The decadence and eroticism of Oscar Wilde's French play "Salomé" was both a scandal and a musical inspiration. Within a few years Florent Schmidt wrote his "The Tragedy of Salomé" and Richard Strauss wrote his opera, "Salome." This opera caused fresh scandal and outrage, and rekindled interest in the original play. Glazunov agreed to write incidental music, comprising an introduction and an accompaniment for Salomé's famous dance, the most famous strip-tease in theatrical history. (All Wilde wrote for the scene was the stage direction: "Salome performs the Dance of the Seven Veils").

This became one of the freshest and most colorful pieces Glazunov had written in some years. His problem as a composer was that he did not make artistic progress. He started out at a relatively high level of attainment in the 1880s, matured a little, and stayed there. Unless he had a good subject, he mainly repeated his earlier successes, which themselves conformed to what was happening in Russian music when he started composing. Fortunately for this project, one of these Russian traditions was that of sinuous, exotic quasi-Oriental dance music (as in Musorgsky's "Dance of the Persian Slave Woman" and Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances"). This genre suited the play and resulted in a good addition to the genre.

© All Music Guide