Strauss: Salomé [french version, 2 CD] Kent Nagano (1990)

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Strauss: Salomé [french version, 2 CD] Kent Nagano (1990)

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On 5 July 1950, shortly after the completion of the Salome score in Berlin and well before its first performance, Strauss wrote to inform his publisher Adolf Fürstner that he himself would undertake a French version of his new composition. His adaptation would retain the existing orchestration but alter the vocal line to accommodate Oscar Wilde's original French Salomé text. (…) From the very beginning, the practical difficulties of adapting the vocal line if Salome to the French language revolved around the central problem of word stress in French and the treatment of silent final syllables ('Can one lay the stress as one wants? Sometimes stressing, sometimes not?'). Strauss' French was adequate, but his approach to setting it was via the more formulaic approach of setting German. Romain Rolland recommended that Strauss study the vocal score of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande as an example of literary French set, almost unchanged, to music (…). Despite the numerous difficulties involved, Strauss completed the French version of his Salome on 13 September 1905. After countless revisions Rolland received a final fair copy of the piano arrangement with a request of corrections, most of which the composer willingly accepted. The final version of the French Salomé was sent to Fürstner in November 1905 and was published in piano score the following year. (An Italian translation, made at the request of Toscanini, was published in piano socre at about the same time, using the same vocal line.) It seems likely that the French Salomé was the version performed at the Paris premiere of the opera, a private performance at the Petit-Théâtre in March 1907, conducted by the French conductor Walter Staram and using a French cast. In the same month it received a performance at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. The first performance in Paris of the German version with Emmy Destinn as Salome and the original Herod, Carl Burian, took place a month and a half later at the Théâtre du Châtelet, conducted by Strauss. Thereafter the French Salomé disappears. (…) By the 1960s the existence of a Strauss French version had so been forgotten that his publishers were unaware of its existence. The continued existence of the Italian version, with its differing vocal line which was found to suit the French of Wilde's play, revived interest in the possible existence of a score of a French version. After meticulous research by the Richard Strauss Institute in Munich several copies of the manuscript of the 1906 piano arrangement were unearthed. In July 1989 a semi-staged concert performance was seen at the Montpellier festival, followed by the much-acclaimed staged performance at the Opéra de Lyon in May 1990, conducted by Kent Nagano. Geneviève Lièvre, notes to the Virgin recording.