On February 14, 1895, 22-year-old Maud Allan left San Francisco to study piano in Berlin. As she recalled some three years later, her parting words to her brother Theo, aged 24 and in his last year of medical studies, were, "Be a good boy and be sure to graduate." Theo never graduated and certainly was not a good boy. Within two months of his sister's departure, he was arrested and after a tumultuous trial and countless appeals he was executed for murder on January 7, 1898.
She had a host of admiring friends enchanted by her sparkling mind, her wide range of interests, her charm, and her "elusive graciousness - it wasn't so much beauty as a sort of mysterious and sympathetic flow" - as the last of her lovers remembered her some 30 years after her death. These ingratiating attributes masked a secretive, manipulative and cunning individual unable to forget her brother's tragedy, or forgive society for its role in his fate.
Upon her arrival in Berlin the San Francisco colony of medical and music students welcomed her with open arms; but within two months, as news of the murder charges against her brother spread, she intentionally avoided that colony. Her musical talent soon enough attracted Joseph Joachim, Director of the Hochschule fur Musik, Artur Rubinstein, her junior by several years, and later, Ferruccio Busoni, who became somewhat more than an ardent admirer.
Her brother faced public execution, she herself was living in poverty and, given her mental health, she had been advised to withdraw from the Hochschule for the year. Thus, by putting her heart and soul into the "Lebensmude" presentation she had, unknown to her Pension audience and quite possibly to herself, given vent to her profound despair.
While ultimately she sought, and in her 'classical' dances achieved, a certain release in her musical interpretations - a fusion of music and movement - she still remained chained to her brother's disgrace. Any hope of freeing herself of those chains was only possible by a violent act of rebellion - as ultimately demonstrated a decade later in the costume, poses, sexual overtones, perceived nudity and even the story line of The Vision of Salome.
She failed to free herself from those chains, but her attempt to do so had its material rewards, thanks to the Vision 's startling impact on London's audiences in 1908/09. The impact was startling for a very simple reason. The unfamiliarity of her musical interpretations, together with the multi-level daring of The Vision of Salome, was a phenomenon for which Edwardian London, so complacently determined to explore life and yet still bound by a code of respectability, was totally unprepared. Maud Allan directly challenged Edwardian London.
This made her into a sexual icon for a large segment of the public. She became internationally known as "The Salome Dancer," an epithet that she detested, all the more because of its erotic overtones. But the fact was that the admirers of the Salome Dancer forgot, ignored or failed to appreciate her creative and intellectual originality and the artistic sensibility honed by years of musical study that served as the basic components of her unique form of self-expression.
But it was as a musician that Maud Allan craved recognition. Dancing was far from an end in itself; which is why it was accurately said that "she did not dance to music; she danced music." This is why her place in dance history has yet to be determined rather than remaining misunderstood or dismissed as irrelevant.
In an attempt to dispel her notoriety she deliberately projected the public persona of a respectable and respected lady, fit both to grace the highest ranks of society or to identify with the hopes and dreams of the common people, all the while determined to keep her personal life very private. The projection was apparently successful - until it was tested.
That test came in London in June 1918, when she attempted to sue Noel Pemberton Billing, Member of Parliament, for personally libelling her as a "lewd, unchaste and immoral woman." Her lesbianism was disclosed. Overnight, the mask of respectability which had become so much a part of herself that even she was unable to differentiate between it and her true self, was destroyed.
