Salome 2024 Programme

DIRECTOR’S NOTE
BRUNO RAVELLA
BURNO RAVELLA
Strauss’s 1905 opera Salome uses as its libretto the
scandalous play of the same name by Oscar Wilde, first
performed nine years earlier. The transformation from page
to stage and then to opera presents many challenges, not
least managing audience expectations of a theme both
salacious and violent. I discussed with the designer Leslie
Travers this “dream to nightmare” trajectory, from the
Apollonian opening to the Dionysiac ending.
Unusually the opera opens in silence with the luminous moon
and stars. A solo clarinet enlivens the scene. This musical
motif is that of Salome and its sinuousness suggests the
slithery snake of Eden. We are in a garden.
Strauss’s libretto is shorter than Wilde’s play and, as in
the play, there is no resemblance to the biblical version in
which Salome is a pawn in the hands of her mother. Wilde
has transformed her into a young woman who discovers her
sexuality and the power that comes with it. Her act of will is to
ask for John the Baptist’s head, telling her mother and Herod:
“I don’t listen to my mother’s voice. It is for my own pleasure
that I want the head of Jochanaan on a silver platter”.
The word “pleasure” here is pivotal. Is she simply perverse?
I see her passion for Jochanan as her first experience of erotic
love and she feels she will never experience it again. As he
refuses her when alive, she will have him dead, he will then
be forever hers. The passion of this young girl is both moving
and powerful. She thinks she has understood all about love.
In her final “Liebestod”, like Isolde, she believes love can only
happen in the final surrender to death. Salome’s love is eros:
the old god of desire. Jochanaan’s love is agape, the spiritual
love of the new god for his followers.
The set takes its inspiration from a medieval cistern. It suggests
a claustrophobic space, a prison as well as a place in which the
normal strictures of the palace do not apply. It is also a place
of voyeuristic exploration. The verbs “to see”, “to watch” or “to
look at” are used extensively throughout the text. We are keen
to show how the viewer and viewed are organised in one space.
This enclosed space contains opposing energies, those of insiders
and outsiders, observer and observed, in which the audience is
privileged to enter a private space but at the same time outside
its power. When Salome meets Jochanaan for the first time we
witness the confrontation of two worlds: the Old Testament, a
world of corruption and decadence, and the New Testament in
its original purity. We have a clash of two realities, that of the mind
and that of the body. What attracts Salome to Jochanaan is his
purity and his otherness from all she has known.
The set also had to be as epic as the piece and to evolve to express
the emotions at play. For Salome, Jochanaan opens up a world of
possibilities. The claustrophobia connected with her situation turns
to liberation and a feeling of space when she meets him. She offers
herself to Jochanaan without any restraint. There is no strategy,
just total sincerity. She is as true to her nature as he is to his.
When he leaves her, she feels this as an existential abandonment.
We were keen from the outset to use water for all its associations
with the characters and the situation. In the cistern is Jochanaan,
who through baptism, had the power to cleanse people of sin.
Water is a symbol of purification in religious ceremonies. But it
can also indicate the id, or what lies beneath, and is associated
with the female element. An opera which starts with the moon,
always associated with female power, ends with a grotesque
display of that power.
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