The tone of Salome’s finale is quite different, though. In Salome, we find Strauss revisiting the precedent established by Wagner in works like Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung of including a monumental final scene for soprano. “The damage,” the composer remarked later, “enabled me to build my villa at Garmisch.” Morgan’s daughter led a crusade against the work in New York, which meant that all further performances were cancelled after the Metropolitan Opera unveiled the work in 1907 and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany worried that Salome would do Strauss’ career a lot of damage.
The first Salome, Marie Wittich, refused to perform the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” declaring that no respectable woman would strip on stage J.P. He adapted his own libretto from that translation, and the opera that resulted scandalized Europe and America. Richard Strauss (1864-1949) first saw Oscar Wilde’s Salomé in a German translation in Berlin in November 1902.
“Well, I will kiss it now! I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit,” she says, voraciously anticipating a moment she has waited for over the course of Strauss’ opera.
We see the teen-age Biblical princess Salome holding a silver platter on which rests the bloody, decapitated head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist). “Ah! Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan!” With these words, one of the most decadent scenes ever devised for the stage begins.
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