Salomé by Richard Strauss

Salomé

Opera by Richard Strauss

The libretto is Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of the 1891 French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde, edited by the composer.
First performed at the Königliches Opernhaus in Dresden on 9 December 1905
Last time at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in 2008-2009

New production
Sung in German with French and English surtitles
Duration: approx. 1h45 without intermission*

Cast

Musical Director Jukka-Pekka Saraste
Stage Director Kornél Mundruczó
Scenographer and Costumes designer Monika Pormale
Lighting Designer Felice Ross
Dramaturgy Kata Wéber

Salome, dauchter of Herodias Olesya Golovneva
Jochanaan Gábor Bretz
Herodes, Tetrarch of Judaea and Perea John Daszak
Herodias, Herodes wife Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Narraboth Matthew Newlin
The Page of Herodias Ena Pongrac
First soldat Mark Kurmanbayev
Second soldat Nicolai Elsberg
First Jew Michael J. Scott
Second Jew Alexander Kravets
Third Jew Vincent Ordonneau
Fourth Jew Emanuel Tomljenović
Fifth Jew Mark Kurmanbayev
Frist Nazarene Nicolai Elsberg
Second Nazarene Rémi Garin

Orchestre de la Suisse Romande

About

The sultry heroine Salomé is one of the most provocative figures in the history of art and opera. Her troubling sensuality seduces her father-in-law Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, into yielding to her whim for an appalling sacrifice: the head of the prophet John the Baptist. This biblical episode’s blend of sexual and macabre desires has long forged a dark legend around the character. In 1904, Richard Strauss took on the play Oscar Wilde had dedicated to it a few years earlier, which is known for two particularly shocking moments: the Dance of the Seven Veils, over which the performer’s body is stripped naked, and the diabolical kiss placed on the mouth of the severed head. When the opera premiered in Dresden in 1905, these two scenes ensured scandal. To this, Richard Strauss’s music adds its own bold expressiveness, further enriched by an orchestral shimmer that’s sometimes orientalist, sometimes orgiastic. With its single, taut-as-a-bow act, Salomé marks an important milestone in the composer’s operatic career. He would soon reprise this ancient, violent vein with Elektra (1909).

Hungarian theatre and film director Kornél Mundruczó here continues his partnership with the Grand Théâtre, after The Makropoulos Affair (2020), Peter Eötvös’s Sleepless (2022) and Christian Jost’s Journey to Hope (2023). In collaboration with Monika Pormale, designing sets and costumes, he sheds a contemporary light on Salomé that psychoanalysis wouldn’t disown. In lieu of the debauchery and power of a Galilean palace, the director will set the characters in the perverted luxury of a penthouse overlooking the skyline of an opulent Babylon. Herod’s family will be torn apart around its prey, a Jokanaan from ‘below’ whose very existence threatens their world view. All crowned with a touch of Buñuelian surrealism, via quirkily phantasmagoric tableaux.

Under the baton of Jukka-Pekka Saraste, the great Finnish conductor heard too seldom in opera, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande will be able to deploy the full force of Richard Strauss’s score. Possessing both the necessary power and Elfengesang fragility Strauss envisaged for the role, Olesya Golovneva will lend her rich timbre and upper-register transparency to Salomé. Opposite her is Gábor Bretz, who previously performed a masterful Jokanaan in Salzburg in 2018, in Roméo Castellucci’s production. Also featuring is Tanja Ariane Baumgartner as Herodias – a new excessive and monstrous mother figure, after her Clytemnestra in Elektra (2022).