CNorthernIrelandOpera Lniopera NIOPERA.COM Salome Programme.indd 1 02/02/2015 13:11 Salome Programme.indd 2 02/02/2015 13:11 Chairman’s Welcome We are delighted to welcome you to our new our commitment to nurturing young local talent production of Salome here at the Grand Opera wherever possible, giving them the opportunity House, in partnership with the Ulster Orchestra. to perform alongside some of the finest singers This is a landmark production in many ways working today. - our first production of an opera by Richard Strauss, the first ever home-grown Northern Irish It has been a successful few months for Northern production of Salome, as well as the first time we Ireland Opera. Our acclaimed production of The believe this great opera has been staged at all Turn of the Screw, generously supported by the in Northern Ireland. This production also reflects British Council, performed to packed houses and our continuing determination to stage ambitious rave reviews at Novaya Opera in Moscow in large-scale works from across the repertoire, August, while our production of The Magic Flute especially those which have special drama and was a resounding sell-out success across the immediacy. Strauss’s controversial opera has country. Our co-production with Welsh National been popular ever since it was composed over a Opera of Verdi’s Macbeth from 2014 has also hundred years ago, and its challenging content recently been nominated for the Best Opera continues to shock and enthrall in equal measure. Production award by the Irish Times Theatre Awards, the fourth consecutive year we have As always, we are pleased to welcome a been nominated for the same award. strong contingent of Northern Irish and Irish singers for this production. Belfast-born soprano However, it is well-known that the arts scene Giselle Allen requires no introduction after her in Northern Ireland is going through troubling heroic performances as our award-winning economic times. The recent difficulties of our Tosca in 2011, as Miss Jessel in The Turn of longstanding and most important collaborator, the Screw in 2012, and as Senta in The Flying the Ulster Orchestra, are well-documented Dutchman in 2013. We are thrilled to have and we are delighted that there is a renewed someone who has been called ‘one of the optimism regarding its future. Our continuing finest singing actresses of her generation’ sing partnership with the Orchestra is a great the role of Salome for the first time in her home example of how collaborations between arts city. Alongside her, and giving their Northern organisations can offer both first-class artistic Ireland Opera debut performances, are Michael quality and value for the taxpayer. Nevertheless, Colvin (born in Ballymena and now based in we rely on your continued enthusiasm for our Canada) as Herod, and Carolyn Dobbin (from project of bringing great home-grown opera to Carrickfergus) as the Page, as well as renowned Northern Ireland. Please continue to come and baritone Robert Hayward as Jokanaan and the see our productions, tell people about them, and exciting English mezzo soprano Heather Shipp consider joining our Friends scheme or offering as Herodias. They are joined by Australian financial support either through individual giving tenor Adrian Dwyer (Steersman in The Flying or via your business’s corporate philanthropy Dutchman) as Narraboth and Northern Ireland programme. Opera stalwart Brendan Collins (Tosca, Orpheus Finally, we would like to especially thank the in the Underworld, The Magic Flute) as 1st Arts Council of Northern Ireland for its continued Nazarene. We are also delighted to give role generous and invaluable support, the Ulster debuts to four Irish singers who have previously Orchestra, and the Grand Opera House for excelled in our chorus: Conor Breen (a current hosting us in Frank Matcham’s glorious theatre. singer on our increasingly successful Young Artist Programme), Rory Musgrave, David Lynn, and Roy Bailie Cormac Lawlor. Thus we continue to demonstrate Chairman, Northern Ireland Opera CULTURAL PARTNER OF NI OPERA Salome Programme.indd 3 02/02/2015 13:11 Salome Programme.indd 4 02/02/2015 13:11 Director’s Notes Salome was premiered in Dresden in December responded to this story (and its author) with 1905, and was the first operatic hit for the 41 such white-hot intensity in one of the most year old Richard Strauss. Before long, the opera daring scores ever composed. But for Strauss, had been performed all over the world and set too, the story had resonance. As for Kafka Strauss on the path to both financial security and and for Mozart, a complex relationship with operatic fame. The Graz premiere saw Mahler, a domineering father was a crucial aspect of Berg and Puccini in the audience, as well as – Strauss’s early life. A renowned but ill-tempered the dictator later claimed – Adolf Hitler on a horn player who played for Wagner but hated cheap student standby. The opera also launched his music, Franz Strauss decried the chromatic, ‘Salomania’ – a craze of female ‘interpreters’ erotic, and progressive direction his son’s vying to perform the Dance of the Seven music took. Before he died, he looked through Veils. With success, however, came notoriety. the score of Salome and described its radical Reactionaries and prudes reviled the undeniably sonorities and ingenious motivic complexity sensational content that touched on sexual as ‘like having a swarm of insects crawl round awakening, incest, murder and necrophilia, inside ones clothes’. Not surprisingly, then, all in the sanctified environs of a Bible story. the French horn had special significance in The German Kaiser, the daughter of banker Strauss’s music, and in Salome it is particularly JP Morgan, and the British Lord Chancellor all associated with Jokanaan, whose censorious weighed in with interventions that varied from rants and bombastic religiosity Strauss loathed. the crass to the comical. Strauss had clearly hit If here Strauss negotiated with the disapproving a nerve. figure of his own father, in Salome Strauss could perhaps see something of his mother. An Salome’s origins should make this no surprise. unstable woman with musical gifts, Josephine The story had provoked fascination from Strauss spent most of the period from 1894 medieval cathedral craftsmen to painters such as to 1909 in mental asylums. And in his opera Caravaggio and Klimt. But it was Oscar Wilde singer wife Pauline, Strauss found yet another – lifting material from Flaubert and injecting it woman who, like Salome, was noted both for with arch fin de siècle symbolism – who gave the her acerbic volatility and her unique talent for Salome story true dramatic shape. With delicious creative self-expression. irony, he also gave voyeurism (in the context of invariably male artistic responses to the Once Strauss had exorcised his demons with this figure of Salome down the ages) a central role. and his next opera, Elektra, his music shed much When Wilde wrote the play in 1891, he was of its violent energy and became increasingly himself living an illicit life; torn between married detached from the musical avant garde – while domesticity and his own powerful desires; his operas veered towards more respectable between his idealised ‘Grecian’ appreciation for subject matter. For Strauss, though, Salome was the male form and his predilection for adolescent always to be a pivotal and personal opera. It male prostitutes. Aubrey Beardsley, in his is also surely one of the most important operas famous engravings of Wilde’s play, portrayed of the twentieth century, opening up new paths the author as both Herod and the Moon, drily both for the last symphonies of Mahler and for referencing the play’s autobiographical impulses Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu. For all its continued and skewering its author’s uneasy mix of aloof notoriety, therefore, Salome is an opera which aestheticism and carnal tumescence. Too much will forever outlive the extraordinary background for a contemporary audience to stomach, noise it generated when it was written. Salome was banned, and Wilde himself never saw his play – which was first performed while he was in prison for ‘acts of gross indecency’. Oliver Mears, Artistic Director It seems odd that Strauss, who made a fetish of his bourgeois domesticity, should have 5 Salome Programme.indd 5 02/02/2015 13:11 Richard Strauss (1864 - 1949) During his lifetime, Richard Strauss achieved being regarded as one of the leading lights in mastery of three musical genres: orchestral tone- contemporary orchestral music, and led von poems, lieder, opera (of which he composed Bülow to dub him ‘Richard the Third’ (since he 15). He was also one of the great conductors believed that, after Wagner, there could be no of his day, not only promoting his own works ‘Richard the Second’.) but championing those by Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven and many others. Strauss moved to the Weimar Court Opera in 1889, where his adventurous choices of Born on the 11th June 1864, Strauss’s childhood, repertoire brought him widespread publicity. unlike other composers of his time, was a During his time at Weimar, Strauss conducted comfortable one; his father was the principal the premiere of his own first opera Guntram horn-player in the Bavarian Court Opera (1894). The principal soprano role was sung by orchestra, his mother was a member of a wealthy Pauline de Ahna, a pupil of Strauss’s for several brewing family, and he grew up in a household years; they married in September 1894. A fine devoted to music. He composed copiously interpreter of his lieder, de Ahna’s influence and from the age of five, and by the age of 16 he example undoubtedly led to Strauss’s special had heard his first symphony performed by his sympathy for the female voice, for which he father’s orchestra.