The lurid biblical story of John the Baptist, King Herod, and Herod’s precocious stepdaughter became an operatic hit in 1905 with Richard Strauss’ Salome. The lecture presents an earlier musical version of this character, la Figlia in Alessandro Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista (1675), and considers the reasons why femmes fatales ruled the operatic stage in the seventeenth no less than in the late nineteenth century.

Susan McClary is Professor of Music at Case Western University. Her research focuses on the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres. She is best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), which examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body in various musical repertories, ranging from early seventeenth-century opera to the songs of the pop queen Madonna. In her more recent publications, she explores the many ways in which subjectivities have been construed in music from the sixteenth-century onward. Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (2004) won the Otto Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society in 2005, and its sequel — Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music — appeared in 2012.