Biblical Source and Oscar Wilde's Transformation
Richard Strauss's opera Salome (1905) is based not directly on the Gospel accounts of Matthew 14:1-12 and Mark 6:17-29 but on Oscar Wilde's 1891 play Salome, which itself is a radical transformation of the Gospel narrative. In the Gospels, the girl who dances for Herod is the daughter of Herodias (not named in the Gospels; the name 'Salome' comes from Josephus's Antiquities), and her request for John the Baptist's head is made at her mother Herodias's prompting. The daughter is a pawn of her mother's political and personal revenge.
Wilde's play transforms this narrative by giving Salome an independent and obsessive desire for John the Baptist that is thwarted by his rejection of her. The dance and the demand for his head become the acts not of a manipulated daughter but of a woman scorned - a psychosexual drama in which John's spiritual purity becomes the instrument of his death. Strauss set Wilde's German translation of the play directly as his libretto, largely without cuts, creating one of the most compressed and intense operas in the repertoire at approximately one hundred minutes without intermission.
The Dance of the Seven Veils
The centerpiece of the opera is the 'Dance of the Seven Veils' - an orchestral interlude during which Salome dances for Herod in fulfillment of his promise to give her whatever she asks. The dance is not described in this way in the Gospels (Mark 6:22 says simply 'the daughter of Herodias danced'), but Wilde's invention of the 'Dance of the Seven Veils' name became so associated with the Salome story that it is now inseparable from the popular understanding of the narrative.
Strauss composed the dance as a full orchestral piece that can be performed separately in concert. Its musical language - richly chromatic, sensual, and technically demanding - was a deliberate artistic provocation, and it achieved its intended effect: the premiere at the Dresden Court Opera on 9 December 1905 was greeted with forty-eight curtain calls and immediately recognized as a scandalous masterwork. The opera's combination of sexual content, decapitation, and sacred subject matter was experienced by many audiences as a profound offense against religious decency.
The Scandal and Its Suppression
The opera's reception history is inseparable from its content. After a single performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera on 22 January 1907, the opera was immediately withdrawn following protests from the board of directors and complaints from the public. The Met did not perform it again until 1934 - twenty-seven years later. Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose personal taste favored more conservative music, stated that Strauss's opera 'caused damage to Strauss as a composer' and that it was 'a horrible perversity,' though he did not ban its German performances.
The suppression of the opera raises the same question raised by the censorship history of Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila: what makes a biblical subject appropriate or inappropriate for the operatic stage? In the case of Salome, the objection was not primarily to the biblical narrative itself - the Gospels record John's beheading with equal factuality - but to the erotic context in which Wilde placed it. The opera transforms a story of political murder into a story of erotic obsession, and this transformation was experienced as a desecration of sacred material.
Matthew 14 and Mark 6: The Gospel Accounts
The Gospel accounts of the Baptist's death are notably restrained. Matthew 14:8 records simply: 'Prompted by her mother, she said, 'Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.'' Mark 6:25 adds the urgency: 'At once she hurried in to the king with the request.' The speed of the request - immediately, at once - suggests a daughter who has been prepared for this moment, not a young woman acting on independent desire. Herod's distress at the request ('the king was distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he did not want to refuse her') is the emotional center of the Gospel account, not Salome's psychology.
Strauss's opera essentially suppresses the Gospel's interest in Herod's distress and replaces it with Salome's psychological intensity. This is a dramatic choice that produces a very different theological resonance: in the Gospels, John the Baptist's death is a political murder enabled by weak authority; in the opera, it is a consequence of John's uncompromising spiritual purity meeting the disordered passion it refuses to accommodate.
Musical Language and Legacy
Strauss's score is among the most demanding in the operatic repertoire, requiring a soprano of exceptional power (the role was originally written for the soprano Marie Wittich, who reportedly called it 'filthy' and refused to perform the final scene) and an orchestra of Romantic scale. The harmonic language is the most chromatic Strauss had yet written, anticipating the atonality of Berg and the Expressionists while remaining within a tonal framework. The final scene - Salome's monologue addressed to the severed head - is one of the most extraordinary passages in operatic literature, combining horror, beauty, and psychological intensity in a way that no previous opera had attempted.