¹ On this subject, see Kivy, Peter, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton, 1980);Google ScholarBeardsley, Monroe C., ‘Understanding Music’, in On Criticizing Music, ed. Price, Kingsley (Baltimore, 1981), 55–73;Google ScholarCone, Edward T., ‘Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics’, 19th Century Music, 5 (1982), 233–41;CrossRefGoogle ScholarNewcomb, Anthony, ‘Sound and Feeling’, Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 614–43;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and my Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 1990), esp. chap. 1.Google Scholar For specific commentary on the interrelations of music and literary criticism, see Scher, Steven Paul, ‘Literature and Music’, in Interrelations of Literature, ed. Baricelli, Jean-Pierre and Gibaldi, Joseph (New York, 1982), 225–50Google Scholar, and my ‘Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism’, 19th Century Music, 13 (1989), 159–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² See Tomlinson, Gary, ‘The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology’, 19th Century Music, 7 (1984), 350–62;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKerman, Joseph, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Mass., 1985);Google Scholar and Treitler, Leo, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).Google Scholar

³ For such analysis, see the following essays in Richard Strauss: Salome, ed. Puffett, Derrick (Cambridge, 1989):Google ScholarPuffett, Derrick, ‘Salome as Music Drama’, 58–87;Google ScholarCarpenter, Tethys, ‘Tonal and Dramatic Structure’, 88–108;Google Scholar and Ayrey, Craig, ‘Salome's Final Monologue’, 109–30.Google Scholar

⁴ For a discussion of the relationship of non-specialist listening to musical structure, see Rabinowitz, Peter, ‘Chord and Discourse: Listening Through the Written Word’, in Text and Music: Critical Inquiries, ed. Scher, Steven Paul (Cambridge, forthcoming 1991).Google Scholar

⁵ For efforts at integrating more technically ambitious musical criticism with conceptual understanding, but without excluding non-musical readers, see my Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley, 1984), chaps. 2–4;Google ScholarHertz, David Michael, The Tuning of the Word: The Musico-Literary Poetics of the Symbolist Movement (Carbondale, Ill., 1987);Google Scholar my Music as Cultural Practice, chaps. 3 and 5; and Scher, , ed., Text and Music.Google Scholar

⁶ Quotation from ‘Silver Blaze’, The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York, n.d.), 397.Google Scholar

⁷ This is the topic of Freud's famous paper, ‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life’ (1912), rpt. in Freud, , Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Rieff, Philip (New York, 1963), 58–70.Google Scholar

⁸ Conrad, Peter, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley, 1981), 171.Google Scholar

⁹ Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York, 1986), 396–8.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Meltzer, Françoise, Salome and the Dance of Writing (Chicago, 1987), 1–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ Gilman, Sander L., ‘Strauss and the Pervert’, in Reading Opera, ed. Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger (Princeton, 1988), 306–27.Google Scholar

¹² Flaubert, Gustave, Three Tales, trans. Baldick, Robert (Baltimore, 1961), 97.Google Scholar

¹³ For a fuller account of the gaze and its relationship to nineteenth-century music, see chap. 4 of my Music as Cultural Practice (n. 1), ‘Liszt, Goethe, and the Discourse of Gender’. My treatment of the gaze is largely indebted to Lacan, Jacques, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1981), 67–119Google Scholar, and to various studies of the gaze in the visual arts and film, including Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975)Google Scholar, in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, In., 1989), 14–28;CrossRefGoogle ScholarArmstrong, Carol M., ‘Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body’, in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Suleiman, Susan Rubin (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 223–42;Google ScholarCaws, Mary Ann, ‘Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art’, Suleiman, 262–87;Google ScholarBernheimer, Charles, ‘Degas's Brothels: Voyeurism and Ideology’, Representations, no. 20 (1987), 158–86;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bryson, Norman, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, 1983).Google Scholar

¹⁴ For an overview of recent theory about pornographic representation, with an emphasis on the continuities between pornography and high culture, see Gubar, Susan, ‘Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation’, Critical Inquiry, 13 (1987), 712–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Victorian pornographic literature, see Marcus, Steven, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1966).Google Scholar For a striking demonstration of the relationship between pornographic photography and high-cultural painting, see Needham, Gerald, ‘Manet, Olympia, and Pornographic Photography’, in Woman as Sex Object, ed. Hess, Thomas and Nochlin, Linda (New York, 1972), 48–53.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Bryson, (see n. 13), 93.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Text from Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du Mal/Flowers of Evil (bilingual edition), ed. Jackson, and Matthews, Marthiel (New York, 1955).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1979), 224.Google Scholar

¹⁸ A further aspect of Judith's visual subjugation is that her own head is imagistically severed from her body by her jewelled neck-collar. Alessandra Comini observes this decapitation in her Gustav Klimt (New York, 1975), 22.Google Scholar For a full discussion of Judith and the problem of castration see Jacobus, Mary, ‘Judith, Holofernes, and the Phallic Woman’, in her Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York, 1986), 110–36.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Huysmans, J.-K., Against Nature [A Rebours], trans. Baldick, Robert (New York, 1959), 64.Google Scholar

²⁰ For a discussion of this association in nineteenth-century art and literature, see Gitter, Elizabeth, ‘The Power of Woman's Hair in the Victorian Imagination’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 99 (1984), 936–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²² Salome, trans. Ellmann, Richard, in The Picture of Dorian Gray and other Writings (New York, 1982), 294.Google Scholar

²³ Kermode, , Romantic Image (New York, 1957), 49–91.Google Scholar

²⁴ Most notably, Herodias's page hopelessly yearns for a young Syrian captain who in turn hopelessly yearns for Salome. The play opens with this subplot, which implies that desire for a female object is indistinguishable from desire for a male one. In this context, Salome's eventual yearning for the male scopic position may suggest that, along with everything else, she encodes the desire of one man for another.

²⁵ On sexual inversion, see Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: Volume II, The Tender Passion (New York, 1986), 219–327Google Scholar, and Chauncey, George Jr, ‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance’, Salmagundi, 58–9 (1982), 114–46.Google Scholar

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²⁷ Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1967), 184.Google Scholar

²⁸ Cited by Tuchman, Barbara W., The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (New York, 1967), 380.Google Scholar

²⁹ Comini (see n. 18), 25, suggests that the pose for this Salome was inspired by the second, and more feral, of Klimt's two Judith paintings (1909); the sets for the production were designed by Klimt's friend, Alfred Roller.

³⁰ Bergman, Gösta, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm, 1977), 269, 298–300.Google Scholar The date is somewhat earlier for England, Italy and (probably) Scandinavia. German theatres went dark after the first Bayreuth Ring (1876)Google Scholar produced the effect by accident; France followed suit shortly afterwards.

³¹ To the degree that it is scopophilic, the unseen gaze of the audience is gendered masculine, regardless of who exercises it. This gendering may be problematic for women in the audience; hence the kernel of truth in the righteous opera critic's remarks about Occidental women. For a discussion of this problem, see Scheman, Naomi, ‘Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women’, Critical Inquiry, 15 (1988), 62–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In one of his dream analyses, Freud makes the interesting suggestion that the theatre circa 1900 offered women – more exactly, married women – the chance to satisfy the sexual curiosity that their upbringing had frustrated. Freud, , Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Strachey, James (New York, 1966), 122–5, 220–1.Google Scholar

³² The modelling effect is confirmed by an interlude late in the monologue, during which Herod and Herodias take up the position of unseen gazers and debate with each other about the spectacle Salome presents to them.

³³ Scheman, (see n. 31), 84.Google Scholar My discussion of the role of the unseen seer has greatly benefitted from Scheman's article.

³⁴ From Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)Google Scholar, italics in original; quoted by Scheman, , 83.Google Scholar

³⁵ Clément, Catherine, Opera, or the Undoing of Women (1979), trans. Wing, Betsy, foreword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis, 1988).Google Scholar

³⁶ ‘Enigmatic nature’: so Ayrey (see n. 3), 120. Salome's other characteristic motif, heard on the clarinets during the opening measures of the opera, is also a triadic figure, embellished by neighbour motion around the fifth degree.

³⁷ I am referring to the moment at which the dance enters C^# major. The significance of this key will soon become evident.

³⁸ Macdonald's essay, which uses a G^b key signature and 9/8 time as its title, appears in 19th Century Music, 11 (1988), 221–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The passage cited is on p. 226.

³⁹ Macdonald, (see n. 38), 230.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ See Gilliam, Bryan, ‘Strauss's Preliminary Opera Sketches: Thematic Fragments and Symphonic Continuity’, 19th Century Music, 9 (1986), 176–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar An amusing example occurs among the sketches for the Symphonia Domestica: ‘The mother's worries: will the child resemble the father [F major] or the mother [B major]?’ (p. 178). Anyone familiar with Strauss's marriage to Pauline de Ahna will understand the joke embedded in the B–F tritone.

⁴¹ Strauss's remarks are cited by Leinsdorf, Erich, The Composer's Advocate: A Radical Orthodoxy for Musicians (New Haven, 1981), p. 57n.Google Scholar

⁴² Leinsdorf, , 57n.Google Scholar, translation modified.