Culture and musical hermeneutics: The Salome complex

Cambridge Opera Journal

Volumn 2, Issue 3, 1990, Pages 269-294

  Kramer, Lawrence ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84974307566     PISSN: 09545867     EISSN: 14740621     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0954586700003281     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton, 1980);
2. 5, in On Criticizing Music, ed. Kingsley Price (Baltimore, 1981), 55–73.;
3. Edward T. Cone, ‘Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics’, 19th Century Music, 5 (1982), 233–241;
4. Anthony Newcomb, ‘Sound and Feeling’, Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 614–643
5. Anthony Newcomb, my Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 1990), esp. chap. 1. For specific commentary on the interrelations of music and literary criticism
6. Steven Paul Scher, ‘Literature and Music’, in Interrelations of Literature, ed. Jean–Pierre Baricelli and Joseph Gibaldi (New York, 1982), 225–250
7. Steven Paul Scher, my ‘Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism’, 19th Century Music, 13 (1989), 159–67.
8. Gary Tomlinson, ‘The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology’, 19th Century Music, 7 (1984), 350–362;
9. Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Mass., 1985);
10. L. Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
11. Richard Strauss, Salome, ed. Derrick Puffett (Cambridge, 1989)
12. Derrick Puffett, Salome as Music Drama, 58–87;
13. Tethys Carpenter, ‘Tonal and Dramatic Structure’, 88–108;
14. Craig Ayrey, ‘Salome's Final Monologue’, 109–130.
15. Peter Rabinowitz Chord and Discourse: Listening Through the Written Word, For a discussion of the relationship of non–specialist listening to musical structure, in Text and Music: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, forthcoming 1991).
16. David Michael Hertz, For efforts at integrating more technically ambitious musical criticism with conceptual understanding, but without excluding non–musical readers, see my Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley, 1984), chaps. 2–4;
17. David Michael Hertz, The Tuning of the Word: The Musico-Literary Poetics of the Symbolist Movement (Carbondale, I11., 1987); my Music as Cultural Practice, chaps. 3 and 5; and Scher, ed., Text and Music.
18. Arthur Conan Doyle, Quotation from ‘Silver Blaze’, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York, n.d.), 397.
19. Freud, This is the topic of Freud's famous paper, ‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life’ (1912), Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1963), 58–70.
20. Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley, 1981), 171.
21. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin–de–Siecle Culture (New York, 1986), 396–8.
22. Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing (Chicago, 1987), 1–46.
23. Sander L. Gilman, ‘Strauss and the Pervert’, in Reading Opera, ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Princeton, 1988), 306–27.
24. Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales, trans. Robert Baldick (Baltimore, 1961), 97.
25. Alan Sheridan, For a fuller account of the gaze and its relationship to nineteenth–century music, see chap. 4 of my Music as Cultural Practice (n. 1), ‘Liszt, Goethe, and the Discourse of Gender’. My treatment of the gaze is largely indebted to Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1981), 67–119
26. Alan Sheridan, to various studies of the gaze in the visual arts and film, including Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, In., 1989), 14–28;
27. Carol M. Armstrong, ‘Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body’, in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 223–42; Mary Ann Caws, ‘Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art’
28. Suleiman, 262–287;
29. Charles Bernheimer, ‘Degas's Brothels: Voyeurism and Ideology’, Representations, no. 20 (1987), 158–186;
30. Charles Bernheimer, ‘Degas's Brothels: Voyeurism and Ideology’, Representations, no. 20 (1987), 158–186; and Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, 1983).
31. Susan Gubar, For an overview of recent theory about pornographic representation, with an emphasis on the continuities between pornography and high culture, ‘Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation’, Critical Inquiry, 13 (1987), 712–741.
32. Steven Marcus, On Victorian pornographic literature, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid–Nineteenth–Century England (New York, 1966).
33. Gerald Needham, For a striking demonstration of the relationship between pornographic photography and high–cultural painting, ‘Manet, Olympia, and Pornographic Photography’, Woman as Sex Object, ed. Thomas Hess and Linda Nochlin (New York, 1972), 48–53.
34. Bryson (see n. 13), 93.
35. Text from Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mai/Flowers of Evil (bilingual edition), ed. Jackson and Marthiel Matthews (New York, 1955).
36. Carl E. Schorske, Fin–de–Siécle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1979), 224.
37. Gustav Klimt, ‘A further aspect of Judith's visual subjugation is that her own head is imagistically severed from her body by her jewelled neck–collar. Alessandra Comini observes this decapitation (New York, 1975), 22.
38. Mary Jacobus, For a full discussion of Judith and the problem of castration, ‘Judith, Holofernes, and the Phallic Woman’, in her Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York, 1986), 110–36.
39. J.K. Huysmans, Robert Baldick, Against Nature [A Rebours], trans (New York, 1959), 64.
40. Elizabeth Gitter, For a discussion of this association in nineteenth–century art and literature, ‘The Power of Woman s Hair in the Victorian Imagination’, Publications of the Publications of the Modern Language Association, 99 (1984), 936–954.
41. Modern Language Association, 99 (1984), 936–954. Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa's Head’, in Freud (see n. 7), 212–13.
42. Salome, Richard Ellmann, The Picture of Dorian Gray and other Writings (New York, 1982), 294.
43. Kermode, Romantic Image (New York, 1957), 49–91.
44. On sexual inversion, see Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: Volume II, The Tender Passion (New York, 1986), 219–327
45. George Chauncey Jr, On sexual inversion, see Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: Volume II, The Tender Passion (New York, 1986),9, 219–327, ‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance’, Salmagundi, 58–59 (1982), 114–46.
46. Carol Christ, For a discussion of the feminisation of the authorial role in the nineteenth century, ‘The Feminine Subject in Victorian Poetry’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 385–402.
47. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), 184.
48. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (New York, 1967), 380.
49. Alfred. Roller, Comini (see n. 18), 25, suggests that the pose for this Salome was inspired by the second, and more feral, of Klimt's two Judith paintings (1909); the sets for the production were designed by Klimt's friend
50. Gösta Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm, 1977), 269, 298–300. The date is somewhat earlier for England, Italy and (probably) Scandinavia. German theatres went dark after the first Bayreuth Ring (1876) produced the effect by accident; France followed suit shortly afterwards.
51. Naomi Scheman, To the degree that it is scopophilic, the unseen gaze of the audience is gendered masculine, regardless of who exercises it. This gendering may be problematic for women in the audience; hence the kernel of truth in the righteous opera critic's remarks about Occidental women. For a discussion of this problem, see Naomi Scheman, ‘Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women’, Critical Inquiry, 15 (1988), 62–89
52. Freud, James Strachey, In one of his dream analyses, Freud makes the interesting suggestion that the theatre circa 1900 offered women – more exactly, married women – the chance to satisfy the sexual curiosity that their upbringing had frustrated. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, (New York, 1966), 122–125,220–221.
53. Scheman (see n. 31), 84. My discussion of the role of the unseen seer has greatly benefited from Scheman's article.
54. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, 1979), italics in original; quoted by Scheman, 83.
55. Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women (1979)
56. Betsy Wing, Susan McClary, foreword (Minneapolis, 1988).
57. Ayrey, ‘Enigmatic nature’: (see n. 3), 120. Salome's other characteristic motif, heard on the clarinets during the opening measures of the opera, is also a triadic figure, embellished by neighbour motion around the fifth degree.
58. Macdonald's essay, which uses a G b key signature and 9/8 time as its title, appears in 19th Century Music, 11 (1988), 221–237. The passage cited is on p. 226.
59. Macdonald (see n. 38), 230.
60. Bryan Gilliam, ‘Strauss's Preliminary Opera Sketches: Thematic Fragments and Symphonic Continuity’, 19th Century Music, 9 (1986), 176–188.
61. Bryan. Gilliam, An amusing example occurs among the sketches for the Symphonia Domestica: ‘The mother's worries: will the child resemble the father [F major] or the mother [B major] ’ (p. 178). Anyone familiar with Strauss's marriage to Pauline de Ahna will understand the joke embedded in the B–F tritone.
62. Strauss's remarks are cited by Erich Leinsdorf, The Composer's Advocate: A Radical Orthodoxy for Musicians (New Haven, 1981), p. 57 n.
63. Leinsdorf, 57 n., translation modified.