A hundred years ago, Richard Strauss, the celebrated creator of blockbuster symphonic poems like Don Juan, Also Sprach Zarathustra, and Ein Heldenleben, was generally regarded as the outstanding composer of his time. But that appraisal did not extend to the field of opera. His first two operatic ventures, Guntram and Feuersnot, both influenced by the music of Wagner, failed to disclose the individual musical personality that distinguished Richard Strauss, the innovative and peerless master of orchestral richness and color.

All this was to change with Salome, Strauss’s third opera, inspired by the Oscar Wilde play which Strauss first saw in Berlin in late 1902. He was instantly attracted to the opening of Hedwig Lachmann’s German text: “Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute Nacht!” (How lovely is the Princess Salome tonight!”) Strauss began working on the score, set to an abbreviated version of Lachmann’s German text, and the young Syrian soldier Narraboth’s yearning phrase became the opening of Salome, the opera which premiered three years later, in 1905.

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In Salome, Strauss used the same powerful orchestra of more than a hundred players that created the overwhelming effects we find in his symphonic poems. But in the opera he used those effects sparingly, and hardly ever in a manner to diminish the singing. As Narraboth and the Page contemplate the moon, their brief conversation, supported by clarinet and strings playing softly, gives us a good example of the subtlety of Strauss’s orchestration. Some years later, he recalled that in Salome he was also striving to achieve distinctive Oriental colors that would reflect the exotic harmonies and the “burning sun of the East.” Certainly, his music here is a far cry from the perfumed Orientalism of Delibes’s Lakmé and the stately dignity of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalia. In fact, dignity is in very short supply in Salome, an opera in which perversity abounds and the rather dysfunctional characters are governed by obsessive desires.

Young Narraboth’s infatuation with Salome leads to an untimely death by suicide. The religious convictions of Jochanaan, the prophet John the Baptist, find expression in obsessive rantings directed against the malevolent Herodias, wife of King Herod.

Herod, a man driven by guilt and deep insecurities, lusts for his step-daughter. As for Salome herself, we find it rather unconvincing that Strauss once envisioned her as a “chaste virgin, an oriental princess who must be played with the simplest and most restrained gestures.” The famous “Dance of the Seven Veils,” which Salome performs for Herod’s sickly delectation, was hardly conceived to reflect virginal thoughts. In the Dance, which Strauss wisely composed after the opera was completed, the orchestra combines several principal melodies previously heard, including that associated with Salome’s ecstatic desire to kiss Jochanaan’s mouth. In the final moment, that fateful theme returns again just before Salome is killed on Herod’s orders. At this point, an ominous dark cloud crosses over the moon.

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Richard Strauss was not a religious man, but he must have known that this opera would run into censorship problems. Indeed, Salome received hostile critical reactions from the outset. After its Dresden premiere in 1905, Mahler’s attempt to conduct it in Vienna was thwarted by the city’s Archbishop who regarded it immoral, so the opera was staged in the smaller theater of Graz in 1906. In the following year, the outcry greeting the first performance of Salome at the Met was so vehement that the opera wasn’t heard again for 26 years. Eventually, the musical and theatrical values of the opera triumphed over hypocrisy. Great singers like Ljuba Welitsch, Inge Borkh, Leonie Rysanek, Birgit Nilsson, and Grace Bumbry placed their personal stamp of sensual authority on that precocious oriental nymphet. When excitingly performed, the opera cannot fail in the theater. And, like Giuseppe Verdi long before him, Richard Strauss, a very practical man, understood that for the opera to prevail, it must appeal to a responsive audience.

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