Strauss' Salomé and Mozart's Idomeneo - more severed heads

Oscar Wilde died in 1900, but Max Reinhardt staged Salomé in 1903 in Berlin to great acclaim, after which came Richard Strauss’ opera of 1905.  It plays to surprisingly strong interest these days, for example the performances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in early 2004.  Is it the sight of a troubled teenager serenading a severed head or the Dance of the Seven Veils striptease or the gay undercurrent?  The result is standing ovations, reinforcing the trend in opera of late toward the salacious and the shocking, curiously duplicating the events of a century ago.

They may have got the idea to restage Salomé from Berlin's Deutsche Oper, which staged Mozart's Idomeneo in 2003-2004 with no fewer than four severed heads. They aren't in Mozart's original story of course but in the new version King Idomeneo staggers on stage next to the bloody severed heads of Buddha, Jesus, Poseidon and the Prophet Mohammed, which are sitting on chairs. It was the last of these heads that prompted the opera house to cancel a subsequent production in the Fall of 2006, concerned about the backlash from Muslims. Before eventually reinstating it, the heads made international news when they went missing from the opera house workshops. A spokesperson remarked, "The costume director and the technical director are having a look around, but if they don't turn up, we'll just make new ones..." PR doesn't get any better than this but the opera house is still struggling to stay alive.

The painting below of Salomé is by French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau in 1871.