Salome

A baleful moon shines down on the scene of Richard Strauss’ one-act opera Salome (1905), and from the very first sounds—silken, slithering, glowing with weird new harmonies—we’re in a strange and unsettling new musical world. Strauss had written two operas before he came to adapt Oscar Wilde’s biblical drama, but something about the play’s lush imagery and decadent atmosphere ignited his imagination. The result was his first great operatic hit, a masterpiece so scandalous that it was banned in some countries (for blasphemy and obscenity), but which nonetheless redefined what was possible on the 20th-century stage. The scene is ancient Judaea, before the birth of Christ, where the spoiled and sensuous Princess Salome lives in the palace of her mother, Herodias, and her lustful stepfather, the Tetrarch Herod. Their servants watch on in longing and dread, and from the cistern below the palace comes the ominous voice of the imprisoned prophet Jokanaan, who foretells the coming of a Messiah—but in doing so awakens the full power of Salome’s sexuality. Strauss tells the story with Wagnerian voices and a huge orchestra, whose iridescent colours change by the second: a parable of lust, violence and forbidden desires, in which the famous orchestral “Dance of the Seven Veils” is only one of a series of ever more shocking—and thrilling—climaxes.