Salome evokes such fascination that the character’s saga has left its mark on humankind’s cultural history for two thousand years. She first appears in the Bible. As the centuries pass, ever-new layers of interpretation have been added to the story of this young woman, who performs an erotic dance in front of her stepfather, Herod, and in return has the severed head of John the Baptist brought to her. The combination of sinful eroticism and cruel, bloody act, framed as it is by exotic opulence, has proven irresistible to artists across time. At the close of the 19th century, Salome became a symbolic figure for the dangerous power of female sexuality. Poet Oscar Wilde wrote a scandalous fin-de-siècle drama that showed Salome as a strong, lustful woman, with the decadence of a doomed world blossoming around her in dazzling colors. In 1905, Richard Strauss turned that play into a gripping one-act opera, a move that brought him his first international success. Today, Salome remains of the most frequently performed operas in the repertoire. This production by Andreas Homoki, which premiered last season, presents the opera in an abstract setting dominated by two rotating crescents. The action develops entirely from the suggestive, relational tension of the characters in empty space. In Homoki's interpretation, Salome is a woman hungry for experience, tired of the confinement and invasiveness of the society into which she was born. She meets the prophet Jochanaan, who criticizes those very conditions she wants to break out of. Here, Jochanaan is not a Christian proclaimer of salvation in a harem robe, but a man wired with charisma and strong, masculine powers of seduction, who in turn cannot resist Salome’s erotically charged attraction. The fatal desire, which leads to a cruel act of slaughter, is mutual.

Russian soprano Elena Stikhina and powerful Lithuanian bass-baritone Kostas Smoriginas return as Salome and Jochanaan; their mesmerizing combination of vocal energy and youthful vigor made this Salome production a wild success at the premiere.

Tickets: https://www.zurichticket.ch/ohz.webshop/webticket/seatmap?eventId=11710