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Organization

Singer

Tenor

John Daszak

Herod

Mezzo-soprano

Anna Maria Chiuri

Herodias

Soprano

Asmik Grigorian

Salome

Baritone

Gábor Bretz

John the Baptist

Julian Prégardien

Narraboth

Avery Amereau

A Page of Herodias

Matthäus Schmidlechner

First Jew

Mathias Frey

Second Jew

Patrick Vogel

Third Jew

Jörg Schneider

Fourth Jew

Bass

David Steffens

Fifth Jew

Tilmann Rönnebeck

First Nazarene

Paweł Trojak

Second Nazarene

Neven Crnić

A Cappadocian

Henning von Schulman

First soldier

Dashon Burton

Second soldier

Conductor

Franz Welser-Möst

Stage director

Romeo Castellucci

Set designer

Alessio Valmori

Costume designer

Lighting designer

Marco Giusti

Choreographer

Cindy Van Acker

Dramaturge

Piersandra Di Matteo

Salzburger Festspiele

Orchestra

Wiener Philharmoniker

Ġermaniż

Salzburg

Austria

Felsenreitschule

"But when Herod's birthday was being celebrated, Herodias' daughter danced before the guests. And she pleased Herod so much that he swore to give her anything she wanted. At her mother's urging she said, "Let me bring the head of John the Baptist on a bowl." The event that led to the beheading of John the Baptist is told in brief sentences in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. The stepdaughter of the Galilean tetrarch Herod is still nameless here, and her enormous demand does not arise from her own will, but from that of her mother Herodias, who hates the uncomfortable prophet. However, what Salome (her name was first handed down from the fifth century) will make into a myth has been clearly named: putting oneself on display in the dance, at the same time the fascination of the viewer and the power that what is observed exercises over him. It seems as if artists, especially painters, have for centuries felt the soberness of the biblical description as a never-ending stimulus to give the story sensual concreteness and to embellish it in the most dazzling colors.

Salome experienced a literary boom in late 19th-century France: as a femme fatale and the epitome of perverted lust. The climax is Oscar Wilde's fin-de-siècle tragedy Salomé, written in French. Extending the original constellation of gazes, Wilde weaves a whole web of obsessive and unrequited gazes between the figures, as an expression or source of desire. Can one evade the gaze, as Jochanaan believes, who wants to forbid Salome to look at him “with her golden eyes under the gleaming lids”? Can the look be denied in order to trust only the word? Wilde's tragedy unfolds between the poles of eye and ear, physicality and spirituality, sound and word, looking and recognizing.
When Richard Strauss began to set an abridged German translation of the scandal-ridden piece to music in 1903, he saw himself faced with the challenge of conveying these contrasts in the medium of music – or even putting them into perspective. As a composer, after the symphonic poems with Salome, Strauss now also found his own language in the field of opera: the hitherto unimagined richness of timbre is just one of its unmistakable characteristics.

Italian director Romeo Castellucci, a profound explorer of the power of seeing, understood also as what we are seen by, will explore the hidden aspects of this "tragedy of the gaze". An artist with an extraordinary ability to create images that pulsate with the knowledge of the unconscious, he approaches Salome using the theatrical scene as a starting point. The impression of suffocation is suggested by an intervention in the classic image of the Felsenreitschule with its arcades hewn out of the rock of the Mönchsberg. It could be seen as an objective correlate to the sense of oppression that surrounds the protagonist on all sides and that permeates the music and the chasing of words in their repetitions throughout the libretto.

The staging conceived for Salzburg makes the figure of Salome the focal point, transforming her into the flame that enlivens everything present and that blazes up in the dance of the seven veils and consumes itself. The dance is the climax, a manifestation of strength and a final twitch that touches the viewer.

In a scenic image in which the sublime coexists with the ordinary, Castellucci's direction focuses less on the longing for the head trophy of Jochanaan than on cutting it off, cutting it away; not the object of desire, which is always already lost, but the touching loneliness a female figure in which we take part. And here the act of looking falls through its final suppression into the abyss of desire.
Christian Arseni, Piersandra DiMatteo

Salome Strauss,R

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Salome 2018 · Trailer

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