By the early 1890s Oscar Wilde was a very well known literary figure in the UK, but he sought fame abroad and traveled to Paris in 1891. While there he had the opportunity to meet Stéphane Mallarmé, the symbolist poet and he came under the influence of both Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, the poet who crafted Pelleas et Mélisande, later set as an opera by Claude Debussy. After a lengthy discussion with friends about the depictions in history and art of the story of John the Baptist and Salome (unnamed) from the Bible, he wrote the play quickly, in French. Although in the published version the playwright acknowledged Alfred Lord Douglas, his lover, as the French translator, it was Wilde himself who completed the task, so disappointed was he by Douglas's schoolboy French. This caused quite a rift in their relationship for a time, but did not harm it irrevocably. (That, of course, was to happen later at the hands of the Marquess of Queensbury, Douglas's father, who publicly denounced Wilde as a "somdomite" [sic] and which led to Wilde's devastating two-year imprisonment and exile to Paris. Even after all they'd been through Douglas and Wilde attempted reconciliation, but it only lasted a few months after which Wilde died in poverty.)
Wilde recognized that in the original Biblical account the 'damsel' from the story who dances for her stepfather Herod Antipas is tantalizingly out of reach of our imaginations: "This has made it necessary for the centuries to heap up dreams and visions at her feet so as to convert her into the cardinal flower of the perverse garden." Mallarmé's poem Hérodiade was certainly an influence, as well as Joris-Karl Huysman's À Rebours (Against Nature). Huysman describes two paintings by Gustave Moreau in his work, and captures the essence of Wilde's eventual creation: "In this picture she was truly a whore, obedient to a temperament which is that of a cruel and passionate woman. She lived again, more polished and more barbaric, more hateful and more exquisite. Arousing the languorous sense of man more vigorously, she bewitched and subjugated his will more surely, with charms as of some great venereal flower which had burgeoned in a sacrilegious seedbed and had grown to maturity in a hotbed of impiety." Wilde, too, was fascinated by the Moreau paintings and tried to capture through language what the artist captured in color.
Hedwig Lachmann's translation of Wilde's play from French into German was used for Max Reinhardt's production of it at the Kleines Theater in Berlin, a show that ran for 200 performances. There were other German translations of the play but this one, some scholars say, even improves on the Wilde original and it was the translation that Strauss used in crafting his own libretto. He excised quite a bit of the original but what is left intact is Lachmann's and not enough attention has been given to her contribution to this fin-de-siécle operatic masterpiece.