Looking at blog stats earlier this morning, I noticed that my post about the closing scene of Richard Strauss’s Salome, Kiss of Death, still gets a ton of hits, a month after it first went up. For some reason, in just the past few days it’s gone way out ahead of entries about Neda Soltan and the singing New York City bus driver, both of which have also been extremely popular recently.
Quite a few people ended up here by Googling the artist Aubrey Beardsley, whose 1893 print of Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist is positioned above the opening paragraph of the post. But the title of Beardsley’s print–”The Climax”–was another common search engine term. I hope the folks who used that weren’t too disappointed with the results.
