Whatever may have been most responsible, Ljuba Welitsch’s voice broke under the strain, and that occurred in the span between the 1949 and 1952 performances. She underwent an operation for vocal nodules, but, unlike Bori or Enrico Caruso, did not make anything approaching a full recovery. Her sound retained its quality, but not the strength necessary for leading roles. Back in Vienna, she took small ones from time to time.

Without an extraordinary Salome, we don’t have a show. But the other characters, both the principal ones and the smaller ones, are of course important to the creation of her stage world, and that world important to our investment in the whole strange Salome project. So let’s take a look at both together.

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Salome is set in the time and place of the most momentous change in the history of the Western world. From that time to this, nothing remotely compares to it, and from our historical imaginings of it many a fantastical tale has been told. In the version that Wilde and Strauss have brought us, there is from the start a sense of portent, a brooding over Palestine that reflects a tense awareness that the change is happening. Prophets roam the land. One of them, a holy man from the desert, proclaims from beneath the ground that the Son of Man, the long-awaited Messiah, is nigh. The deaf shall hear, the blind shall see, sins shall be redressed. Soon, he bids the ruler of the land to come forth and hear the word that he is to die before the people in his silver robe, and that if his wanton wife does not repent of her sins, the rod of the Lord awaits her. The ruler so summoned is Herod Antipas, who has been appointed Tetrarch, i.e., “ruler of one quarter” of Palestine, by the Emperor of the occupying Romans. Herod is jumpy. While he believes that the prophet is indeed a holy man and as such must be protected, he has had him arrested and confined in the cistern because he fears that, in this atmosphere of stirrings that are not only political but spiritual, the prophet might foment an unrest with a mysterious force behind it. He swings from one terror or hunger to another, shaking off one only to encounter the next, each disconnected from the one before. He hears the beating of invisible wings, the moon looks to him like a madwoman desperate for a lover, an ill wind blows, he is unbearably hot, then cold, he is dying of thirst, his speech is skittery and run-on. It is easy for us to perceive Herod as a superstitious, comically fearful man of no stature, and there is plenty in Strauss’s score, starting with his tweaky entrance music, to justify that view (Aegisth, in Elektra, gets even less respect.) But there’s another way to look at him, which can also be justified by the music. In contrast to his wife, Herodias (“No, there is no wind.” “The moon is like the moon, that is all,” etc.), Herod is attuned to the impending change. In a way, he’s on a wavelength with his captive holy man, sensitive to the manifestations where others are not, or feel them as only personal. And the music makes it clear from the start that it is impossible to separate the personal forebodings from the cosmic one that hovers over all.

The personal aspect is connected to Herod’s stepdaughter, Salome. To look at her is to be ensorcelled. The Page, besotted by the handsome Syrian Captain Narraboth (“er war sehr schön,” sings Herod over his corpse, more or less in passing) tells him that if he so much as looks at Salome, something horrible (“Schreckliches“) will happen.^(I) Herodias tells Herod the same thing in the same words. But neither man can help himself, and in both cases something horrible does happen. As for Salome, she’s sixteen—the same age as, for instance, Manon, and like Manon fully aware of her sexual irresistibility and willing, even eager, to use it to escape an insufferable circumstance. Like her stepfather, she is taken by the moon immediately upon her entrance, but sees something very different in it. Salome’s moon is “like a silver flower, cool and chaste—yes, like the beauty of a virgin, forever pure.” Virgin, wanton madwoman, or whatever else the moon can be made to reflect, there is something occult in its connections with Salome and Herod, for when Herod orders the torches snuffed and the moon and stars hidden, that actually happens, as if his orders commanded the heavens, and the moon (still virginal?) emerges to shine on Salome, and on her only, when she has consummated her act of love.

Love is what Salome seeks. She has no idea what it is or how it might feel. For her, after all, that mystery is greater than the mystery of the dead. She has heard only that it has a bitter taste, and that, at least, will finally be confirmed for her when she kisses her dead prophet’s mouth. When she hears Jochanaan’s voice booming up into the garden, denouncing the immoral ways of all Palestine but, on a particularly fine point, those of her mother, something stirs in her, and when he climbs to the surface to tower above her, his body whiter than the whitest things of the world, she knows where she must search. From this point in the action, in this darkling atmosphere of calamity and promise, the story is one of primitive, innocent passion, psychologically quite simple. A young woman of high station, sophisticated in the ways of society, aware that love has a sexual component and fascinated both by her prophet’s rejection of that and his call to a higher life whose attainment would entail humility, is left with no recourse when he curses her final wild plea. She must possess him living or dead. Then she will know what love is. She knows how to go about assuring that possession, and so she does. Nothing much to analyze, but made emotionally profound and pitiful (and “schreckliches,” of course) by Strauss’s genius.