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When Richard Strauss's opera Salome was first performed in 1905, it generated shock and dismay. The story, borrowed from Oscar Wilde, featured such intense horror, sexuality, and attachment debacles that it was hard to watch even as its music was sublime. This incredible viscerality, pain, and violation in all domains led to its being banned in many venues. In a profound way, as music and musical drama often do, the opera portrayed multiple aspects of a ravaged landscape. Both for the self and for the other, the audience, this may be too much to handle. In an excerpt1 from a long and meaningful correspondence between the composer and Romain Rolland, the latter had this to say:
When you speak in the name of Herod, or of St. John, you create a sturdily constructed work, but you do not, in my opinion, say eternal things. What seems to me to be the most intense in Salome (all the end of the drama, from the moment when St. John's ‘decollation’ is expected)—and in which you are most closely reflected—that stupendous nervous tension, which is so characteristic of your genius: that is not the best, the purest that you have to give.
To sum up:
Salome appears to me to be the most powerful of your dramatic works.
Salome appears to me to be the most powerful of contemporary musicodramatic works.
You are worthy of better things than Salome.
You have triumphed over the Europe of our time. Now you must leave our Europe, raise yourself above it. There is, in the Europe of today, an unbridled force of decadence, of suicide (in various forms, in Germany, in France)—
Brought to my attention by Jason B. Horowitz of the New England Conservatory and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Page 1141beware of joining forces with it. Let that which must die, die—and live yourself [Myers 1968, pp. 85-86].