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Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, edited by Clair Rowden; pp. xvi + 217. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013, £60.00, $109.95.
Oscar Wilde's 1891 one-act tragedy Salomé and Richard Strauss's 1905 operatic adaptation have become objects of keen scholarly interest in the last two and a half decades. From Derrick Puffett's Richard Strauss: Salome (1989) and William Tydeman's and Steven Price's Wilde-Salome (1996), to Toni Bentley' s Sisters of Salome (2002) and Rhonda K. Garelick's Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism (2007), to my own Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (2011) and Michael Y. Bennett's Refiguring Oscar Wilde's Salome (2011), critics have widened their analytical lens from examining Wilde's ur-text and its fin-de-siècle contexts to Salomé 's myriad reinterpretations in Western music, dance, film, opera, and popular culture.
The latest edited collection to join the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on Salomé, Clair Rowden's Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, draws attention to an often overlooked aspect of this rich interpretive history: the role of notable individual performers and performances, and specifically the "performative nature of Salome-the way in which meaning is inscribed and reinscribed with each successive iteration or performance" (7). With contributors drawn from musicology, comparative literature, and film studies, the seven essays address a range of productions, adaptations, and periods, but the strongest focus remains Strauss's opera. Given that this collection emerged out of a 2008 conference on opera, exoticism, and visual culture, and that the volume appears in Ashgate's Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series, this comes as no surprise.
For readers of Victorian Studies, the chapters by Sandra Mayer, Anne Sivuoja-Kauppala, and Rowden may be the most interesting since they deal with the period before World War I, whereas the rest of this volume does not. These three essays also provide a true treasure trove of fresh archival materials, some of them translated for the first time. Mayer'sessayonthefirst performances and censorship of Wilde'splay,Strauss'sopera, and Maud Allan's " The Vision of Salomé" (1906) in Vienna translates and analyzes German-language censorship records and contemporary press reviews. She lucidly details the censors' and reviewers' homophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments and hostile attitudes toward Wilde and draws new connections among seemingly separate censorship decisions, such as Gustav Mahler's thwarted attempts to host the opera's...