In the writing for Salome there is a recurrent pattern, prefigured in her insistent queries concerning Jochanaan’s age, then set by her successive odes to his presumed assets (first of all his voice, then his body, then his hair, finally his mouth), in which there is a buildup of excitation followed by a calming down, then settling on the key word by way of a special note on the first beat of the next bar. These passages all involve tiny but important interpretive decisions, creating momentary resolutions before Jochanaan’s next outburst of rejection. But the climactic one, following her paean to the redness of his mouth, is tricky, and does not bring even the briefest of hopeful resolutions, but rather an extended moment of dramatic suspense. From a bar in which the singer attacks on a high B, fortissimo, marked as “ausser sich” (“beside herself”) in Strauss’s affective direction, then plunging downward to the words “Nichts in der Welt” (“Nothing in the world”) in an already-familiar pattern that sounds like we’re about to launch into a merry proto-Rosenkavalier waltz (and which becomes that in the dance); then sustaining the energy of desperate passion through “is so red as thy mouth” and leading into two bars marked ruhiger werden (“becoming calmer,” also marked with a diminuendo for the voice while there’s a swell-and-diminish in the orchestra) as she sings “let me kiss it;” then to two more of molto ritardando while she holds on C sharp before lifting a graceful little portamento up to a pianissimo F at “dei-nen Mund“—a technically sophisticated move—and then sustaining “Mund” for the full bar marked langsamer over a string tremolando before Jochanaan mutters his “Never.” We have plenty of evidence that Strauss, for all the elaboration of his word-setting, was a practical man of the theatre who would not insist on his note values so long as an essential point was being made. Nonetheless, “Mund” is a whole note and he wrote it, so we are entitled to believe that he heard, first, a beautifully shaded reduction in volume and drawing out of the phrase as his Isolde’s voice slides up (the orchestra holding under the singer’s ritard.), then a bonding of the tonic consonants n and m just as the voice reaches the F, then perhaps a barely perceptible emphasis right on the downbeat, followed by four long beats for “Mund,” ideally finished off with a diminuendo that melts into silence.

That effect is recapitulated in the last scene as Salome, addressing the prophet’s severed head, is reviewing the elements of Jochanaan’s beauty and sums them all up with “Ah! Jochanaan, du warst schön!” This time, the approach is simpler, the interval wider. But again there is a slowdown and the pitch attained is enharmonically the same (E sharp). The singer no longer has tonic consonants to work with, but must articulate the “sch,” this time on a double bar with a brightening key change, and then again sustain for four slow beats, her method and aesthetic determining whether she closes in on the “u” component of the “ö” compound or brightens it with its “e” element. Either way, she and the conductor must jointly determine whether the slowdown and key change merit the slightest of unmarked pauses (“Du warst . . . schön“) before landing on the word. Surely something is called for beyond simply ramming ahead (“Du warstschön“). There are other similar moments scattered through the writing, and the point is not that a given one must be decided one way or another, but that all must give the impression of being under the control of the singer-as-character—of the singer’s feel for the dramatic pause, of suspense, of word inflection and timbral shading, all arising from her sense of the dramatic moment and its physically acted reality. And since that must be so in appearance, it must be so in fact, since she is the one who must, with body and voice, create the effect.