Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus
Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus
Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus
Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus
Dear colleagues,
Now the festival season with particularly good productions is over. After I have reviewed several of them (see my homepage below) I looked - as every year - into the season programmes of major companies in Europe to consider going there as an opera lover and critic.
When I saw the 2018/19 programme of the Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus in Minsk, I was surprised and very happy to see “Salome” of Richard Strauss on your 2018/19 programme. I have not come across many other productions of “Salome” in Eastern Europe, if at all! This major oeuvre of R. Strauss of 1905 just saw a flabbergasting production of the Salzburg Festival by director Romeo Castellucci. I still will review it in all relevant detail. Castellucci put the plot in a totally new dramaturgic light and made connoisseurs of this opera extremely impressed and positively astonished. All performances were sold out with opera goers in front of the Felsenreitschule begging for tickets in vain.
Let us recall: Morten Kristiansen writes rightly in an essay in the playbill of the Salzburg production that a critic after the first ever performance on December 19th, 1905 had called this opera “the birth of musical modernism”. When “Salome” was first performed in the relatively small city of Graz in Austria on 16th May, 1906, composers like Gustav Mahler, Giacomo Puccini, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Alexander von Zemlinsky travelled there to see this opera. Strauss received for this masterpiece a fee of 60,000 marks and built his villa in Garmisch with this money.
“Salome” is currently the most performed Strauss opera with about 100 annual performances and is thus staged worldwide every two or three days during a typical season.
We should also see the role of “Salome” in the wider context of the situation of opera in Europe after the death of Richard Wagner in 1883. His influence in the years thereafter was still so strong that new operas were either composed imitating him, or avoid opera altogether. As we can learn from M. Kristiansen, between “Parsifal” in 1882 and “Salome” in 1905 only one German opera remained in the repertory to date “Hänsel und Gretel” of Engelbert Humperdinck - actually premiered by R. Strauss in 1893. With “Salome” a new era of opera in Europa started after the hegemony of R. Wagner till 1883.
It is, therefore, a bold and adequate decision of the Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus to take up “Salome” in their 2018/19 theatrical season and thus add the representative oeuvre of an important new chapter of opera at the beginning of the 20th century to the company’ s repertory. Congratulations!
With best regards,
Klaus Billand
Music critic
www.klaus-billand.com
