Salome, op. 54

The moon is the predominant metaphor in Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Richard Strauss’s operatic adaption: ‘How good it is to see the moon. It is like a silver flower’ exclaims princess Salome. She asserts that the prophet Jochanaan is ‘as chaste as the moon’ and the prophet himself declaims: ‘The moon will become as blood’. The nocturnal source of light has its pivotal moment during the Dance of the Seven Veils, the central scene of the opera. A few pages later, Strauss enters the stage direction ‘The moon disappears’ into the score. When it breaks through the clouds again, Salome perishes and the curtain falls like an axe.