Composers Datebook

One of the 20th century’s most important—and most lurid—operas had its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on today’s date in 1907. Richard Strauss’s “Salome” is a faithful setting of Oscar Wilde’s play about the decadent Biblical princess who, after her famous “dance of the seven veils,” demands the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter as a reward. She then confesses her love to the severed head and kisses it. This scene, accompanied by Strauss’s graphic music, proved too much for early audiences to take. “A reviewer,” wrote the New York Tribune,” should be an embodied conscience stung into righteous fury by the moral stench with which Salome fills the nostrils of humanity.” The New York Sun went even further: “The presentation of such a story is ethically a crime.” The Met cancelled the rest of the scheduled performances, and “Salome” was not staged there again until 1934. Closer to our time, the American composer Terry Riley put a more positive spin on the legend of Salome. In the 1980s, Riley wrote some string quartets collectively titled “Salome Dances for Peace.” “I conceived my quartets as a kind of ballet scenario,” said Riley, “in which contemporary world leaders like Reagan and Gorbachev are seduced by a reincarnated Salome into realizing world peace.” The fifth quartet in the Salome series, which we’re hearing now, is even subtitled “Good Medicine.”