Opera "salome" Drama And Music Features

Originating from "Holy Bible", the Salome theme has been attracting a great many artists since old times. At the beginning of the 20th century, the opera Salome, which was created together by the Germany composer Richard Strauss and the English aestheticism playwright Wilde, pushed this theme up to an artistic peak. Wilde's one-act tragedy Salome is filled with violence and blood as well as abnormal desire. The last scene of this play in particular, when Salome held Jehohannan's head and kissed it crazily, has almost impressed and shocked the whole world. It has been forbidden to perform and criticized a lot due to its deviation and absurdness. However, Strauss cherished this play actually, revised the script personally, and created the opera Salome after two years'hard work which made it the first representative works of operas. Haven't been ranked among the first-class operas, it still becomes one of the most-performed operas and has high artistic value.Both musically and theoretically orientated and with these two bidirectionally mingled, Salome was expressive, and with high music writing skills, it has been considered as an excellent work which represent the wonderful combination and harmony between music and drama. Wilder's play Salome has provided the previous popularity for the opera, along with the successful performance of Strauss's opera Salome, thus promoted Wilder's operas spread all around the world and become immortal. To be short, complementing with each other, the traditional Salome theme has been pushed to an artistic peak and has establish the opera Salome a world culture status.On account of the complex cultural background, this thesis starts with the controversial script. First, it introduces Wild's life and his living background, excavates the opera's origin, and analyses the impacts of cultural factors such as literature and art on Wilder's creation of Salome. Chapter Two introduces Richard Strauss's life and creations, makes a survey of revisions made by the playwright, andmake a summary about its first show. The last three chapters mainly concerned with analyses from drama and music aspects with further analysis on their combination. Chapter Three made a summary on the dram's structure after investigating its plot, characters and their inward description with the aim to discover its intension and unique features. Chapter Four analyses from the perspective of its music creation. Take the main characters of this opera as examples to investigate its motivation and summary the tune and layout of this opera. Chapter Five discusses the high mingling of music and drama from two angles including combination of lyrics and song as well as combination of opera and plot. In the conclusion part, the opera was displayed in historical background to explore its profound significance.Aiming at seeking truth from facts, this thesis starts from script and music themselves, with the help of the comprehensive means of music, literature and history, makes a careful investigation from different perspectives, analyses the work in great detail, and summaries its characteristics both from opera and music angles. With the study of these characteristics, we can have a better understanding and make it well transmitted in China.