Singing Love Songs to a Disembodied Head

Push play to listen while you read.

I just started reading Alex Ross' incredible book, The Rest Is Noise, which covers the breadth of classical music in the twentieth century - a topic dear to my heart. I first fell in love with this stuff in college and have been fascinated by it ever since. The amount of differing genres and experimentations in the last century are innumerable and I can't wait to revisit them all in this giant tome. As I cycle through the years, I'll no doubt be inspired to share some of my favorite pieces here.

Today's gem is from Richard Strauss' opera Salome, which upon its debut in Graz was lovingly dubbed "satanic" by critic Ernst Decsey. Strauss had a knack for choosing thought provoking and controversial subject matter. As Ross writes:

"In his songs, Strauss made a point of setting poets of questionable reputation - among them Richard Dehmal, infamous for his advocacy of free love; Karl Henckell, banned in Germany for outspoken socialism; Oskar Panizza, jailed for 'crimes against religion, committed through the press' (he had called Parsifal 'spiritual fodder for pederasts'); and John Henry Mackay, the biographer of Max Stirner and the author of The Anarchists, who, under the pen name 'Sagitta,' later wrote books and poems celebrating man-boy love."

You can clearly see, he had the lock on awesome source material. Salome was no different. Using Oscar Wilde's play, Salome, as its base, Strauss' opera tells the story of a Judaean princess who performs the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils for her stepfather, Herod, before demanding the unusual (even for early 1st century standards) reward of John the Baptist's head. So enjoy the final scene as Salome sings a demented love song to the disembodied head of the future patron saint of Puerto Rico. The music perfectly captures her insanity, vacillating between gauzy swooning and unsettling dissonance. After her gorgeous solo, Herod decides he has seen enough and orders the guards to crush her to death as the orchestra shrieks, abruptly ending the opera and leaving the audience in stunned silence.