Richard Strauss: Salome
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/oq/kbr018
ISSN1476-2870
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
ResumoStaging Richard Strauss's Salome means visualizing a world whose externalities are never objectively defined and whose characters cannot agree on what they see. The text presents its audience not with a concrete reality but a shifting mosaic of perceptions and impressions.1 But portraying an unstable visual field in a visual art such as stage production is a formidable challenge, and directors have tended to dodge these issues. Most often they resort to salaciousness, giving us a group of diseased, often drunken neurotics and an atmosphere tinged with exoticism that frequently slips into camp (even before reaching the ten-minute striptease and the severed head).2 At the 2011 Salzburger Osterfestspiele, Stefan Herheim's production featured no shortage of debauchery, but it offered new perspectives as well.3 The Norwegian director, now forty-one, first rose to prominence with his lurid and cryptic deconstruction of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the 2003 Salzburger Festspiele (from which the Osterfestspiele is independent, though they use the same performance venues).4 If that production generated shock and noisy controversy, Herheim's subsequent work has been recognized for an intellectual ambition and the use of dazzling stagecraft to convey multiple narrative threads, explore psychological and historical themes, and comment on the work's reception history. His widely acclaimed 2008 Bayreuth Parsifal traced the history of the Wagner-Festspiele along with modern German history itself, while his 2009 production of Der Rosenkavalier in Stuttgart staged a Nietzschean dialectic between a Dionysian Ochs and an Apollonian Octavian (featuring the French Revolution at the end of act 2 and a wandering ostrich representing Strauss himself). He returned to Salzburg with Salome as one of the most acclaimed and closely watched opera directors working today. Yet only the early Entführung is available on DVD, and he remains little known outside continental Europe and Wagner circles.5
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