![]() ![]() For that reason, I chose to begin “ The Rest Is Noise,” my history of music since 1900, by describing a performance of “Salome”-not the world première, which took place in Dresden, in 1905, but a subsequent staging in Graz, Austria, with Gustav Mahler, Giacomo Puccini, Arnold Schoenberg, and, possibly, a teen-age Adolf Hitler in attendance.įor a long time, few people took “Salome” seriously. When the clarinet slithers up a disjointed scale at the outset of the piece, the curtain effectively goes up on twentieth-century music. ![]() The score is at once staggeringly original, more than a little trashy, and unsettling in its sexual and racial politics. But “Salome,” with its delirious text, by Oscar Wilde, is perhaps the opera that fascinates me the most. ![]() This is, after all, a work that ends with a young woman kissing a severed head and her stepfather screaming “Kill that woman!” I hasten to add that “Salome” is not actually my favorite opera that would probably be “Tristan und Isolde” or “Otello,” depending on the day of the week. To say that Richard Strauss’s “Salome” is your favorite opera is a bit like saying that “The Shining” is your favorite film or that Edgar Allan Poe is your favorite author: it marks you as something of a freak. ![]()
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