The Lust for Youth

Two operatic works with themes of more or less scandalous sexuality as good as bookend the 20th century. The first, acknowledged from the start as a problem work, is Strauss's Salome (1905); the second, whose sexual content, when it is admitted at all, has been bound up with recent queer studies, is Britten's Death in Venice (1971–3), which Clifford Hindley has read as a story of homosexual self-discovery in the specific form of ‘a sublimated love of youthful male beauty along the lines of the Platonic philosophy’. One purpose of this essay is to suggest that Death in Venice is more of a problem work than some scholars think it is; another is to examine its perhaps surprising relationship to a work whose aesthetic is radically different and therefore seems to resist the association.

The similarities in the plots of Salome and Death in Venice rest largely on the corrupting lust of a man for a much younger sexual object. In Salome the sexual focus causes the death of a man who refuses to look at her; in Death in Venice the sexual focus causes the death of the man who cannot stop looking at him. Strauss made his libretto by abridging Hedwig Lachmann's German translation of Wilde's play, and the telling of the Salome story is therefore Wilde's intensely decadent version. Two men are sexually obsessed with Salome: a young Syrian (Narraboth) and her stepfather, Herod. She in her turn is evidently sexually obsessed with Jochanaan (John the Baptist), who is imprisoned in a cistern, as her father had been. She uses her sexual power over Narraboth to command Jochanaan's release from the cistern; the prophet refuses to look at her, calling her the Daughter of Sodom among other things, but she promises that she will kiss his mouth. When he emerges from his feast, Herod pleads with Salome to dance for him, and she agrees on condition that he will grant her any request. He is happy to give her half his kingdom, and so when she has completed her dance of the seven veils she demands the head of Jochanaan.