Strauss’s Salome

In 1905, Richard Strauss turned the opera world upside down with this searing, salacious, completely unprecedented one-act masterpiece that welds Oscar Wilde’s graphic take on the biblical tale of King Herod’s daughter Salome with the most audacious and modern score the composer had yet created. By the time the deranged antiheroine has finished the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils and stands before the audience entirely stripped of clothing and pretense, one has the sense that Strauss has done the same to opera itself.