Death and the Maiden

Only four days before the première, conductor Christoph von Dohnányi withdrew from the Staatsoper’s new production of Salome, citing unspecified artistic differences with director Hans Neuenfels. On the strength of this last-minute backstage drama – and also, perhaps, the reputation of Mr Neuenfels – one might have expected the production to be somewhat more controversial; what emerged instead was visually dazzling, tightly directed and even, given the opera’s potential for violence and sexuality, reasonably demure. If Mr Neuenfels did not always seem overly interested in making the intricacies of his concept accessible to the audience, the staging nonetheless played out with a conviction that suggested an order and intelligence behind its sometimes disorienting parade of weighted images. 

Mr Neuenfels and set/costume designer Reinhard von…