Salomé's Dance

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894

The death of John the Baptist is treated twice in the New Testament: in Mark and in Matthew.  The passage from Matthew (14:3-10) is by a small margin the more succinct:

For Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him in prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife. For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her. And when he would have put him to death, he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a prophet. But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod. Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask. And she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger. And the king was sorry: nevertheless for the oath's sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her. And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.

The daughter is not named in the bible, but she is, as Shalomit or Salomé, in the writings of Josephus, whose history of the Jews was written within a century of when the events described in Mark and Matthew were said to have occurred. I'm not a biblical scholar or a historian, so I can't speak to the historical accuracy of the passage above, but as with so much of the bible, as literature, it ain't bad.  From the bare bones of the biblical account, with an assist from Josephus, the story was fleshed out to portray the eternal tension between the worldly, the lusty, the decadent and profane represented by Salomé, and the heavenly, abstemious, pure and spiritual represented by John the wild eyed prophet, whom the unrequited desire of Salomé destroys, thanks to the lust that her dance enflames in the heart of his captor.

Oscar Wilde, who encountered and derived inspiration from the story outside the bible in writings of Gustave Flaubert and paintings of Gustave Moreau set about dramatizing it for the London Stage.  Before it got there, production (which was possibly to include the participation of Sarah Bernhardt) was halted on the basis that it was to depict biblical characters-- a no no in British law at the time.  Wilde had long wanted to write a French play anyway, so in 1893, Salomé was published in French in Paris.  An English translation appeared in 1894.  Wilde was in Newgate Prison in London serving 2 years of hard labor for "gross indecency"-- a charge for homosexuality that authorities could get to stick when sodomy could not be proven-- when the play premiered in Paris in February 1896.  Richard Strauss produced a German opera version of Wilde's play in 1905.  The original Salomé from that production was reluctant to dance the Dance of the 7 Veils so a stand-in did it for her in what has become the tradition for performances of the opera.

An epic movie version starring Theda Bara premiered in 1918.  It caused a major ruckus in the US and had to be edited to suit the standards of the provinces.  For whatever reason, it did not stand the test of time and is now considered lost.  

In 1923, Alla Nazimova, a Russian emigrée already with a storied Broadway career behind her and now head of her own movie production company in Hollywood developed a new film adapation of Wilde's Salomé with herself in the title role.  In her design, Nazimova hewed closely to the visualizations of Aubrey Beardsley whose famous illustrations graced the first English language edition of the play in 1894.  Nazimova (also the founder of the legendary Hollywood hotel dubbed the Garden of Alla) was the original Anna Biller: she wrote, directed, produced, edited, did lighting and costumes for her films.  Commercial failures though they were, they were outstanding pieces of work nevertheless.  Her Salomé is considered among the first art films in the US.  For this reason it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2000. 

British composer Charlie Barber created an outstanding score for the film which was released as an album in 2009.  The Dance sequence is below:

Barber's score appears to have been matched to the film in snippets, but to see the whole thing in one go, you can fortunately avail yourself of this version featuring another original soundtrack by another contemporary British composer, Mike Frank.  (If you'd like to imagine your own soundtrack you could always mute it, I suppose.)