Salomé is an opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 in one act by Antoine Mariotte

Antoine Mariotte

Antoine Mariotte, born in Avignon on 22 December 1875 and died in Izieux, on 30 November 1944 was a French composer, conductor and music administrator.- Biography:...

 to a libretto

Libretto

A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...

 based on the French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 play Salome

Salome (play)

Salome is a tragedy by Oscar Wilde.The original 1891 version of the play was in French. Three years later an English translation was published...

by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

.

Mariotte commenced composition of his opera before the far more famous treatment of the same source by German composer Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...

 (Salome

Salome (opera)

Salome is an opera in one act by Richard Strauss to a German libretto by the composer, based on Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. Strauss dedicated the opera to his friend Sir Edgar Speyer....

 ), but his premiered after the Strauss work.

Performance history

While serving in the French navy in the Far East in the late 1890s, Mariotte read the Oscar Wilde play Salome, and decided to set it to music.

Mariotte completed the score of Salomé while professor of piano at the Conservatoire de Lyon

Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon

The Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, sometimes referred to as the Conservatoire de Lyon, is a conservatory for the study of music and dance, located in Lyon, France....

, but without the necessary permission from Wilde's estate and publisher. In fact, having obtained the agreement to use the play, Richard Strauss asked his publisher Adolph Fürstner to acquire the rights, and a subsequent court case decided in favour of Fürstner. Mariotte then learnt that Fürstner would oppose the production of his own opera, and only after visiting Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 to negotiate did he obtain permission to have it staged, and that on swingeing conditions: 40% royalties to go to Richard Strauss and 10% to Fürstner, with all musical materials to be sent after the run to Fürstner to be destroyed. French writer Romain Rolland

Romain Rolland

Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...

, having read an article by Mariotte in the Revue internationale de musique, helped the composer to get a better settlement from Strauss.

Salomé was first performed on 30 October 1908 (three years after Strauss’s in Dresden

Dresden

Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....

) at the Grand Théâtre de Lyon

Opéra National de Lyon

Opéra National de Lyon is an opera company in Lyon, France which performs in the Nouvel Opéra, a modernized version in 1993 of the original 1831 opera house.The inaugural performance of François-Adrien Boïeldieu's La Dame blanche was given on 1 July 1831...

, and staged in Paris in 1910 at the Gaîté-Lyrique, while Strauss’s opera was performed at the Opéra

Paris Opera

The Paris Opera is the primary opera company of Paris, France. It was founded in 1669 by Louis XIV as the Académie d'Opéra and shortly thereafter was placed under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Lully and renamed the Académie Royale de Musique...

.

After having been performed at Nancy, Le Havre

Le Havre

Le Havre is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total...

, Marseille

Marseille

Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...

, Geneva

Geneva

Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...

, and Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

, Salomé was seen at the Opéra on 1 July 1919 with Lucienne Bréval

Lucienne Bréval

Lucienne Bréval was a Swiss dramatic soprano who had a major international opera career from 1892-1918...

.

In November 2005 the Opéra National de Montpellier

Opéra national de Montpellier

The Opéra national de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon is an opera company located in the Place de la Comédie in Montpellier, France. The company was established in 1755 and was granted the status of "National Opera" in 2002 by the French Ministry of Culture....

 juxtaposed the Strauss and Mariotte operas.

Musical style

Mariotte’s selection from the Wilde text was not the same as Strauss’s, and the musical style of the opera is significantly different. In comparison with the more famous Salome opera, Mariotte’s rich orchestral colours are sombre, and the drama unfolds in a sequence of tableaux. The characters are less extravagant and certainly less sexually charged; the dense, often contrapuntal

Counterpoint

In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...

 sound-world has its roots in 19th century academicism. Mariotte uses an off-stage orchestra for the banquet in the opening scene while the final scene uses a wordless chorus to add an enigmatic glow to Salomé’s ode to Iokanaan’s head.

A work rich in orchestral invention and emotional intensity, Salomé is in some respects rather more sympathetic to the original Symbolist

Symbolism (arts)

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

 mood. Wilde wrote the play in French, because he felt its poetic language belonged to fin de siècle

Fin de siècle

Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century". The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning...

sensibility. Mariotte’s version owes much to the sound world of Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

 and to the disengaged emotional landscape of Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...

 (who had praised highly Wilde’s play).

Roles

Role	Voice type Voice type A voice type is a particular kind of human singing voice perceived as having certain identifying qualities or characteristics. Voice classification is the process by which human voices are evaluated and are thereby designated into voice types...	|Premiere cast, 30 October 1908 (Conductor Conducting Conducting is the art of directing a musical performance by way of visible gestures. The primary duties of the conductor are to unify performers, set the tempo, execute clear preparations and beats, and to listen critically and shape the sound of the ensemble... : –)
Hérode Herod Antipas Herod Antipater , known by the nickname Antipas, was a 1st-century AD ruler of Galilee and Perea, who bore the title of tetrarch... , Tetrarch Tetrarchy (Judea) The Tetrarchy of Judea was formed following the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE, when his kingdom was divided between his sons as an inheritance...  of Judaea Judea Judea or Judæa was the name of the mountainous southern part of the historic Land of Israel from the 8th century BCE to the 2nd century CE, when Roman Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina following the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt.-Etymology:The...	baritone Baritone Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...	Édouard Cotreuil
Hérodias Herodias Herodias was a Jewish princess of the Herodian Dynasty. Asteroid 546 Herodias is named after her.-Family relationships:*Daughter of Aristobulus IV... , his wife (and niece)	contralto Contralto Contralto is the deepest female classical singing voice, with the lowest tessitura, falling between tenor and mezzo-soprano. It typically ranges between the F below middle C to the second G above middle C , although at the extremes some voices can reach the E below middle C or the second B above...	Soïni
Salomé Salome Salome , the Daughter of Herodias , is known from the New Testament... , his stepdaughter (and great-niece)	soprano Soprano A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...	De Wailly
Iokanaan (John the Baptist John the Baptist John the Baptist was an itinerant preacher and a major religious figure mentioned in the Canonical gospels. He is described in the Gospel of Luke as a relative of Jesus, who led a movement of baptism at the Jordan River... )	baritone	Jean Aubert
Narraboth, Captain of the Guard	tenor Tenor The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...	Henry Grillières
The page Page (servant) A page or page boy is a traditionally young male servant, a messenger at the service of a nobleman or royal.-The medieval page:In medieval times, a page was an attendant to a knight; an apprentice squire...  of Hérodias	contralto
First soldier	tenor
Second soldier	baritone
Young Syrian (Narraboth)	tenor
Royal guests (Egyptians and Romans), and entourage, servants, soldiers

Recording

The 2005 Montpellier production was issued by Accord in 2007, conducted by Friedemann Layer with Kate Aldrich

Kate Aldrich

Kate Aldrich is an American mezzo soprano.She has performed with the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the Hamburg State Opera, Teatro Regio of Torino, Los Angeles Opera, L'Opéra de Montréal, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, Teatro Nacional de São...

in the title role.