Salome

Richard Strauss

Music drama in one act
Libretto: Richard Strauss after Oscar Wilde
World premiere: 9 December 1905, Semperoper, Dresden
Premiere of this production: 23 October, National Theatre, Prague
Premiere at the Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera: 22 March 2016
Co-production: National Theatre, Prague

In the original German with Polish surtitles.

Salome, alongside Elektra, is considered to be one of the most powerful of Richard Strauss’s works. This completely modern staging explores the hidden family relations between a stepfather (Herod), his stepdaughter (Salome) and her powerlusting mother (Herodias). This family drama is at the same time a tragedy of faith, despair, fear and helplessness, in which the title character plays her game with the prophet Jochanaan, the elusive object of her obsessive desire — or perhaps just a voice, a hallucination, a phantasm imposing a powerful metaphysical anxiety upon reality?

The game takes place also between Salome and Herod, her perverse stepfather, living in constant fear of death and that which is final. The heroine, through her desire to capture the elusive, makes an absurd request: she wants the head of the prophet on a silver platter. In the staging this biblical drama is played out simultaneously in a wealthy bourgeois world and in a space between reality and fantasy.

The modern fragmentary narrative — a trademark of Mariusz Treliński’s style — forms a series of subtle images and visions of a world only seemingly stable, over which hangs the threat visible in the first signs portending tragedy.

Cast

Credits

Orchestra of the Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera
Dancers and mimes

Sponsors

  • Patron of Teatr Wielki - Polish National Opera

  • Partners of Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera

  • Media patrons of the premiere

  • Media patrons of Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera

  • Co-organisers of the cocktail reception

  • Time is measured by