Salome has no more than a bit part in the Bible, and doesn’t even merit a name-check in the two accounts of her demanding the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Neither Matthew nor Mark identifies her as more than the “daughter of Herodias”; it took a later historian, Josephus, to pin her down.
But her post-biblical life has been extensively – not to say luridly – imagined, in paintings, in Oscar Wilde, and in the opera Salome that Richard Strauss based on the Wilde play. When it premiered in 1905 it caused the kind of scandal music history loves to chronicle. And scandal was exactly what the composer was after in a score of provocative sensuality that made his name.
