A Study On Harmony In The Richard Strauss’s Opear "Salome"

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) is no doubt one of the most significant composers, who insists The Post-Romantic style and promotes it to a new level. Opera is one of Strauss’s main creation forms, whose works played an important role in the development of the whole Opera Undertakings.Richard Strauss began to involve in the Opera since1892. During the19th century to the20th century, due to the influence of Wagner’s Music Play Theory and his creative techniques, Strauss created "Salome" and "Elektra".He used in the play with dissonant sonority, a large number of the chromatic, all kinds of accidentals and more composite tonal, as well as the vision of the configuration. Strauss developed the Big Minor System into an acme, however, the piece was not accepted at that time, so that both of the Works helped Strauss occupy a solid position in opera creation.Since the distinguished achievements of Strauss’s Symphonic Poem and Lieder, people concentrated on the symphonic poem and Lieder research, ignored the skill research, and paid more attention to Salome’s dramatic characters and cultural meaning study. This paper takes the Harmony of Salome as the research subject, with the purpose of through the observation to a series of characteristics of the pitch construction of Salome, such as the Chord construction, the dealing with Cadence, Tonality, Unessential Note, Leading Motive, and so on, to know and master the pitch construction and tonality construction of his works, summarize the harmony and explore harmony thoughts, thus forming the grasp of the whole work’s harmony thoughts, and then to realize some specialty of the Post-Romantic musical creation.This thesis consists of five chapters, respectively discuss the materials of pitch construction in Salome, pitch construction, the interaction with other elements of music, etc.Chapter One:Aim to the thesis, remind the traditional of opera from the point of view of history review.Chapter Two:Focus on Richard Strauss’s opera works, briefly presents his creation conditions and opera works to help the reader build a full vision of his opera creation.Chapter Three:Analysis the leading motive, pitch construction and tonality, as well as the colorific harmony and Chord-progression, in order to summarize the kernel harmony of Salome.Chapter Four:Discuss the scale use and composite tonality of Salome to understand that how Strauss built the whole play through expressive leading motive. Then, summarize the layout mode. Chapter Five:After an in-depth case study of Salome, summarize the times characteristic, the pitch logics of the work and its specialties, talk about shallow view of its influence to other genre and extended to the Post-Romantic and pitch harmony creation characteristic, so that to have a full understanding of Richard Strauss and his works.Conclusion:Summarize the main contents for the research of this paper, abstract it and conclude the characteristics in the Pitch Harmony of Salome.