But the emerging composer Arnold Schoenberg was also in attendance with six of his devoted pupils, including Alban Berg. Many big names, such as Puccini and Mahler, were present at the Graz performance of Salome. Mahler's Sixth Symphony approached the avant-garde differently than Strauss's Salome. Because of Strauss’s liberal use of such dissonances – musical devices which go against traditional musical harmony – Salome was received with shock that was either of excitement or disgust, depending on the individual. Human ears don’t respond well to the tritone, since it juxtaposes two very different harmonic spheres. What’s more, this quick switch involves the interval of a tritone, which is also known among music scholars as diabolus in musica, or “the devil in music.” Within the first few seconds, the listener is subjected to a scale that starts off in C-sharp major, but quickly changes to G-major – a completely unrelated key, causing immediate dissonance. Like Zarathustra, Salome grabs the listener from the very beginning, but this time the choice of notes and progressions is used to an entirely different end. On May 16, 1906, Strauss’s new operatic work Salome was performed in Graz, Austria, and it heralded a new direction. If you’ve seen the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, you’ll immediately recognize these “rising” notes during the opening scene of the film, they’re memorably used to herald a new beginning for mankind. Trumpets play C, G, and then a higher C the intervals between the notes conform to natural ratios on the frequency spectrum and so sound pleasing to the ears. Strauss’s 1896 work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, essentially announces a new dawn arriving, the music rising and shimmering as it uses the natural harmonic series. Strauss can be seen as a leading voice in shaping the music that was to come in the wake of Wagner’s grandiose and opulent work. This included giants of Austro-German music such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The next generation of composers, who were hitting their stride at the start of the new century, had grown up under Wagner’s considerable influence. Wagner was essentially the blockbuster producer of his day.

The event was such a remarkable occasion that the New York Times ran stories on it for days. In Bayreuth, Germany, when Wagner debuted his four-part opera series known as the Ring cycle in 1876, royalty and the upper crust of culture from around Europe attended, including other composers such as Tchaikovsky and Franz Liszt. By 1900, the composer had been dead for over 15 years, but his operas had been so lavish and grandiose that they’d become the height of entertainment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, music lovers across Europe were still under the spell of Richard Wagner.

Alex ross the rest is noise review