SALOME Comes To Opera Zurich Beginning August 29th

SALOME will begin performances as part of the new season at Opera Zurich beginning 29 August 2021. The production is performed in German with German and English subtitles.

The Galilean Princess Salome is one of the mythical female figures in Western cultural history. Her erotic dance in front of her stepfather Herod is already mentioned in the gospels of the Bible, for whom she has the severed head of John the Baptist brought on a bowl in return. Salome has inspired poets and visual artists to create works across all epochs - as a figure who releases fantasies of unbounded sensuality, feminine demonia, lust for violence and fairytale exoticism.

At the end of the 19th century, the Irish poet Oscar Wilde wrote a scandal-ridden play about Salome, forbidden in England, which illuminates Salome's desires and states of mind in a powerful language and shows them as strong, self-determined acting woman and counter-figure to the prudish Victorian society. At Wilde's, Salome kisses the prophet's severed head with relish.

Richard Strauss, on the other hand, turned Wilde's drama into a gripping one-act opera, which premiered in 1905 with resounding success and is still one of the most popular works in the operatic repertoire today.

The large-format orchestrated score moves stylistically on the threshold to musical modernity and develops an intoxicating undertow from the first bar on. It provides dazzling psychograms of the characters and summarizes their instinctual energies in tones. That is what makes the play so attractive for every director.

Salome will be in Zurichdirected by Andreas Homoki, who has a great weakness for Richard Strauss' operas. He not only focuses on the psychological aspects of the subject, but also on the social: the appearance of the prophet Jochanaan in his staging also marks the dawn of a new era that is destroying the old power structures. The cast brings new voices to the stage of the opera house: the promising Russian Elena Stikhina from the ensemble of the St. Petersburg Mariinsky Theater is our Salome. The Lithuanian bass-baritone Kostas Smoriginas is also making his Zurich house debut in the role of Jochanaan. With the Australian Simone Young, a conductor with a great international reputation returns to the Zurich Opera House in Richard Strauss' repertoire.

For tickets visit https://www.opernhaus.ch/spielplan/kalendarium/salome-769/2021-2022/

To post a comment, you must register and login.