It's the 101st anniversary of the Austrian premiere of Salome, an event that is described at some length at the beginning of my book. The photograph above, which appears in Gilbert Kaplan's wonderful book The Mahler Album, captures Mahler and Strauss together on the day of the premiere, apparently getting to leave for an afternoon expedition in the hills above the city. Alma Mahler described the day memorably in her memoir. It's worth noting that when Strauss read the book in the nineteen-forties he wrote in the margins of that description, "All untrue."
And happy birthday to Alex Star, the last New York intellectual.
