The Schlussgesang, by far the best-known section of the opera due to recordings, exploits the upper part of the soprano voice consistently, in both full-out and pulled-back modes, but frequently makes forceful high/low distinctions as well, e. g., “Nun wohl! ich lebe noch, aber du bist tot” (“Well now! I still live, but thou art dead,” landing on the soprano’s low D-flat over a jabbing chord), and contains one of the role’s instantly memorable moments, when Salome sings that the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of the dead “. . . ist grösser als das Geheimnis des Todes” (sudden key change, cistern-music, the voice down to low B flat, then G-flat again, and though not necessarily loud, necessarily more than merely audible—effectively present, preferably in a cavernous, contralto-ish chest voice.) And that moment is followed by the sustained passage that is decisive, dramatically speaking. The torches are snuffed; the moon and stars are hidden; Herod and Herodias flee back into the palace; the scene grows dark as if to conceal the act; and Salome, with the orchestra chromatically moaning beneath her, intones the drawn-out passage (at a very slow tempo) during which she fondles and kisses Jochanaan’s severed head and sings about it to writing centered on the F sharp above middle C, just at the upper edge of “the break.” She emerges from that into a brightening environment both visually (the moon comes back out and illuminates her) and musically (pitch rises, harmony and orchestration open out), and she sings her triumphant final lines (“What of that? I have kissed thy mouth, Jochanaan, I have kissed thy mouth.”) before Herod orders her crushed beneath his soldiers’ shields. And if we are searching this scene for rapid-fire description in the lower range, perhaps  the most prominent among several examples of piercing lower-to-upper midrange chatter in this scene is Salome’s glee over the silencing of Jochanaan’s tongue, with its wonderfully onomatopoeic settings of “this scarlet viper” (“diese Scharlachnatter,” sixteenth notes, quick tempo, back and forth between E and G sharp) and “this red viper” (“diese rote natter,” higher, same note values and tempo).

We can concede that Strauss was something of a dreamer with respect to his expectations of voices, especially at this stage of his compositional development, with his command of the orchestra far advanced over his voice-orchestra expertise. And he knew his adolescent Isolde imaginings for the title role would be but rarely approached in practice. But I don’t think he was so unrealistic as to make demands far out of line with what he had heard around him in the forty-one years that preceded his work on Salome, which included plenty of high-level opera-house experience as conductor. His long, close collaboration with his wife, Pauline de Ahna, had also given him an intimate view of the workings of the soprano voice in the German (or, perhaps I should say, Northern European) tradition. To wax technical for a moment: that tradition, as distinct from the Mediterranean one, has historically embraced a more blended, “governed from the top” way of incorporating the chest register into female voices. ^(I) It thus reduces the danger of a more open, defined chest voice creating a discrepancy with the long stretch of range lying above it, resulting in a weak patch just above the passaggio. But it runs the risk of insufficiently developing the lower register at all, so that there is no stability to the bond in that same area, and the third or fourth above the break must be treated very cautiously and/or “covered.” Now comes Strauss, asking his “Isolde voice” to jab through his huge orchestra in passages like those noted above.^(II) Whom might he have had in mind?