[Assassins]

Strauss - Salome - Stratas, Weikl, Varnay, Beier - Wiener Philarmoniker - Karl Bohm


Год выпуска: 2007
Жанр: Opera
Продолжительность: 101'

Режиссер: Gotz Friedrich

В ролях:
Herodes - Hans Beirer
Herodias - Astrid Varnay
Salome - Teresa Stratas
Jochanaan - Bernd Weikl
Narraboth - Wieslaw Ochman
Page - Hanna Schwarz

Доп. информация:

Richard Strauss (1864 - 1949)

Salome, Op.54

Scene 1

1. "Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute Nacht!" [3:57]
Wieslaw Ochman, Reinhold Möser, Hanna Schwarz, Wolfgang Probst, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

2. "Nach mir wird Einer kommen" [2:34]
Bernd Weikl, Reinhold Möser, Wolfgang Probst, Nikolaus Hillebrandt, Hanna Schwarz, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

Scene 2

3. "Ich will nicht bleiben" [3:38]
Teresa Stratas, Hanna Schwarz, Reinhold Möser, Bernd Weikl, Wieslaw Ochman, Wolfgang Probst, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

4. "Denn aus dem Samen der Schlange" [1:52]
Teresa Stratas, Hanna Schwarz, Reinhold Möser, Bernd Weikl, Wolfgang Probst, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

5. "Du wirst das für mich tun" [3:11]
Teresa Stratas, Wieslaw Ochman, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

Scene 3

6. "Wo ist er, dessen Sündenbecher jetzt voll ist?" [4:40]
Bernd Weikl, Teresa Stratas, Wieslaw Ochman, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

7. "Er ist schrecklich" [4:27]
Teresa Stratas, Wieslaw Ochman, Bernd Weikl, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

8. "Jochanaan! Ich bin verliebt in deinen Leib" [5:17]
Teresa Stratas, Bernd Weikl, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

9. "Deinen Mund begehre ich" [2:58]
Teresa Stratas, Wieslaw Ochman, Bernd Weikl, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

10. "Wird dir nicht bange, Tochter der Herodias?" [3:59]
Bernd Weikl, Teresa Stratas, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

11. Zwischenspiel [3:58]
Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

Scene 4

12. "Wo ist Salome?" [3:41]
Hans Beirer, Astrid Varnay, Reinhold Möser, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

13. "Salome, komm, trink Wein mit mir" [2:41]
Hans Beirer, Astrid Varnay, Teresa Stratas, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

14. "Siehe, die Zeit ist gekommen" [4:16]
Bernd Weikl, Astrid Varnay, Hans Beirer, Friedrich Lenz, Ewald Aichberger, Kurt Equiluz, Karl Terhal, Alois Pernerstorfer, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

15. "Was soll das heißen, der Erlöser der Welt?" [4:05]
Bernd Weikl, Hans Beirer, Heinz Klaus Ecker, Friedrich Lenz, Norbert Heidgen, Astrid Varnay, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

16. "Tanz für Mich, Salome" [4:08]
Hans Beirer, Astrid Varnay, Teresa Stratas, Bernd Weikl, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

17. Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils [9:52]
Teresa Stratas, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

18. "Ah! Herrlich! Wundervoll, wundervoll!" [3:42]

19. "Salome, ich beschwöre dich" [6:07]
Hans Beirer, Teresa Stratas, Astrid Varnay, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

20. "Man soll ihr geben, was sie verlangt!" [1:39]
Hans Beirer, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

21. "Es ist kein Laut zu vernehmen" [2:11]

22. "Ah! Du wolltest mich nicht deinen Mund" [11:52]
Teresa Stratas, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

23. "Sie ist ein Ungeheuer, deine Tochter" [1:05]
Hans Beirer, Astrid Varnay, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

24. "Ah! Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan" [4:50]
Teresa Stratas, Hans Beirer, Wiener Philharmoniker, Karl Böhm

Total Playing Time: [1:40:40]

Salome - A Test Case

Richard Strauss saw the “convict" Oscar Wilde's verse drama Salome in Berlin in 1902, in Max Reinhardt's Kleines Theater. The event turned out to have immense consequences for opera, and was recalled by Strauss himself in lapidary style in his Recollections and Reflections: “After the performance I met Heinrich Grünfeld, who said to me: 'Strauss, surely that's an opera subject for you!' I was able to tell him truthfully: 'I'm already composing.'"

The first performance of Strauss's “drama in one act", given at the Dresden Court Opera on 9 December 1905, attracted great and widespread attention. The work encountered resistance on various grounds, and the scent of scandal adhered to it for years, but slowly it established itself. Today it is recognized that the “shocker" of 1905 represents one of the most important turning points in operatic history, a test case of music theatre, marking the end of the post-Wagnerian epoch and opening the way for the developments of the twentieth century, above all in the work of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg.

The subject was controversial for the time in two main areas: the character of the female outsider as a challenge to late-Victorian bourgeois morality, and the presentation of the apocalypse as a parable, a parallel to the sense of change and upheaval which was particularly strong at the fin de siècle: the sense that an epoch had ended and a new one was beginning.

There is a close affinity between Wilde's Salome and other female protagonists of contemporary drama: Maeterlinck's Mélisande (in Pelléas et Mélisande, 1893), Wedekind's Lulu (in Earth Spirit, 1898, and Pandora's Box, 1904), Georges Rodenbach's Marie/Marietta (in Bruges-la-Morte, 1892) and Hofmannsthal's Electra (1903). In their distinct but similar ways all these women combine a radical otherness with a puzzling ambivalence, and none of them is adequately described by the contemporary catchphrase, “femme fatale". Another thing they have in common is the fact that they were all eventually transformed by opera from figures striking modish attitudes into human archetypes: Mélisande by Debussy (1902), Lulu by Berg (1929-34), Marie/Marietta by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (in Die tote Stadt, 1920) and Electra by Strauss himself in 1909.

What adds to Salome's significance in this test case is the fact that, like her biblical sisters Delilah and Judith (both of whom have also been given operatic existence, by Saint-Saëns in 1877 and Siegfried Matthus in 1985 respectively), she provides the opportunity for a new reading of an old story about a turning point in the history of the world, interpreted in this case as the transformation of unfulfillable desire into cruelty and barbarism. Suffering passivity gives way to positive action. The protest does not end in triumph, however, but only causes even greater suffering. To this day, that remains the disturbing essence of all such histories of women. Is Salome a vamp who goes too far, or a child-woman to whom innocence still clings in a decadent environment? A pagan salon-viper or a proto-Christian martyr? The question has been endlessly debated. The crux is whether it is a whim or an existential compulsion which drives her to desire to kiss Jokanaan's mouth - even if the price of doing so is to pass beyond the frontiers of life itself.

In terms of the history of opera, the very choice of one-act form - prescribed by Wilde and still further concentrated by Strauss's cuts in the text - signals innovation and a break with custom. Many younger composers of the same period, such as Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Hindemith, as well as Puccini, found the one-acter the most suitable form in which to defy the conventional, traditional operatic norms. But while many of these composers also used reduced musical forces in their shorter works, Strauss used the form as a means of augmenting those same skills he had already developed in his symphonic writing by engaging them closely in the dramatic events, and also drew on the experience he had gained in nearly twenty years as an opera conductor. In doing so, he created a new quality of large-scale symphonic-dramatic form, the most significant antecedents of which appear to lie in Wagner's Rheingold. At the same time, through an extraordinarily refined development of the instrumental sonorities and of the metrical and harmonic material given to the orchestra, he gave it a wholly new function for which he coined the expression “nerve-end contrapuntalism". What he meant by that was certainly not just the precisely graduated half-shades elicited from his orchestral language for depicting character but the thematic and leitmotivic structure of the work, the articulation of which is always clear no matter how luxuriant the expression becomes.

The dramatic structure has a firm foundation in the musical architecture. Two large-scale passages of symphonic writing, the interlude following Jokanaan's exit and Salome's dance, divide the one-act drama into three main sections (the meeting of Salome and Jokanaan, Herod's soul-searching and the catastrophe), between which the orchestra assumes something of the function of a Greek chorus. Strauss uses some twenty leitmotifs with a precision that is demonstrated from the very start of the work, when the page's first words “Du musst sie nicht ansehen, du siehst sie zu viel an" (You must not look at her, you look at her too much) are accompanied by the baleful motif that recurs when Salome demands the head of Jokanaan.

The score is more effective than any stage designer could be in making the moon an active character in the drama. It is a latent presence, brooding over everything and everyone, a presage of the catastrophe, a symbol of both purity and dreadful destruction, mysterious and oriental. “I had long been dissatisfied with the absence of truly Eastern colour and fierce sunlight in any operas about the Orient and the Jews", Strauss wrote in Recollections and Reflections. “Necessity taught me how to write really exotic harmony, which shimmered like shot silk, especially in strange cadences. The desire for the most vivid characterization possible drove me to bitonality, because rhythm alone, such as Mozart uses so ingeniously, did not seem to me to be strong enough to characterize the contrast between Herod and the Nazarenes, for example. It should be regarded as an isolated experiment on a special subject, but not recommended for imitation."

The characterization is unsurpassed. That of Herod, in particular, amounts to a clinical case study, showing an admirable exactitude in detail and presenting a psychopath on a terrifying historical scale. But in every scene, and with every other character, Strauss's “experiment" proves itself not only unique but also forward-looking. Its audacious chord combinations and metrical variation create an extraordinary tension between chromaticism and diatonicism in order to press forward to the very frontier of the tonal relationship of major and minor harmony, without abandoning the foundation of tonality altogether. Schoenberg and his school waited on the further side of that frontier.

The present version, made for television in 1976, is now also a valuable document of the work of Karl Böhm. It is an opera film which takes advantage of the technology allowing the sound to be recorded first, then using playback to incorporate that soundtrack on to the film as the action is filmed in the studio, before cutting and final editing take place. This process demands from the singers a particular facility in combining acting with music making: they must not simply simulate singing in front of the cameras, they must rather create the vocal expression anew as the most important element in the interpretation of their roles. This recreative procedure still appears to be the most satisfactory way of making opera, even when channelled through the audio-visual media, an artistic experience with its own validation and enchantment, so that it emerges not as a filmed theatre performance but as a real-life story turned into music.

Filming allows aspects to be brought out, both in the character of Salome and in the work as a whole, which are not so readily conveyed in the theatre. These include the presence of the crowd, the proximity of the characters (through the use of close-up) but, above all, the irritation that Jokanaan disseminates and eventually experiences himself. To the woman seeking an answer from him, he replies by referring her to the one “on the Sea of Galilee". We see the prophet broken, exactly as he earlier described his relationship to Jesus of Nazareth: “He must increase and I must decrease" (John 3: 30). When he curses Salome (instead of helping or even redeeming her) and flees back into the cistern, his mission is over. His death is the outward sign of the catastrophe which Salome has provoked and goes through with to the end.

Curiosity, a hunger for what is new, the need to lay hold of radical otherness and unite herself with it - these are the forces driving Salome to the actions she takes. But she learns that the “kiss" does not make it possible to build a bridge between two different worlds, or to reconcile - or dissolve entirely - extreme opposites in the subjective act of love. She seals this knowledge with her death, which remains a protest against the incompatibility of eros and ethos in occidental thought. She is already dead when the spears of Herod's mercenaries strike her. In her dialogue with Jokanaan's severed head, the closing scene which is like a monodrama within the one-act opera and can be seen as the direct predecessor of Schoenberg's Erwartung, she has already discovered that “the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death".

Götz Friedrich
4/2007

Оркестр: Wiener Philarmoniker
Дирижер: Karl Bohm

Постановка 1974 г.

Субтитры: German, English, French, Spanish, Chinese

Знойная ночь окутала дворец Ирода Антипы. Стремясь забыться от преследующих его неудач и мрачных предсказаний, тетрарх пригласил множество гостей на очередную праздничную оргию. На террасе расположилась охрана. Начальник стражи, сириец Нарработ поглощён созерцанием принцессы Саломеи, также принимающей участие в празднестве. Увлечённый, он не слышит предостережений охваченного непонятным страхом юного Пажа. Мощный голос пророка Иоканаана доносится из глубокой цистерны, он предвещает пришествие нового духовного правителя. На террасе появляется Саломея. Преследуемая жадными взорами отчима, девушка не хочет оставаться с гостями. Грозные речи Иоканаана пробуждают её любопытство и она требует показать пленника. Испуганные солдаты отказываются, лишь Нарработ нарушает приказ Ирода и выпускает пророка из подземелья. Тот обличает погрязшего в бесчестье тетрарха и развратную Иродиаду. Непреклонная воля, решимость и мужественность Иоканаана рождают в девушке острое неосознанное влечение – коснуться поцелуем губ пророка. Осквернённый, он отталкивает похотливую принцессу и спускается в темницу. Навязчивая идея поцелуя овладевает мечущейся в смятении Саломеей. Поражённый увиденным, Нарработ закалывается. В сопровождении многочисленной свиты, под яростный спор еврейских теологов на террасу выходит Ирод с супругой. Гонимый кошмарными видениями, доведённый до истерики, тетрарх ищет падчерицу, так как лишь в её обществе он находит отдых. Ирод предлагает Саломее место подле себя, вино и чудесные фрукты, но погружённая в мысли об Иоканаане принцесса отказывает ему. Вожделея, Ирод просит Саломею танцевать. За это наслаждение он готов исполнить любую её просьбу. Неожиданно девушка откликается на щедрые посулы и начинает «танец семи покрывал». Источающее эротическую негу тело постепенно вовлекается в стремительный вихрь восточной пляски. В восторге Ирод вопрошает Саломею о награде. Ответ повергает присутствующих в ужас – юная красавица под торжествующие возгласы Иродиады просит голову Иоканаана. Бесполезны попытки тетрарха откупиться золотом и драгоценностями. Сломленный Ирод отдаёт страшный приказ. В предельном, граничащим с безумием возбуждении Саломея получает награду. Желание исполнилось, и в трансе она припадает к губам мертвеца, утоляя агрессивную страсть. Не в силах вынести отвратительной сцены кровавого наслаждения Ирод приказывает убить принцессу. Раздавленная огромными щитами солдат, Саломея умирает.

Качество: DVD9
Формат: DVD Video
Видео кодек: MPEG2
Аудио кодек: AC3
Видео: NTSC 4:3 (720x480) VBR
Аудио: Deutsch (LinearPCM, 2 ch); Deutsch (DTS, 6 ch)