Salome, Op. 54: Dance of the Seven Veils

Program notes

About the Work

Strauss saw Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé in Berlin in November 1902, in a German translation, and turned that translation into the libretto of a one-act opera. Salome had its first performance in Dresden on 9 December 1905. The mixture of biblical subject, eroticism and murder shocked audiences from the start and made the opera a sensation. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York the run was cancelled after a public outcry. Kaiser Wilhelm II is said to have worried that the piece would do Strauss a great deal of damage; the damage, the composer is reported to have remarked later, enabled him to build his villa at Garmisch.

The dance comes near the climax. Salome, princess of Judea, is obsessed with the prophet Jochanaan (John the Baptist), who has rejected her. Her stepfather Herod, who cannot keep his eyes off her, begs her to dance for him and swears to give her whatever she asks in return. She dances. Then she names her price: the prophet’s head on a silver dish.

Even the first Salome balked. The soprano Marie Wittich refused to perform the dance herself, and a dancer took her place for those few minutes, an arrangement that many productions have followed since. In the concert hall the question does not arise, and the Dance of the Seven Veils has long had a separate life as an orchestral showpiece of about nine minutes.

What to Listen For

This is the opera’s huge orchestra let off the leash. Listen for the exotic colouring Strauss gives the music: winding, heavily ornamented melodies, and a percussion section that includes tambourine and castanets.

The shape is a long, calculated build-up. Strauss works by crescendo and by a gradual quickening of the pace, so that the excitement mounts by stages until the final headlong rush.