Salome with the head of John the Baptist - an Aubrey Beardsley print used to illustrate Oscar Wilde's play. (Large gif - 17K)
After more than half a century out in the cold, German opera is set to make a dramatic comeback to the Mariinsky stage with the premiere of Strauss's "Salome" on Friday, June 30.
This tale of salacious and macabre passion has not been staged in St Petersburg since the 1920s. Then it was seen 40 times over seven seasons, between 1924 and 1929, under the Mariinsky's then-conductor Vladimir Dranishnikov. The opera proved a hit, with Valentina Pavlovskaya taking the lead as Salome.
And this time around it should have every chance of succeeding. After all, it is to be conducted by St Petersburg's finest conductor, Valery Gergiyev, and is to be masterminded by New York producer Julie Taymor in conjunction with designer Georgy Tsipin, also from the US.
Taymor is famous for her performance of the opera-oratoria "Tsar Edip" by Igor Stravinsky, while Russian emigre Tsipin has had much experience designing theater performances in the West.
Last week the "Salome" troupe performed the opera in Germany, its birthplace, at the well-known Oberammergau festival.
The Mariinsky Theater's Literature Department head, Marina Malkiel, said, "We once had a conductor here called Vladimir Dranishnikov, who throughout the 1920s and 1930s was interested in modern and foreign music. It was under him that the Mariinsky performed Alban Berg's `Wozzek' and Franz Schreiker's opera `The Far Sound.'
"It was also under his baton that the theater performed `Salome' for the first time," she said.
"The Kirov Opera has had no Strauss in its repertoire since then, but now a new tendency towards non-classical modern opera is making itself felt, so it's very interesting for us," she added. During the late 1930s Stalin's grip on Russia's artistic life took hold. and Dranishnikov's foreign interests were frowned upon among certain circles. He was removed, partly for political reasons, and sent to the Kiev Opera House.
During the war, and for some time after, German music by Wagner and Strauss and others was banned, and everything German was unpopular.
"Salome" takes its central idea from the biblical New Testament story in which King Herod's daughter-in-law convinces the king to promise her anything if he will dance for him. When she finished her dance she asked for John the Baptist's head on a silver platter.
As an opera, "Salome" deals with female obsessions of a disordered, twisted kind, with violent climaxes involving gruesome deaths and impassioned dancing mixed with eroticism and corruption.
The libretto was also based on Oscar Wilde's macabre play "Salome" (1891), which was written in French, and designed, as he said, to make his audience shudder by its "portrayal of unnatural passion." The play outraged society on both sides of the Atlantic and had great trouble getting past the censors. It was finally published in 1893 and an English translation appeared in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley's celebrated illustrations. Like much of Wilde's work, "Salome" exposes a secret sin or indiscretion, and disgrace is the main theme.
But it was left to Richard Strauss, the celebrated German Romantic composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to put the story idea to music, which he began in 1904.
Germany has always had an appetite for Oscar Wilde's plays and so there was nothing unusual in Strauss' decision to use Wilde's material. Even today Wilde's plays are more often performed in Germany than they are in England. "Salome" was, if not the best, undoubtedly his most daring play, and Strauss had even read Hedwig Lachmann's 1902 translation many years before the play was shown in London.
In fact, Strauss was already thinking about it as the subject of his third opera when he saw it early in 1903 at Max Reinhardt's Kleines Theater in Berlin.
Strauss found two-thirds of the play suitable as a libretto, and it is amusing that while he was composing his incendiary "Salome," later that year he was also completing a piece about the everyday joys of moral family life!
"Salome" was considered Strauss' first operatic success when it opened in Dresden in 1905. Like the play 10 years before, "Salome" the opera was regarded as blasphemous and scandalous and ran into censorship problems. Despite that, it was given at 50 opera houses over the following two years.
The Dresden production was a sensation, even though it had been preceded by only one month of difficult and stormy rehearsals. First, Marie Wittich, the original choice for the role of Salome, went on strike with the words, "I won't do it; I'm a decent woman."
Then the orchestra got disgruntled after Strauss told his henpecked musicians that it would be easier and more to his taste if they played everything but the few grand climaxes lightly, as if they were fairy music by Mendelssohn.
"Gentlemen, there are no difficulties or problems. This opera is a scherzo (musical joke) with a fatal conclusion!" he told them.
Although Strauss did not have his ideal Salome, a dancer employed for the Seven Veils scene later admitted that the opera was a "success in spite of Auntie Wittich," and the audience demanded 38 curtain calls.
This week's premiere performance of "Salome" will throw the spotlight on accomplished opera singer Lubov Kazarnovskaya, who takes the lead role as Salome. She now lives in New York and regularly takes the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House.
She'll be following in the footsteps of the most famous Salome, Christel Goltz, who was the dominant Salome worldwide for 12 years in the 1950s and 1960s. A hard act to follow, it will be interesting to see if Kazarnovskaya can interpret the girlish timbre required for "Salome" and still throw out those notes with enough shot to pierce the highest rises in the orchestral brocade.
And conductor Gergiyev has the unenviable task of creating an ongoing, doom-laden, haunted atmosphere while at the same time including Mendelssohn's lighter texture and clarity which was used by Strauss in his compositions.
Marina Malkiel said, "The whole project is very exciting because we're seeing this here virtually for the first time. It's not only important for the Kirov but for the city and the Russian public. It's a great opportunity -- after all, they have not heard Strauss for such a long time. We hope Friday's production of "Salome" will revive and continue the Strauss tradition, which was once so strong here in St Petersburg but was cast aside."