Sisters of Salome

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, a short-lived but extraordinary cultural phenomenon spread throughout Europe and the United States—“Salomania.” The term was coined when biblical bad girl Salome was resurrected from the Old Testament and reborn on the modern stage in Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play Salome and in Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera based on it. Salome quickly came to embody th...