I've finally gotten around to reading Richard Ellman's book on Oscar Wilde, which is the very model of literary biography. (Thankfully, there are many such models out there.) With the Met's production of Salome still fresh in my memory (an opera whose libretto is adapted from the eponymous play by Wilde), I was fascinated by this description of Wilde's initial plan to extend the story, which currently ends with Salome's erotic worship of the head of John the Baptist, and Herod ordering her death:
In its earlier dramatic form, Wilde thought he would call the play The Decapitation of Salome. The title seems to have gone with a story he told Maeterlinck and Georgette Leblanc. It was of how Salome eventually became a saint. Herod, incensed at her kissing the decollated head, wanted to have her crushed, but at the pleas of Herodias contented himself with banishing her. She went off to the desert, where for years she lived on, maligned, solitary, clothed in animal skins, and subsisting on locusts and wild honey like the prophet himself. When Jesus passed by, she recognized him whom the dead voice heralded and she believed in him. But, feeling unworthy of living in his shadow, she went off again, with the intention of carrying the Word. Having passed over rivers and seas, she encountered, after the fiery deserts, the deserts of snow. One day she was crossing a frozen lake near the Rhone when the ice broke under her feet. She fell into the water and the jagged ice cut into her flesh and decapitated her, though not before she managed to utter the names of Jesus and John. And those who later went by saw, on the silver plate of the re-formed ice, showing like the stamen of a flower with rubies, a severed head on which gleamed the crown of a golden nimbus. (344-45)
Wilde gave up on the idea, at least in part, because the double decapitation would have been "too pat and repetitive," but - wow - what a sequel this would make! Some contemporary composer needs to dust off Wilde's outline and write a Salome for the new century.
Posted by gminter at April 30, 2004 11:16 AM