This article reconsiders the “Dance of the Seven Veils” in Richard Strauss’s Salome through the concepts of body, gaze, desire, veil, unveiling, and freedom. Its central question is whose voice is actually heard on stage when Salome dances. In this context, the notion of “voice” is not used merely as a narrow musical term referring to vocal performance; rather, it is treated as a representational category through which the article examines whose desire, power, and claim to freedom become visible in a wordless scene through music, body, choreography, and the regime of the gaze. The article first discusses the tension between Strauss’s emphasis on Salome’s innocence and restraint and the sensual intensity produced by the opera at both musical and theatrical levels. It then compares two contemporary interpretations of the “Dance of the Seven Veils”: the 2004 Metropolitan Opera production and the 2006 Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet production. In the Metropolitan production, the dance is associated with Salome’s bodily unveiling, her desire for subjectivity, and her claim to freedom; however, this interpretation also carries the risk of turning the female body once again into a visual object of spectacle. The Lithuanian production, by contrast, transfers the dance to Herod, reverses the direction of the gaze, and exposes male desire rather than the female body. The article argues that the motifs of veiling and unveiling should not be read solely as signs of liberation, since they also involve orientalist visual desire and the politics of representation. Ultimately, the voice heard in the “Dance of the Seven Veils” belongs neither entirely to Salome, nor to Herod, nor to Strauss, nor to the Western spectator’s gaze. Instead, it emerges through these enclosing structures and takes shape within Salome’s fragile yet resistant field of subjectivation.

Richard Strauss, Salome, Dance of the Seven Veils, gaze, freedom, veil, female body