, under which naked bodies writhed as if to form morbid, festering boils. No wonder Tannhäuser just wanted to get away.

But appearances are deceptive in Salome. Beneath the veil of hedonism, perversity and narcissism lies a desire for freedom, a rebellion against a social structure that suppressed individuality and retreated behind the hypocrisy of its prudery. Oscar Wilde's dramas are always characterized by an ambiguity that, on the one hand, appropriates the traits of Victorian aristocratic society and then mocks them with merciless cynicism. Wilde was an artist whose life and identity were inextricably interwoven with his work, who realized a part of himself in his texts and subordinated his life as an aesthete to a certain artificiality: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life", he noted in the essay The Decay of Living - a life according to the rules of art, not reality.

When Oscar Wilde published his French drama Salomé in 1893, he took up a subject that goes back to early Christianity and has enjoyed popularity in ever-changing forms for centuries. The Gospels of Mark and Matthew already tell of the dangerous Salome, who deceives Herod with the help of her physical charms and thus provokes the beheading of John the Baptist. In the Middle Ages and in the centuries that followed, the image of Salome circulated in ever-changing versions: Sometimes the actual beheading of Jochanaan is in the foreground, sometimes Salome in a seductive dance; sometimes Herodias is the driving force behind the beheading, instrumentalizing her daughter for it, then again Salome is the sole perpetrator (sometimes both figures are also brought together). Salome always appears as a "demonic woman", even though she has had many different faces over the centuries: Eve or Judith, Cleopatra, Dalila, even mythical creatures such as mermaids and Undine are just some of the women who share the suffering of being reduced to their sexual attraction and denounced as dangerous seductresses.

The epic poem Atta Troll (1843) by Heinrich Heine was initially decisive for the renaissance of the Salome myth in the 19th century: Herodias appears here for the first time as part of the "Wild Army" with the severed head of Jochanaan, which she wants to kiss. At the same time, the image of the "demonic woman" was consolidated over the course of the 19th century into the type of femme fatale, in which her erotic attraction was simultaneously associated with cruelty and callousness. The femme fatale also flourished in opera history in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Carmen is probably the most famous example, but Lulu, Dalila and Manon Lescaut can also be subsumed under this type.

In addition, another type of woman developed that is both opposite and similar to the femme fatale: the femme fragile. While the latter is ascribed rather passive, weak or shy traits, both types of women see themselves equally constructed and sexualized under the male gaze of the fin de siècle.

Not least because of his enthusiasm for French-language symbolism, which he clearly draws on in Salomé, Wilde's Salome shows strong parallels to Maurice Maeterlinck's Mélisande.

In addition to the cultural-historical view of the Salome myth, it is also worth taking a closer look at Wilde's oeuvre as a whole, within which Salomé is supposedly unique. In terms of subject matter, it differs from both his social comedies and his gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. But while Salomé shares a cynical and sarcastic tone with the former (especially in the character of Herodias), in many respects it seems to be born of the same spirit as Dorian Gray. Here, as there, everything is based on the premise of aesthetics: beauty and desire become the supreme maxim, narcissism and vanity characterize both title characters. The image as a reflection of the self in its most desirable and ugliest form takes on a greater significance in both dramas. B

lasphemic desire is the driving force behind both stories: Dorian Gray desires what no one can be allowed: eternal life - eternal beauty. Salome's desire is for something equally impossible - a saint. Both get what they want and pay for it with their lives. And in both cases, the forbidden desire itself is the driving force behind the works - the force of attraction and the force of revolt. Both characters, in their refusal to subordinate themselves to the norms of their society, rebel unequivocally and violently against them. In both, Wilde creates a fantastic image of an artistic and intellectual freedom that uncompromisingly refuses to conform.

The circle between artist, figure and image is closed in the Salome paintings by Gustave Moreau and the novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, both important sources of inspiration for Wilde. In Huysmans' novel, it is the main character Jean des Esseintes who refers to Moreau's paintings and feels about his Salome that she is the "emblematic deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortal hysteria; that simple sensual animal, monstrous, unfeeling, insensitive [...]". Here the dangerous, ugly Salome is immortalized in the painting.

It is obvious that Salome is above all a tragedy of desire. Everyone desires something and does so with a perverse excessiveness: Herod desires his brother's wife, so he murders him in order to marry her. Herodias desires wealth, men and the silence of Jochanaan and instrumentalizes her daughter to fulfil these desires. Herod desires Salome, Salome desires Jochanaan, Narraboth desires Salome and even the page desires that Narraboth no longer looks at Salome.

In this sense, desire is primarily related to the gaze. For director Cyril Teste, the opera takes up two central myths of Greek antiquity in which the forbidden gaze marks the turning point: Orpheus and Medusa. At the moment of the gaze, Orpheus completely loses his Eurydice and the observer of Medusa loses his life. Both gazes are fatal, both gazes are fatal.

In quantum mechanics, the gaze is the moment in which a thing solidifies: An object can exist in one of two different states at any moment, but at the moment of capture, at the moment of sight, it is fixed in one of these states. Matter constructs itself in the moment in which it is determined by the eye - by our will. "Real" is only when and what is seen. The image of Salome also manifests itself in the moment in which she is viewed and desired. Sometimes she is a virgin, sometimes an innocent child, sometimes a perpetrator, sometimes a seductress.

In the staging of Teste, the camera becomes that determining gaze. It is the anonymous observer - the individual, the crowd - that focuses the desire for Salome's body and directs the viewer's gaze. The camera becomes a danger and a weapon: it creates the image of Salome that resembles that of Dorian Gray: the beautiful, the ugly, the dangerous, the seductive. Under her, Salome constructs herself into a femme fatale, the object of the viewer. The camera shows our own perverted view of Salome, our desire to be close to her, to touch her. At the same time, Salome takes back some of this power of determination through the camera: she consciously directs the gaze, she decides what is shown, how she wants to be seen, what information reaches the public. Here we see Herod's hand searching for hers in Salome's lap - the camera witnesses such perverted processes and thus makes them visible to the outside world.

The figure of Salome is a product of the imagination. Throughout her cultural history, fears in particular have been projected onto her: Fear of losing power and control, fear of a new modernity, fear of the unpredictable subconscious.

Salome is so disturbing above all in her excess, in the boundlessness of the imagined and imaginable. And this is precisely where its strength lies: Salome becomes the epitome of an infinite fantasy, an infinite freedom of the mind. There are no rules here, no boundaries. Salome desires - and she gets what she desires at any price. Everything you want, everything you can think of, is available here. That is dangerous, but also promising. Can a new utopia emerge like this?