AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Performance
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

The premiere of Salome on 9 December 1905 was a scandal. Even before the work had been heard in public, there were serious problems. Rehearsals became increasingly difficult because of both the demands Strauss placed on the voice and the eroticism of the subject. At the first piano rehearsal, the entire cast handed back their scores, declaring it ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

in Berlin in 1903. Directed by Max Reinhardt, it made an immediate impression on the composer and he decided to set Lachmann’s text himself. The relatively short length of Salome allowed Strauss to approach the composition as though it were another of the tone-poems with which he had established his reputation. The work is symphonically conceived and the giant orchestra ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Late Romantic

The heckelphone was developed by William Heckel after he heard from Wagner in 1879 that the orchestra lacked a powerful baritone double-reed instrument. Accordingly, he experimented with the oboe family and produced the first heckelphone in 1904. Built in three sections, it has a wider bore than the oboe, and is played using a bassoon-type reed mounted on ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

Following Salome was no easy task, and Strauss felt strongly that he needed to tackle an entirely different subject – by preference a light, comic work. He had been in correspondence with the playwright Hofmannsthal and approached him with an idea for such a work. Hofmannsthal had other ideas, and was insistent that Strauss should take up his ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

vital part the vast orchestra plays in depicting the characters’ emotions. As well as having Wagnerian traits, the opera demonstrates the interest Puccini had in Strauss, and in Salome in particular. Composed: 1908–10 Premiered: 1910, Metropolitan Opera, New York Libretto by Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini, after David Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

most famous performances are those of Minnie in the premiere of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the title role in Richard Strauss’ Salome in Berlin. Destinn developed a reputation as a femme fatale and her love affairs were always hot gossip. In addition to singing, Destinn also wrote novels, essays and ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

of Russian-Jewish parents (his real name was Israel Balin) who emigrated to New York when he was a child, Berlin was self-taught and sold his first successful song (‘Sadie Salome, Go Home’) before his 20th birthday. ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ in 1911 was an international hit. In all, he wrote over 1,000 songs and numerous successful musicals, ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical
• Singer

b. 1933 Spanish soprano Caballé studied at the Barcelona Liceo, and joined the Basle Opera in 1956, where she sang the Italian and German repertory. She appeared at La Scala and in Vienna, before consolidating her reputation in several operas by Donizetti. She made her Glyndebourne and Metropolitan Opera debuts in 1965, and her Covent Garden debut ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

real father. He feared unfavourable comparisons with the great man and began to find ways of expressing his own voice in his music. There are still traces of Wagner in Salome, his third opera, based on Oscar Wilde’s French orientalist drama. But compared with Wagner’s noble dramatic ideals, its moon-struck decadence could hardly be more different. The dead ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

a disaster; it won over neither the critics nor the public. For all his success with the dramatic music of his tone-poems, it was not until the premiere of Salome in 1905 that Strauss gained a firm hold on opera. Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) play had attracted fury and outrage in England, but Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation was triumphantly staged ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Late Romantic

these works was Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895), an exuberant, orchestral showpiece that remains a favourite with concert audiences. After 1900, Strauss increasingly turned to opera. In first Salome (1905), then Elektra (1909), he treated melodramatic subjects with a histrionic musical language that verged on the atonal. These works of musical expressionism are contemporaneous with the radical, atonal ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

Before 1914, Wagnerian adherents explored increasing chromaticism, often allied to the expression or exploration of ever-more powerful emotions. The corresponding artistic movement was Expressionism. Representative were the operas Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) by Richard Strauss (1864–1949), the opera Wozzeck (1914–20) by Alban Berg (1885–1935) and Arnold Schoenberg’s (1874–1951) monodrama Erwartung (‘Expectation’, 1909). In all these, dissonance, ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

a symbol of the establishment, holding on to the last vestiges of a secure, civilized and supremely hierarchical culture. Early in the twentieth century, Richard Strauss’s (1864–1949) Salome (1905), had pointed the way to the future, followed by Elektra in 1909, both of which employed new and bold musical language to push chromaticism to its breaking ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

While Wagnerian music drama cast its shadow over his first two operas, Guntram (1892–93) and Feuersnot (1900–01), it stood at some remove from the two works that followed, Salome (1903–05) and Elektra (1906–08). Both are nerve-jangling psychological dramas that underline the depraved obsessions of their protagonists with violent dissonance and writhing chromaticism. Strauss never sought to recapture this degree ...

• Styles & Forms
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

local colour, begun by the veristic writings of Giovanni Verga and then Mascagni and Leoncavallo, provided a welcome sideline but La fanciulla del West (1910), Madama Butterfly (1904), Salome (1905), Elektra (1909) and even Der Rosenkavalier (1911) testify to the continued allure of unfamiliar worlds. This was allied with increasing fluidity in the form taken by opera. By the ...