Richard Strauss saw a German production by Max Reinhardt of Oscar Wilde's Salome in 1903. He'd already been told of its potential as an opera subject, but the Reinhardt production convinced him and he immediately began setting this German translation by Hedwig Lachmann. Strauss took about a year to lay out the work in 'short score', then began the orchestration, completing it in June, 1905. During this time he also completed his Sinfonia Domestica, additionally updating and expanding Hector Berlioz' treatise on orchestration. One cannot help but notice the artistic motif of the dangerously sexual femme fatale in Austrian arts and culture at the time, and Strauss's clever appropriation of it. Franz Wedekind's Erdgeist (which was eventually set by Alban Berg as Lulu), Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Elektra (set later by Strauss himself), Franz Von Stuck's painting The Kiss of the Sphinx and Edvard Munch's Vampire all contributed to this motif, not to mention Klimt's and Schiele's erotic ladies.
But what a visual artist could render on paper was quite different from what producers of a theatrical work could get away with on a public stage. The Lord Chamberlain in Great Britain had already banned the Wilde play (1892) so a Covent Garden production was out of the question. Church and state censors blocked it in Vienna, ignoring the desire of Gustav Mahler to have it produced at the Staatsoper. (Mahler was at first non-committal about Salome but when Strauss came to Vienna to play and sing the score from the piano, Mahler's wife relates: "Strauss played and sang incomparably well. Mahler was overwhelmed. We came to the dance - it was missing. 'Haven't got it done yet,' Strauss said and played on to the end, leaving this yawning gap. 'Isn't it rather risky,' Mahler remarked, 'simply leaving out the dance, and then writing it in later when you're not in the same mood?' Strauss laughed his light-hearted laugh: 'I'll fix that all right.')
When the composer played the opera for his aged musician-father, he complained about the 'restlessness' of the music, comparing it to having insects crawling around underneath one's clothes. This wasn't atypical of the reactions of Strauss's contemporaries. The rehearsal period for the opera's premiere at Dresden under conductor Ernst von Schuch was difficult, to say the least. Singers rebelled, especially Marie Wittich in the title role who was appalled by what she was required to do on stage by the producers: "I'm a decent woman!," she complained. But the work finally reached the stage on December 9, 1905, and the audience responded by giving the artists thirty-eight curtain calls. The critics were less kind, in fact condemnatory. Despite problems with censors and critics, however, Breslau, Graz and some fifty other German and Austrian opera houses staged the work within the next couple of years. The Metropolitan Opera tried to stage it in 1907 but J. P. Morgan's daughter, who saw a dress rehearsal of Salome on a Sunday afternoon, described such a cacophonous battery of offensive sounds and purple imagery that the performances were scrapped. For performances in Berlin the Kaiser insisted that the Star of Bethlehem be painted on a backdrop for the final scene, a bizarre addition to the scenario that was featured at the opera house for three decades of performances!