ABSTRACT
Leitmotives in Salome are most clearly associated with persons, rather than with objects, events or abstract concepts. Salome proclaims its genre on the title-page: ‘music drama in one act’. The dynamism of Salome is a function of Strauss’s ‘progressive’ conception of the leitmotive, which derives from the ‘narrative’ type of thematic transformation developed in earlier, purely orchestral works such as Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel and Don Quixote. Salome particularly contains ideas Wagner would never have thought of: not only the exoticisms, but also and above all the utterly distinctive material associated with Herod. This is partly a matter of orchestral sound, partly a matter of the whole-tone and other non-diatonic configurations that were not a regular part of Wagner’s vocabulary. But in addition to these, the sudden departures, changes of subject, wanderings of attention on Herod’s part – in their musical realisation a matter of pace – create an atmosphere not unlike that of Wozzeck, as has often been remarked.
