Trying to figure out if Strauss has something to offer to me, and I guess not much.

I'd watched Ariadne auf Naxos because the story description is so quirkily appealing, but it seems that Strauss just drove it into a nice showpiece for his soprano, then forgot to include the ending of the story.  What happened to all those people in the opening scene? They weren't auf Naxos with Ariadne, so I guess we don't get to know. 

Then I gambled on Arabella, and found it to be not much more than a stiff but wandering romantic stage play, where all the actors sing their lines in disconnected musical phrases.  They could have just done it as a spoken drama - no point to the music here.  The takeaway from Arabella is that at the end, you get to learn the meaning of the term "bed trick", if you follow up with Wikipedia.

But my favorite music major mentioned that there is something notable about the music toward the end of Salome, and besides, it will be staged by Houston in the spring, so -- let's find out.

Sitting at the bar in Saffron, across the street from my Seattle hotel, I ate curried tofu and read a lengthy piece on Strauss.  This is Richard Strauss, not Johann the waltz king and not the composer of the opera Die Fledermaus who was also Johann the waltz king.

I learned about his varied musical career as a composer and conductor, all his musical influences, and his extreme success as an innovator. So he's not just some hack drumming up songs for the stage; there's societal value in his pioneering music, something to be respected.

I had an Indian dessert which was fried dough the size of ping-pong balls, drizzled with cardamom-flavored syrup. I could indeed detect the cardamom.

With that setup, I was ready to plug in my special HDMI cable and load up "Salome" on my room's incredible 48-inch screen.  It is so big that you have to prop yourself up in the far corner of the room, so your eyes don't go batty looking from left to right at the picture.

The story here is more complete than Ariadne, and more concise than Arabella, and the gist of it is, Salome is insane.  She really likes an ugly prisoner, then she doesn't like him, then she wants him killed, then she fondles his dead head on a plate.

It makes partial sense when you see that they credit this story not to the Bible, but to a French-language play by Oscar Wilde.  So, there is something witty here, somewhere.

To me, most of the music is not coherent. It is consistently dissonant and jerky, and although I could tell that the mood of the music is well-matched to the events on stage, I could not track with any melodies, or even see a one-minute pattern.

Personally, what I hoped for was that Strauss would find a reason to bring a small army onstage for a rousing Bellini soldiers' chorus, or maybe get King Herod and his family to all sing heartily about their garden or something, like Donizetti would.  Rossini would have had them all enjoy a funny meal, and Verdi would have had the guard not just stab himself silently and fatally, but sing loud and long about why, toppling slowly to the floor.

On it goes, with solid use of French horns, because Strauss' father was a hornist.

Then Salome makes a deal with her perverted dad, who wants her to dance.  The famous Dance of the Seven Veils is purely a strip-tease, nicely done by a full and comely woman approaching middle age.  (The thing was censored often in the 19th century, and I can see their logic.)  Here, the music is appealing, but not familiar to me.

It ends with Salome singing a more traditional lengthy aria, which I found engaging, as long as I did not watch her attending so lovingly and closely to the head.

I conclude the following:

1. There's something kinky about Strauss' thoughts on intimacy, as seen in this opera and also that bit at the end of Arabella.

2. At a cut-off point around 1880, they stopped making opera music that I like.  Wagner, Puccini, Strauss -- I will probably steer clear.  

3. I would have to learn a lot more about music, maybe about the "early modern era" in particular, before I'd expect to enjoy whatever it is that Strauss was putting out there.

4. I would go see Salome in Houston only if I was with someone who could give me more information about at least the academic value of this music.

5. Eventually I might watch Elektra or Capriccio or Rosenkavalier, but only as experiments.  For fun, we still have plenty of the pre-1900 stuff to enjoy with popcorn on Friday nights.