Opera in one act
Text: Hedwig Lachmann by Oscar Wilde

Musical direction: Philippe Jordan
Stage direction: Cyrill Teste

In Salome, composer Strauss confronts a princess harassed by her stepfather with a captive prophet who recognizes in her not the desirable young woman but the traumatized child. When the prophet Jochanaan, desired by Salome, rejects the young princess, however, she prevails upon her stepfather Herod to behead him.

The one-hundred-minute one-act play glows like a feverish frenzy; the composer courageously exploded both the sound and moral concepts of his time. To this day, the music captivates the listener with its enormous imagery, highly charged emotionality and sharp, sometimes garish characterisation. Strauss not only portrays the decadent, sultry atmosphere of the royal court, which has Salome's childhood on its conscience, with a tremendous orchestral artistry, but also shows a differentiated fanning out of the external and internal psychological events in a captivating way.

In his direction of Salome, Cyril Teste wants to make Salome's energy and heartbeat tangible, to make her traumas real and to fundamentally tell the family history of a powerful dynasty whose inner mechanisms must produce what is at the end: Destruction.