![]() ![]() Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and controversial Alma. Giacomo Puccini, the creator of La Bohème and Tosca, made a trip north to hear what "terribly cacophonous thing" his German rival had concocted. The premiere of Salome had taken place in Dresden five months earlier, and word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale-an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna. When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to witness the event. ![]() I am ready, I feel free To cleave the ether on a novel flight, To novel spheres of pure activity. ![]()
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