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By Root 1135 0

new domains of knowledge be conquered.” As the domain of art if not knowledge, the same forest had lured the French decadents and the aesthetes of England in the movement that was abruptly terminated by Wilde’s trial. In Germany the movement, carrying over into the new century, was pushed to new limits by Wedekind with a kind of frustrated ferocity. It was a form of rebellion against the overwhelming material success of the country, a sense of something wrong beneath the twelve-course dinners, the pomp of military parades, the boasts of “blood and iron.” Wedekind and his kind were Schwarzseher, seers of black, of the black in man. They were a trend feeble in comparison with the dominant mood of self-confident power and pugnacity, yet who felt intimations of disaster, of a city ripe for burning, of Neroism in the air.

Strauss’s antennae picked up whatever was in the air and he fixed unerringly on Salome—as the subject of an opera, not a tone poem. Using more instruments than ever, he composed a score of tremendous difficulty and exaggerated dissonance with the orchestra at times divided against itself, playing in two violently antagonistic keys as if to express the horror of the subject by horrifying the ear. Instruments were twisted to new demands, cellos made to reach the realm of violins, trombones to cavort like flutes, kettledrums given figures of unprecedented complexity. The musical fabric was dazzling. Strauss could write for the voice with no less virtuosity than for orchestra and the singers’ parts seemed to grow more eloquent as the drama deepened in depravity. Salome’s final song to the severed head thrilled listeners with a sinister beauty that did justice to Wilde’s words:

“Ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Iokanaan! If thou hadst seen me thou hadst loved me. I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body and neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion.… Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth.”

When Berlin and Vienna refused performance, like London, on the ground of sacrilege, Strauss’s great admirer, Ernst von Schuch, conductor of the Dresden Royal Opera, presented it there on December 9, 1905. The production, in a single act lasting an hour and forty minutes without interruption, spared the audience’s sensibilities nothing. Iokanaan’s head, made up in realistic pallor of death with appropriate gore, was held in full view; Salome’s seven veils were ritually discarded one by one while Herod leered. Death under the soldiers’ shields supplied a punishing catharsis. The audience responded with unbounded enthusiasm extending to thirty-eight curtain calls for cast and composer. In subsequent performances in other German cities Salome went on to huge success and, for Strauss, large financial reward not adversely affected by bans and censorship troubles. In Vienna owing to the objections of the Archbishop the ban held, but in Berlin over the strenuous objections of the Kaiserin a compromise was reached of the kind applied by the Church to the Song of Solomon. Performance was allowed on condition that the star of Bethlehem should appear in the sky as Salome died, presumably indicating the posthumous triumph of the Baptist over unnatural passion.

Kaiser Wilhelm nevertheless remained unhappy. Despite an affinity for coarse physical jokes practiced upon his courtiers to their intense embarrassment, his moral views were more Victorian than Edwardian and he was married to a model of German bourgeois respectability. The Kaiserin Augusta, known as Dona, was a plain, amiable woman who provided her husband with six sons and a daughter, had no interests outside her family and wore large feathered hats on every occasion, even when yachting. They were her husband’s choice since his annual birthday present to her was invariably twelve hats selected by himself which she was obliged to wear. Her one mark on history was her insistence on a double bed in which she so often kept her husband awake with family discussions which made him irritable next day, that Chancellor