Strauss's musical essay in depravity and necrophilia is based on Oscar Wilde's dramatisation of the story of the fate of John the Baptist at the whim of a neurotic child-woman. Salome is a study in obsession. Gabriel Fauré described it in 1907 as 'a symphonic poem with vocal parts added', an accurate assessment when one contemplates the immense and immensely inventive details of the orchestral score. It has a nightmare intensity, the relentless build-up of horror as Salome's insane sexual desire for Jokanaan's death blots out all other feelings.

The legend of "Salome" derives from a sparse Biblical account of the decadent stepdaughter of Herod, Tetrach of Judea, and her shocking insistence upon the beheading of St. John the Baptist. In the original Gospel story, Salome was depicted very briefly as an amoral adolescent who demands the Prophet's head on a charger, essentially to fulfill a request of her affronted and vengeful mother.

In the operatic version, taken from a much-expanded concept developed by playwright, Oscar Wilde, a more or less psychopathic Salome demands the decapitation of the holy man, both as revenge against one who has spurned her shamelessly immoral propositions, and as an ultimate test of the limits of her stepfather's lascivious desires, a direct trade-off for her acquiescence to his continuing, perverted sexual advances. The entire opera takes place in one Act, set at the palace of Herod in approximately 30 A.D.

This is an essay on the destructiveness of sexuality driven by a sense of wounded narcissism. Salome is self-assured, some might say arrogant, body-flaunting and driven by heat, narcissism, and sexuality.

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