Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé long attracted Richard Strauss as a possible operatic subject.
Wilde himself remarked that Salomé was written like a musical score, with recurring
motifs around which the action is structured. Working from the German translation by
Hedwig Lachmann and omitting certain refrains and motifs, Strauss retained Wilde’s
dramatic core. The opera Salome premiered in Dresden in 1905. The soprano cast in the
title role refused, on moral grounds, to perform the Dance of the Seven Veils and was
replaced by a dancer. This exception would soon become common practice. Censorship
proved relentless. London saw Salome only in 1910, and in an altered version. In Vienna,
Gustav Mahler unsuccessfully attempted to secure permission for its staging, and
the premiere there had to wait until 1918. New York’s Metropolitan Opera withdrew the
work after a single performance and did not return to it until 1934. Zagreb, however,
proved a more liberal environment, and Croatian audiences saw Salome as early as 1915.
This opera united a biblical subject with eroticism and violence and it demonstrated
that scandal can be the best form of promotion: within two years of its premiere,
it was performed in around fifty theatres across Europe. The libretto preserves Wilde’s
symbolist atmosphere and its tightly compressed structure, which Strauss follows in a
continuous musical flow without separate arias or ensembles, assigning the orchestra
a central role in shaping the characters. The action of this one-act opera unfolds on the
terrace of Herod’s palace. Salome, his stepdaughter, is obsessed with the imprisoned
prophet Jochanaan (John the Baptist), while Herod’s desire for Salome and Jochanaan’s
ascetic rejection of all earthly things form the central triangle of this decadent work, musically
situated at the threshold between late Romanticism and emerging Expressionism.
Stage Director Marin Blažević and conductor Ville Matvejeff previously collaborated
on Strauss’s Elektra at the Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc in Rijeka. Salome
now emerges as a natural continuation of that artistic dialogue.
