Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 8 - Salome

21 | Lyric Opera of Chicago desires clothe in a beauty of her own invention. Critics may disagree with Strauss’s conception, but they should not say that he did not execute his purpose. But the heart of Strauss’s music-drama is the Princess, and here he achieves, all agree, a stunning success. Salome is a child who never became fully human — and this production, which shows her as very young, emphasizes this. All young children initially feel that they are the centers of the universe — what (Strauss’s contemporary) Freud called “infantile omnipotence.” But in a loving family they soon understand that their actions can hurt those who love and sustain them, and this crisis jolts them into recognition of the reality of others. Salome has two strikes against her: terrible parents — one utterly selfish, the other a would-be pedophile — and unlimited royal power. She therefore never undergoes any check to her omnipotence. She moves through the world arranging everything to accord with her desires, as we see early on from her manipulation of the charmed Narraboth, whom she destroys without even acknowledging his existence. A leading post-Freudian analyst, conversing with a narcissistic patient of this sort, speaks with him of a “struggle that never was,” the struggle that might have checked omnipotence and opened the door to concern and even love. Salome never encounters any such struggle, nor does she have any models of sanity and concern to steer her toward it. So she sees the world as a toy of her own mind, a mind at times delighted, at others petulant and vindictive. Salome gets her wish, as usual. The head is delivered to her on a silver platter. She then launches into one of opera’s most remarkable and brilliant monologues — around seventeen minutes long — addressing the head with hair-trigger alternations between rapture and fury, tightly organized musically around a series of harmonic oppositions that signal the ambivalence of her passion. Salome never had a strong grip on outer reality, a world peopled by other human beings, but now she has retreated fully into her own mind, declaring her obsession with his mouth, his body, his hair, which she now triumphantly possesses. Repeatedly she berates Jochanaan for not returning her desirous gaze — as if he were alive — but she then announces her triumph over his resistance by proclaiming that she is alive and he is dead. She notices no contradiction. She kisses the head with passion and then spirals into a demented declaration of her complete success. Forgetting that he never returned his gaze or listened to her, she is now utterly, serenely, delighted: She has kissed his mouth. The music, in the key of C sharp major, expresses the sweet climax of her passion. (This is what Kerman means by the “sugary orgasm” comment, wrong if used to put down Strauss, but accurate if it refers to Strauss’s insight into his character’s complete detachment from all awareness of her failure and of the hideous crime she has committed.) But Strauss has a surprise in store. Two measures after the triumphant C-sharp major vocal line ends, we are assailed, in the orchestra, by a grotesquely dissonant chord, with no harmonic preparation or resolution — Newman calls it a “spasm” — that has riveted critics and audiences ever since, although quite a few pronounce it “sickening” and “disgusting.” What does the shocking dissonance mean? In all the pages written about this chord, I find too little recognition that it is not, cannot be, inside Salome’s mind, depicting a sense of failure or self-awareness. She is too far lost in fantasy for that. Deliberately Strauss has positioned it after her happy triumph ends, as an external commentary on what we have just witnessed. Although nobody will have the last word about Strauss’s intriguing mystery, I propose that it is the opera’s analogue of the picture of Dorian Gray — the true portrait of the monstrous ugliness of Salome’s words and deeds. The reckoning that she horribly avoided has come at last, although she is utterly unable to grasp it. And sure enough: Herod now commands his soldiers, “Kill that woman.” And they do. Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at The University of Chicago. Her new book, The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom , appears in April 2026. Salome’s dangerous desire reaches its epic denouement. Tristram Kenton / Royal Opera House