Notes on a Scandal

Salome is synonymous with scandal, and its first performance at the Metropolitan Opera was no exception. The opera premiered at the Met on January 22, 1907, in a benefit performance aimed at raising funds for the company. Strauss’s work was already the source of controversy, and New York audiences knew what they were in for. “There was a long line at the box office as early as six o’clock and although only one admission ticket was sold to a person, the speculators continued to get hold of a number, which they sold at a considerable advance,” noted a reviewer in the New-York Tribune. “The subscribers, however, were not very liberally represented in the audience. Many boxes were occupied by outsiders, and all over the orchestra were strange faces.”

The response to the work was immediately divided. A review in the New York Sun noted, “Setting aside for the moment the question of whether the causation of nausea should be regarded as a laudable purpose for dramatic and musical art, it may be conceded that Salome is a creation of tremendous dramatic power, if irresistible musical expressiveness and of marvelous technical construction.” A New York Times review similarly hailed the event as, “one of the most remarkable achievements in the way of a lyric production ever accomplished in this country.” In the following days, readers wrote to the newspaper expressing their objection to—and support of—the work. One “distinguished physician,” for example, described Salome as, “a detailed and explicit exposition of the most horrible, disgusting, revolting, and unmentionable features of degeneracy … that I have ever heard, read of, or imagined.” He concluded his letter with the promise that “for an hour and twenty minutes every day for a year I shall weep for having consciously sat through the most revolting spectacle of my life that has ever been presented to my hearing and my sight.”

One particularly vocal critic of the production was none other than Louisa Pierpont Morgan, the daughter of J. P. Morgan, the famous American financier and influential member of the Met’s board. After internal deliberations, the board sent word to the Met’s General Manager Heinrich Conreid that continued performances of Salome would be “objectionable, and detrimental to the best interests of the Metropolitan Opera House.” As a result, Salome was banned from the Met, and the board of directors also refused to support Conreid in finding an alternative venue for the work under the auspices of the company. The ban was announced on January 31 in the New York Times and New-York Tribune. According to the report, Morgan offered to subsidize all production expenses for Salome out of his own pocket rather than have it performed again.

Salome remained exiled from the Met for 27 years. It was not until 1934 that it finally returned to the Met stage, after which the opera was revived again in 1938 and throughout the 1940s and 50s. In most cases, the one-act work was presented as part of a double bill with another ballet or opera, such as Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona, Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball, or Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Salome received its first new production at the Met in 1965, with legendary Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson in the title role and Karl Böhm conducting. Another new production followed in 1989 and then in 2004, when Finnish soprano Karita Mattila was the first and only Salome to appear fully nude on the Met stage.