Salome

Growing up in an environment that has no moderation or inhibitions, the eccentric Princess Salome is fascinated by the otherness of the ascetic prophet Jochanaan, whom her mother Herodias and her abusive stepfather Herod hold captive. When Jochanaan brusquely rejects Salome's advances, she develops a real obsession and uses her stepfather's lust to get her way.

Since Herod has promised to grant Salome every wish for the erotic “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she now demands Jochanaan's head on a silver platter in return. In frantic delusion, she kisses his lifeless lips and thus fulfills her sensual desire — until Herod gives the order to kill Salome. Varying between a delicate psychogram and the portrayal of intoxicating, unbridled lust, Richard Strauss achieved his first overwhelming success as an opera composer in 1905 with his adaptation of Oscar Wilde's scandalously shocking décadence drama. In provocatively ecstatic sound visions, he pours the hot-charged emotional surges and deep emotional abysses of his eccentric title heroine into iridescent, sometimes harsh music that, with the drastic sound power of the huge orchestral apparatus, not only the emotional decline and seduction of Salome, but also her other emotional cold and Jochanaan's pathetic charges on exciting Knows how to capture a disturbing way.