It is probably impossible to separate Wilde's Salome from the great opera Richard Strauss based on it. Isn't it better to enjoy the opera (as I did) and leave the play alone? On the other hand, in the opera the music is in the foreground and it is often impossible to understand the words - so I found it interesting to read the play as well - in its quieter atmosphere it brings its own rewards.
When Wilde began writing Salome in late 1891, he was well known as a writer and critic, but not yet established as a playwright. Lady Windermere's Fan had been completed but not staged, and his other West End successes, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, were yet to come. He had been considering the subject of Salome since his undergraduate days at Oxford, when Walter Pater introduced him to Flaubert's story Hérodias in 1877. Biographer Peter Raby notes that Wilde's interest was further stimulated by descriptions of Gustave Moreau's paintings of Salome in Joris-Karl Huysmans's À rebours and by Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll, Jules Laforgue's "Salomé" in Moralités Légendaires, and Stéphane Mallarmé's Hérodiade. (Salome was indeed a fin-de-siecle phenomenon!)
[Salome dancing before Herod, by Gustave Moreau]
The English translation appeared in book form in 1894, with a cover design and ten illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. The play was next successfully produced in France, where the world premiere took place in Paris in 1896, while Wilde was in prison. Germany and the United States soon followed.
[Salome with the head of Jokanaan, by Aubrey Beardsley]
The legend of Salome comes from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark. Salome is the daughter of Herodias, who left her first husband and Salome's father to marry her husband's brother, Herod, King of Judea, because he was richer and more powerful. This marriage was considered illegal by contemporaries because Herodias' first husband was still alive; and because she had married her brother-in-law, it was also condemned as incestuous. One man who publicly criticized her was John the Baptist (Jokanaan), an ascetic and fierce moralist. He had been arrested and imprisoned by Herod, but the king was afraid to put him to death, as his wife Herodias demanded, because of John the Baptist's holiness and great popularity.
At Herod's birthday party, Salome is tempted to perform an erotic dance for her stepfather after being told that she can ask for anything she wants, even half of his kingdom. At her mother's instigation, she then demands the head of John the Baptist as her reward. A new element added by Wilde is that the sixteen-year-old Salome has a perverse attraction to John the Baptist. She shamelessly eroticizes the ascetic preacher's body and causes his execution when he spurns her affections. In the finale, Salome picks up John's severed head and kisses it, the height of decadence and necrophilia. Another new motif was that Wilde had Herod, already tired of Herodias, lust after Salome, his young stepdaughter and niece. When she dances naked for him, he is willing to give her anything she desires.
[Alice Guszalewicz as Salome in the Richard Strauss opera, c. 1910 (this photo has been misidentified as "Wilde in costume as Salome.")]
But in the end, when he sees her dancing with and even kissing the head of Jokanaan, Herod decides that Salome is monstrous and has her killed:
THE VOICE OF SALOMÉ
Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood?... But perchance it is the taste of love.... They say that love hath a bitter taste.... But what of that? what of that? I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan.
[A moonbeam falls on Salomé covering her with light.]
HEROD
[Turning round and seeing Salomé.]
Kill that woman!
[The soldiers rush forward and crush beneath their shields Salomé, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judæa.]
CURTAIN.