The sultry heroine Salomé is one of the most provocative figures in the history of art and opera. Her troubling sensuality seduces her father-in-law Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, into yielding to her whim for an appalling sacrifice: the head of the prophet John the Baptist. This biblical episode’s blend of sexual and macabre desires has long forged a dark legend around the character. In 1904, Richard Strauss took on the play Oscar Wilde had dedicated to it a few years earlier, which is known for two particularly shocking moments: the Dance of the Seven Veils, over which the performer’s body is stripped naked, and the diabolical kiss placed on the mouth of the severed head. When the opera premiered in Dresden in 1905, these two scenes ensured scandal. To this, Richard Strauss’s music adds its own bold expressiveness, further enriched by an orchestral shimmer that’s sometimes orientalist, sometimes orgiastic. With its single, taut-as-a-bow act, Salomé marks an important milestone in the composer’s operatic career. He would soon reprise this ancient, violent vein with Elektra (1909).