Mel Bonis “Salome” from “Trois femmes de légendes
Florent Schmitt “La Tragédie de Salomé
Richard Strauss “Dance of the seven veils” from “Salome
Igor Stravinsky “Le sacre du printemps”
Conductor: Andreas Hotz
With: Ladies Choir of the Theater Osnabrück
The premiere of the opera Salome by Richard Strauss in Dresden in 1905 turned into a real scandal. For years afterwards
the piece about the desires of the princess of the same name was considered unperformable. Among other things, audiences and critics took offense at the dance of the seven veils, which Salome performs scantily clad for her stepfather. In the meantime, Salome has become one of the modern classics and it is impossible to imagine the repertoire without it. The figure of Salome forms the starting point for this concert. Strauss was not the only one to deal with the Salome theme. The composer Mel Bonis asserted herself in Parisian musical life around 1900 against much patriarchal opposition and became one of the first full-time female composers. Her fascination with strong female figures from literature is evidenced by her Trois femmes de légende, a series in which, in addition to Ophelia and Cleopatra, she also sets Salome to music.
Also from France is Florent Schmitt, an individualist whose music oscillates between Romanticism and Impressionism. His ballet La Tragédie de Salomé was written shortly after Strauss’s opera and has strong tonal parallels to it. Schmitt later extracted an orchestral suite from the ballet.
April 6, 2021, marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Igor Stravinsky, whose Le sacre du printemps also centers on a woman. Like Salome, she is killed at the end of the story ballet, but under completely different circumstances than Salome. The German title “Das Frühlingsopfer” already gives it away: a virgin is sacrificed to the gods in pagan times. The archaic ritual is vividly set to music by Stravinsky, whose rhythmic complexity is still hard to resist today.