mother told her to ask for his head? Had she taken dancing lessons
from one of the women of Cadiz to learn to dance as she must have
danced to excite such lust in Herod? Was she a monster, a worse
than vampire as she is represented by Wilde and Strauss? Was she an
"Israelitish grisette" as Pougin called the heroine of the opera
which it took one Italian (Zanardini) and three Frenchmen (Milliet,
Gremont, and Massenet) to concoct? No wonder that the brain of
Saint-Saens reeled when he went to hear "Herodiade" at its first
performance in Brussels and found that the woman whom he had looked
upon as a type of lasciviousness and monstrous cruelty had become
metamorphosed into a penitent Magdalen. Read the plot of the opera
and wonder!

Salome is a maiden in search of her mother whom John the Baptist
finds in his wanderings and befriends. She clings to him when he
becomes a political as well as a religious power among the Jews,
though he preaches unctuously to her touching the vanity of earthly
love. Herodias demands his death of her husband for that he had
publicly insulted her, but Herod schemes to use his influence over
the Jews to further his plan to become a real monarch instead of a
Roman Tetrarch. But when the pro-consul Vitellius wins the support
of the people and Herod learns that the maiden who has spurned him
is in love with the prophet, he decrees his decapitation. Salome,
baffled in her effort to save her lover, attempts to kill Herodias;
but the wicked woman discloses herself as the maiden's mother and
Salome turns the dagger against her own breast.

This is all of the story one needs to know. It is richly garnished
with incident, made gorgeous with pageantry, and clothed with much
charming music. Melodies which may be echoes of synagogal hymns of