Au début des années 1890, Oscar Wilde choisit Paris comme terre d’élection et entreprend de s’y faire un nom. Bientôt connu comme l’auteur du Portrait de Dorian Gray et de Salomé, pièce d’inspiration symboliste écrite en français, la presse le chronique abondamment. En 1896, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe, porte Salomé à la scène et lui offre les conditions d’une nouvelle réception parisienne. En 1902, Richard Strauss voit la pièce représentée à Berlin et s’en empare pour en faire le livret allemand d’un opéra auquel il donne, en parallèle, une version française. Dans un contexte socio-Culturel en mutation et dans un climat politique tendu entre la France et l’Allemagne, Salomé de Strauss arrive à Paris en 1907, accompagnée d’une réception critique exceptionnelle qui ne faiblira pas jusqu’à son entrée au Répertoire de l’Opéra en 1910.Salomé, d’Oscar Wilde à Richard Strauss, se trouve ainsi adoptée à plusieurs reprises par Paris, littéralement portée par les réceptions qu’elle y a reçues, jusqu’à devenir, en ses premières années, malgré des caractéristiques nationales étrangères plurielles et marquées, une œuvre où résonne un fort accent français. Elle peut être appréhendée comme une illustration des discours journalistiques et revuistes parisiens de la fin du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siècle, dans une perspective verticale – sur une période d'une vingtaine d'années – et horizontale, à travers trois éclairages critiques. Telle que les écrits la montrent ou la façonnent en ses différents avatars, elle est peut-Être aussi une tentative réussie d’art total, héritière superlative du mythe de Salomé revisité en une œuvre-Tiroir, littéraire, dramatique, musicale. / In the early 1890s, Oscar Wilde chose Paris as his adopted land, aiming at becoming famous. Soon known as the author of The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Salomé, a play inspired by the Symbolist movement and written in French, he triggered much curiosity on the part of the critics. In 1896, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe, brought Salomé to the stage and provided the conditions of a new Parisian reception. In 1902, Richard Strauss saw the play represented in Berlin and used it to compose the German libretto of an opera of which he also, simultaneously gave a French version. Against the backdrop of a socio-Cultural context of change and political tension between France and Germany, Strauss’s Salome was performed in Paris in 1907, accompanied by a huge critical reception that would not weaken until it entered the Repertoire of the Opera in 1910. From Oscar Wilde to Richard Strauss, Salomé was thus adopted on several occasions by the Paris, literally sustained by the receptions that it received there, becoming, in spite of its several, marked foreign national characteristics, a work resounding with a strong French accent. Salomé’s critical reception can be seen as an illustration of the journalistic speech in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a vertical perspective - over a period of twenty years - and horizontal, through three critical perspectives. Revealed by this kind of writing or shaped by it into its different types of metamorphosis, this play may also be a successful attempt at total art, superlatively embodying the myth of Salomé in its multiple literary, dramatic and musical dimensions.

In this dissertation, I explore the musical prosody of the literary symbolists and the influence of this prosody on fin-de-siècle French music. Contrary to previous categorizations of music as symbolist based on a characteristic "sound," I argue that symbolist aesthetics demonstrably influenced musical construction and reception. My scholarship reveals that symbolist musical works across genres share an approach to composition rooted in the symbolist concept of musicality of language, a concept that shapes this music on sonic, structural, and conceptual levels. I investigate the musical responses of four different composers to a single symbolist text, Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salomé, written in French in 1891, as case studies in order to elucidate how a symbolist musicality of language informed their creation, performance, and critical reception. The musical works evaluated as case studies are Antoine Mariotte's Salomé, Richard Strauss's Salomé, Aleksandr Glazunov's Introduction et La Danse de Salomée, and Florent Schmitt's La Tragédie de Salomé. Recognition of symbolist influence on composition, and, in the case of works for the stage, on production and performance expands the repertory of music we can view critically through the lens of symbolism, developing not only our understanding of music's role in this difficult and often contradictory aesthetic philosophy but also our perception of fin-de-siècle musical culture in general.