Dance of the Seven Veils: Strauss - Stokowski/Philadelphia

From the opera "Salome"
Recorded May 1, 1929

Leopold Stokowski (April 18, 1882 -- September 13, 1977) was a British-born American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound.

Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 -- 8 September 1949) was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, particularly of operas, Lieder and tone poems. Together with Gustav Mahler he represents the extraordinary late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style. Strauss's music had a profound influence on the development of music in the twentieth century. Like Mahler, Strauss was also a prominent conductor.

Salome
Opera in one act by Richard Strauss; words after Oscar Wilde's poem of the same title, translated into German by Hedwig Lachmann. Produced at the Court Opera, Dresden, December 9, 1905. Metropolitan Opera House, New York, 1907, with Olive Fremstad; Manhattan Opera House, New York, with Mary Garden.

Regarding the score of "Salome," Strauss himself remarked that he had paid no consideration whatever to the singers. There is a passage for quarrelling Jews that is amusing; and, for a brief spell, in the passage in which Salome gives vent to her lust for Jokanaan, the music is molten fire. But considered as a whole, the singers are like actors, who intone instead of speaking. Whatever the drama suggests, whatever is said or done upon the stage -- a word, a look, a gesture -- is minutely and realistically set forth in the orchestra, which should consist of a hundred and twelve pieces. The real musical climax is "The Dance of the Seven Veils," a superb orchestral composition.

Strauss calls the work a drama. As many as forty motifs have been enumerated in it. But they lack the compact, pregnant qualities of the motifs in the Wagner music dramas which are so individual, so melodically eloquent that their significance is readily recognized not only when they are first heard, but also when they recur. Nevertheless, the "Salome" of Richard Strauss is an effective work -- so effective in the setting forth of its offensive theme that it was banished from the Metropolitan Opera House, although Olive Fremstad lavished her art upon the title rôle; nor have the personal fascination and histrionic gifts of Mary Garden been able to keep it alive.

At the Metropolitan Opera House, then under the direction of Heinrich Conried, it was heard at a full-dress rehearsal, which I attended, and at one performance. It was then withdrawn, practically on command of the board of directors of the opera company, although the initial impulse is said to have come from a woman who sensed the brutality of the work under its mark of "culture."

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