Episode 2 Lucy Worsley's Nights at the Opera

For centuries opera was at the heart of European society.

And in the late 19th century, during a turbulent time of war

and revolutions, a new opera house was being built here in Paris.

One night in 1858 Emperor Napoleon III was travelling in his carriage to the opera.

All of a sudden, bombs were thrown.

There'd been Italian revolutionaries hiding in the crowd.

The next day Napoleon III decided to exercise one of the perks

of being the Emperor. He decided to build a new opera house.

The Opera Garnier, made Paris the operatic capital of Europe.

I've always been fascinated by how opera and history go hand in hand like this.

We've sort of forgotten this today,

now that opera's become a specialised interest,

but opera used to be centre stage,

it used to be right at the heart of historical events.

I've picked some of the best-loved operas to show you how.

I'm going to visit the historic cities that shaped my operas,

explore the colourful cast of characters who composed them,

and show you how music can give us a peephole to look back

into tumultuous times,

with the help of conductor Antonio Pappano.

I'll be exploring the nuts and bolts of the most famous arias,

duets and ensembles in the operatic repertoire.

In this episode I'll visit France and Germany,

to look at a new kind of opera that swept away conventions

is in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

One that delved into the realities of people's lives,

especially those of women,

and their deepest desires for freedom, identity and sex.

Paris, where Bizet and Puccini captured the spirit

of bohemianism that swept through the city.

SHE SINGS: "Habanera" by Georges Bizet

Bayreuth, where Wagner premiered a total work of art

to transform German identity.

SHE SINGS: "Ride Of The Valkyries" by Richard Wagner

And Dresden, where Richard Strauss premiered a work

that explored, "perverted female pleasure".

SHE SINGS: The final scene from Salome by Richard Strauss

Napoleon III's opera house opened in 1875

and was designed to be a display of imperial pomp and grandeur.

Well-heeled Parisians revelled in what's known as

the Belle Epoque - the beautiful era -

a time of glitz and glamour,

when Paris was the centre of Western culture.

And if you were an aristocrat or even a nouveau riche,

and the Opera Garnier was the place to be.

It was like a sort of permanent Cannes Film Festival.

Your carriage would drop you off out there,

then you'd enter up the grand staircase.

In an ideal world you'd come to every performance,

that's three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

In the foyer there were these magnificent mirrors for you to

check out your dress and possibly your diamonds,

that you might very well have got from Paris's most upmarket

jewellers, situated, not by accident, right next door.

The French fashion was for grand opera, lavish productions

and spectacle, but most of the audience weren't watching the stage,

they were looking at each other.

Garnier, the architect, deliberately designed the interior

for people to see and be seen.

Whether the acoustics inside the auditorium were any good or not,

Garnier admitted was down to chance alone.

The best boxes, like this one,

were reserved for the members of the Jockey Club -

that's a sort of Bullingdon Club, but for grown-ups.

It was essential that each opera contained a ballet section,

so that the club members could identify

which of the pretty ballerinas they wanted to...

..make the acquaintance of.

The dancers had their own special room behind the stage,

the foyer de la danse,

and that's where the artist Degas would go to paint them.

That's also where the club members would go after the show

in order to meet the girls' "mothers",

to negotiate the right fee for making an introduction.

For the Garnier's prosperous audience,

everything was just as it should be.

But the ballets and operas they enjoyed rarely reflected

the daily struggles of most Parisians,

or their desire for the same freedoms the elite enjoyed.

Later in 1875, though, a French composer called Georges Bizet

did put people from the margins at centre stage.

His opera Carmen featured a heroine who,

unusually for the time, is very much in charge.

Bizet was part of the French realism movement,

pioneered by writers such as Balzac and Zola.

And for Bizet - here he is - inspiration came from a woman

who'd escaped Paris's underworld of sex for sale.

These scratch marks were made by courtesans testing out

their diamond gifts to make sure that they weren't paste.

A lot of people thought that the character of Carmen was based on

a real life notorious ex-courtesan called Celeste Venard.

She did awfully well. She ended up married to a Count.

She met Bizet on a train. He was 27 and she was 41.

"Moderation," Celeste used to say, "forms no part of my nature.

"Passion devours me.

"I have always been capricious and proud."

Which sounds very much like Bizet's Carmen, a story set in Spain,

but which would resonate strongly in Paris.

Carmen is a working-class girl with a job in a factory.

Carmen is a gypsy, she's a free spirit, she has little respect

for social conventions, and she's a free spirit sexually too.

What she likes to do is to find a man who has no apparent interest

in her at all, and then to seduce him.

And that is exactly what Carmen does to a soldier called Don Jose,

in one of opera's most memorable moments.

Now, you hear this rhythm, we all know this rhythm.

Well, this is a habanera.

It's a Cuban dance, a contredanse.

You hear that...

Da-rum-pum-pum.

Now, she sings over that, likening...

..love to a rebellious bird that you can't catch.

This describes the character of Carmen to a T

because the minute you think you have her, she's off,

and this is brilliantly captured by Bizet in this sultry triplets here.

Incredible, how this piece is like a slow burn.

It is a sensual dance.

You can feel the hips in this music,

but it becomes more dangerous.

And there's a real menace in her as well as an incredible playfulness,

and that makes the complexity of the character,

that's what draws us to her,

it's what opera audiences have been trying to figure out for so long.

Who is this woman?

Carmen was commissioned for Paris's Opera Comique.

The audience here wasn't as louche as the Garnier lot,

they were from the respectable bourgeoisie.

Today there's a statue of Bizet's Carmen in the foyer,

but in 1875 an opera featuring a sexy Spanish gypsy

who also ran a smuggling racket wasn't ideal for the clientele.

Bizet had to fight the management to get his story staged,

but the premiere went ahead on 3rd March.

The first performance of Carmen didn't go particularly well.

During the intervals, all the audience were overheard

muttering the words, "immoral", and "scandalous".

When Bizet walked around the theatre, everybody,

from the director to the doorkeeper, turned their backs on him.

It seems that the audience couldn't get past

their assumption that the character of Carmen must be a prostitute.

But that isn't the only possible explanation of what Carmen's all about.

Bizet exclaimed, "Don't you see that these bourgeois have not

"understood a word of the work that I've written to them."

So, what could Bizet have been getting at?

Well, during the Paris Commune in 1871,

working-class revolutionaries briefly took over the city.

Their main headquarters was here at the Hotel de Ville, the City Hall.

After the Commune was suppressed an enterprising printer produced this map,

showing all the buildings that had been damaged and destroyed.

Look, it's a guide to the ruins of Paris.

It says here that the City Hall was entirely destroyed in 1871.

By 1875, you could still see the scars of this upon the city.

By then, any direct mention of the Commune in operas or plays was still banned.

The authorities were terrified of the forceful working-class women

of the Commune, who'd even helped hold the barricades.

A myth arose of the petroleuses,

female Communards who'd burnt down buildings.

So we've got this myth of the fearsome lady fire thrower,

how does that appear in the story of Carmen?

-She's very often described as being like an animal.

-An animal!

And there are references, too, in the libretto,

and this was a kind of language that was very often used

to describe the Communard women.

It was a way of dehumanising them.

Delphine, tell me some of the other ways that you can see

Carmen as a lady Communard?

The word "liberte" is repeated time and time again.

That, too, relates very closely to some of the ideas of the Commune,

and particularly of Communard women,

who were very much against the idea of marriage,

which they saw as enslaving them,

and preferred the idea of free unions

so they wanted much greater equality in their relationships.

And would you say that Carmen's seduction of the soldier

-had particular meaning?

-Absolutely.

We know that a number of soldiers from the Republican army

did defect at the time of the Commune,

they refused to fire on the citizens and joined their ranks.

In Bizet's opera Don Jose spends time in prison for Carmen

and then deserts the army.

In Don Jose's Act II aria, we have something that is

completely different from the dances of Act I,

something more symphonic.

This is an incredibly sensual

and emotional piece of music.

It's not frivolous, as a lot of the music in Act I tends to be.

This is something really deep

because he somehow goes through a psychological churning...

..to be able to tell her that...

he loves her.

Carmen abandons Don Jose for a handsome matador.

And though we'll never really know

if Bizet invokes the commune deliberately, his heroine's

fate is as bloody as that of the female communards she resembles.

By the 19th century, in art and culture,

women were allowed to be heroines.

They were allowed to be strong and courageous.

And you can see Carmen as part of this trend.

You can really see that she's a proto-feminist.

But even these new heroines aren't allowed to go too far.

Basically, they have to die in the end.

In serious, tragic operas, they die in all sorts of ridiculous ways.

They get strangled, or shot, or thrown into vats of boiling oil.

And, in Bizet's opera, Carmen gets killed by Don Jose.

She gets stabbed.

SHE SIGHS

MUSIC CRESCENDOS

But Bizet had managed to turn a complicated, flesh and blood,

female character into a tragic heroine.

And his own fate was rather tragic, too.

Shortly after Carmen's opening-night,

Bizet died of a heart attack after a swim in this river.

Tchaikovsky, the composer, rightly predicted that in 10 years,

Carmen would be the most popular opera in the world.

But poor Bizet never lived to see it.

And he was only 37.

Carmen had shown that opera could explore every area of society.

She had proudly called herself a bohemian,

an unconventional, free spirit.

And, during the second half of the 19th century, La Vie De Boheme -

the bohemian life - became very fashionable amongst younger,

middle-class people, looking for more in life than making money.

In 1895, it would prompt an opera that immortalised the lives

and loves of a group of bohemian friends in Paris.

These bourgeois Bohemians liked to behave eccentrically,

drink too much, explore their own sexuality.

They also liked to hang out here, in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

It's said that a woman on her own couldn't sit on a bench here

for more than two minutes

without some Bohemian coming and chatting her up.

-Oh, hello.

-Hello.

SHE LAUGHS

Back in the 1840s, this man here, Henry Murger, wrote stories

and a play about this lifestyle that would inspire a generation.

"Bohemia," Murger wrote,

"only exists and is only possible in Paris."

Bohemians liked to live in the Latin Quarter, or here in Montmartre.

Most of them wanted to be artists of some kind.

But making a living like that isn't easy, even when

you're a genius, like the poet Baudelaire or the painter Renoir.

So, most Bohemians lived in poverty in freezing garrets.

However, if you want to be an artist, it really helps

if you look like one.

There was a fashion for having hollow eyes,

for being generally quite emaciated, for having high cheekbones.

It also helped if you had a melancholy disposition,

and if you wore a lot of black.

The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini had had his own bohemian phase

in his youth, when he'd been a penniless student in Milan.

He later romanticised this time in his life.

He and his flatmates didn't have enough money to eat out.

And the landlord of the garret where they lived had forbidden cooking.

Puccini liked to tell the story of how he would play tempestuous music

on the piano in order to cover up the sound of his flatmates

secretly frying eggs.

Puccini traded in cold attics for fast cars when he became

a successful composer but he remained nostalgic

for his bohemian years.

And, in 1895, when he came across Murger's work,

Puccini wrote a musical masterpiece, La Boheme.

So, let's meet the characters.

The 19th century was the age of postcards.

They were cheap to buy, easy to send, and really great to collect.

This whole collection here are all on the theme of La Boheme.

Here's the hero, Rodolfo.

He lives in a garret, that's where he writes his grand dramas.

In the same building lives Mimi,

she's another romantic soul.

She ekes out a living as a seamstress.

One night, Mimi knocks on Rodolfo's door.

She wants to borrow a match to light her candle.

What could possibly happen next?

Well, Mimi and Rodolfo fall in love.

Puccini was interested in a style of opera writing which was

called verismo.

Verismo has to do with that which is real,

that which is true,

that which is modern.

In Mimi's Act I aria, we get the normal hesitancy of...

..everyday conversation.

But, then, unexpectedly, she talks about the end of winter

and the coming of spring.

And, with the thaw, the music becomes warm, and becomes symphonic.

The orchestra's playing the tune with her.

And, with this passionate outburst, really, it's something

so romantic, and so...

..I would dare to say cinematographic. And it's so real.

Genius.

Women like Mimi were familiar characters in 19th-century Paris.

They were often country girls who'd moved to the capital

to work in the clothing industry.

Once in the big city, these young women, known as grisettes,

could make the most of their new freedoms.

Grisettes are clearly very popular in 19th-century culture.

We've got all these pictures,

we've got all of these books.

Why was that?

Because, I think that she is a mirror of the new society.

It's a democratic society.

She wants to have money, you know,

to have freedom, you know, to be independent.

Is this a student coming in through the window of her garret?

Yes, because students come into the grisettes room by the roof

because he's afraid of the owner.

She's very close to where the thirst is,

and it's why she belongs to the boheme.

Because the boheme is the artistic life, you know?

-With the freedom, with creation.

-I think that sounds really romantic.

And what happens as the grisette grows older?

Ah! There are no old grisettes.

Is that because they've married rich men

-and they're no longer grisettes?

-Yes.

Or she has become a kept woman.

Grisettes like Mimi couldn't afford to be too sentimental

in their relationships.

Quite literally because they were often poorly paid

and had to get cash wherever they could.

A grisette would often have two lovers.

Firstly, her amant de coeur, the one she really likes.

He might well be a handsome, penniless student.

And when the grisette was feeling flush, she might give him money.

But, then, she would also need her amant metallique.

This was perhaps an older gentleman, a member of the bourgeoisie.

Maybe married.

But he would give her gifts.

Some women lived entirely off their rich lovers.

These kept women became known as lorettes.

Puccini included one in his opera.

Her name is Musetta, and she goes to a cafe with her older lover.

Also there are the young Bohemians who scrape together

the money for a Christmas meal.

Among them is Musetta's former amant de coeur, a penniless painter.

It's genius how Puccini has created a situation that, on the surface,

is chaos, but is actually very sophisticatedly written.

The confrontation of Musetta, she comes in, and sees...her...

..old boyfriend, Marcello.

And sings an aria to him.

The seductive long note of Musetta's aria...

..unsettles everyone.

The confidence, the poise, the sexiness of this girl.

Incredible.

There's a tremendous swagger about this musicality.

And there's an almost vulgar sensuality...

..that makes Marcello feel absolutely terrible.

But she is irresistible.

And, of course, he falls in love with her again.

In La Boheme, Rodolfo and Mimi's love affair

doesn't have a happy ending.

Mimi falls fatally ill with tuberculosis.

This terrible condition was a grim reality in the 19th century.

Soprano Angel Blue has played Mimi dozens of times.

Why do you think that so many heroines

in 19th-century operas have to die?

They're being written about from the perspective of a man.

And it's unfortunate that these women who really, if you think

about it, have led really glamorous lives have to end in such tragedy.

She has to pay the price for her sin.

They're not supposed to express themselves sexually.

Still, Mimi's deathbed scene is one of the most moving in any opera.

So, here we are, sitting on our couches.

Would you mind giving me a little masterclass in how you do it, then?

How do I die of consumption as Mimi?

Sure. I'd be happy to.

-We're just going to reverse down a little bit.

-Assume the position.

-Is it really possible to sing like this?

-Yes, it is.

-My goodness.

So, what I think... Let's see, where could we start?

We could start from it's just her and Rodolfo, they have a moment.

And then...

And then the next part I think is probably the most

crucial for a death scene.

And I always pretend like I'm trying to look to him

-but I can't quite see him.

-You can't quite see him, yeah, yeah.

SHE SINGS

The music...

SHE SINGS

Always, always trying to reach for him. And...

SHE SINGS

I sleep.

And in this moment there is this...

the music is slowing down and in that moment I think that's just the very last bit.

Mimi takes her last breaths and...

There is this wonderful stillness onstage.

Mimi's death does help the other characters grow up a bit.

Even Musetta shows a softer side.

La boheme premiered in Turin in 1896 and in Paris two years later.

Normal Parisians loved La boheme.

The box office receipts were as good as they had ever

been at the Opera-Comique.

The opera's themes of lost love,

and lost youth and poignant regret were irresistible.

A few decades earlier,

the German composer Richard Wagner had premiered a very

different kind of opera here in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth.

Wagner was composing very serious works drawing on legends

and mythology rather than people's everyday lives and emotions.

Like this early opera, Tannhauser about a man's struggle to

choose between sexuality and spirituality.

Wagner's attempt to express the deepest levels of human

existence had not gone down well at the Paris premiere in 1861.

Also, the ballet wasn't at all to the taste of the jockey club,

remember them?

They even staged an elaborate protest involving whistles,

this annoyed other operagoers and fistfights broke out.

Wagner was very unhappy about all of this.

He left France utterly disgusted with the French.

Wagner returned home to continue working on his specifically

German form of opera.

"I am the most German of men," Wagner once said.

"I am the German spirit." He wasn't known for his modesty.

Wagner was a complicated, controversial character.

He was a megalomaniac. It was always in debt.

He hated to be ignored.

Once at a dinner party in Zurich he felt he wasn't getting enough

attention so he simply shrieked until everybody looked at him.

He was also a passionate nationalist.

After Prussia and other German states won a war with

France in 1871,

Germany became a unified nation instead of a loose confederation.

Wagner wanted to write operas that were billed as shared national

consciousness for the new Germany's ragbag of regions.

Drawing on ancient Teutonic myths and legends and Norse sagas.

The result was the Ring cycle,

a quartet of operas lasting some 16 hours.

This epic work was finally finished in 1874 after

a quarter of a century of labour.

The Ring would, as Wagner put it,

contain the beginning of the world and its destruction.

The Ring is a sprawling tale of gods and dragons,

heroes and heroines, such a lot of them.

Here are the most important.

Wotan is the king of the gods.

He wants to get his hands on a powerful ring that is

guarded by a dragon.

To do this, he needs a human hero.

That's Siegfried.

He's awfully brave

but he isn't exactly the sharpest tool in the box.

He does manage to forge a sword...

..that is sharp enough to kill the dragon.

And he also manages to fall in love.

With Brunnhilde. She is Wotan's daughter.

She is one of the warrior goddesses called Valkyrie.

In the cycle's second opera,

we meet Brunnhilde's Valkyrie sisters. What follows is

one of the most famous scenes and musical motifs ever written.

On a mountaintop, eight Valkyries is in full body armour transport

the fallen heroes to Valhalla.

We all know this theme...

HE PLAYS RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES

Now the piece starts off as an orchestral showpiece,

enormous vitality and energy and rhythm above all.

And then becomes a vocal piece.

Valkyries almost cackle with joy. Ha-ha, ha-ha!

They almost sound like witches, actually.

The scene becomes more and more intense, more incredible high notes,

incredible bursts of orchestral splendour.

In a splendid showpiece, Wagner provides it.

Wagner's vision was for a Gesamtkunstwerk -

an ideal work of art, the perfect fusion of words, music and drama.

And he dreamed of a specially built opera house to perform it in.

Fortunately, Ludwig II,

King of Bavaria, who often stayed at this palace, helped pay for it.

And there's a special gap in the trees here through which they

could admire their creation.

The Festival Theatre.

Now most of the opera houses we have visited so far have been

sat in the centre of their cities but Wagner did things differently.

It would be opera house itself that would make Bayreuth important.

Wagner's stripped back design is the polar

opposite of the Opera Garnier which opened just the previous year.

The revolutionary acoustics, including a covered orchestra pit

are meant to completely immerse the audience in the performance

so it felt like experiencing reality itself.

This Festival Theatre was vital to Wagner's vision of a total

work of art.

It seems like the theatre itself is a musical instrument,

it has been that carefully designed.

Yes, it is also a visual reason.

The perspective is always leading to the middle of the stage

and you are always fixed on the stage.

Yes, you are not looking at the other people in the other boxes

and saying, "Hello, there is my friend."

-You're sat here in quite a small seat.

-That's it.

You have to concentrate on the stage.

You have to see, look and hear

and you are getting in a sort of flow, an aesthetic flow.

It is a little bit like consuming drugs.

And, yeah, it is sort of a Wagner trip.

They are in a Wagner trance.

Yes, a sort of aesthetic trance which he wanted to create.

Bayreuth now has a Wagner Festival each summer and the staging

of the Ring cycle is updated to try to tap into contemporary concerns.

In 2017, it is partly set in a gas station in the American midwest

and the New York Stock Exchange.

But at the first full performance here in August 1876,

the props proved troublesome.

The premier did not go at all smoothly.

Part of the problem is that part of the dragon didn't turn up.

Legend has it that it was sent not to Bayreuth in Germany

but to Beirut in Lebanon .

The parts that did arrive made the dragon

look like a cross between a porcupine and a lizard.

Wagner was so disappointed

and upset that he refused to come out of the end for his curtain call.

Instead, he stayed skulking in his room hurling abuse at all

the performers.

But there was good news, too.

Many considered this to be the musical event of the century.

And Kaiser Wilhelm was there along with dignitaries, musicians

and artists from around the world.

Since then, the Bayreuth festival has become part of the international

opera calendar.

For many, it is like a pilgrimage and they will eat

here at a restaurant that still serves Wagner's favourite sausages.

But Wagner's legacy is a controversial one.

His creation of a shared national consciousness appealed to Hitler

and the Nazis.

Siegfried's Funeral March was a particular favourite of theirs.

Siegfried's Funeral March is an orchestral interlude that

celebrates the life of a fallen hero.

It is many themes intertwined,

one with the other celebrate a life lived, a life lost.

Introduced by a desolate...

And gloomy chromatic figure.

The most important theme that we hear is the theme of the sword,

this ascending theme, the theme of achievement.

In a blaze of C major.

It also expresses an enormous and genuine sadness.

That is overwhelming and Wagner knew that this would be the effect.

It is unique.

You can kind of see why Hitler was a fan.

But I prefer a different interpretation of the Ring.

That it ends with a passionate appeal for love and compassion.

This idea centres on Brunnhilde, an incredibly challenging vocal

role that soprano Catherine Foster has performed numerous times.

How would you contrast Brunnhilde to the male characters in general?

Everything that Brunnhilde does is motivated from love.

And motivated out of the wish to be with somebody whereas Wotan

and most of the other characters it is all motivated out of power

and wanting money.

She actually turns around and says, "enough is enough."

It is time for a change.

It is a complicated story but by sacrificing herself on

Siegfried's funeral pyre, Brunnhilde ends the selfish rule of the gods.

Humans and humanity have the ability for wonders,

for absolute beauty

but they also have the terrible side for horrendous acts

and I think that is what she was cleansing, start again,

get your values right

and start living life for yourself with

better values than greed and want and money.

-So, she really has destroyed the patriarchy?

-Yes.

Can you tell me,

what is different about Brunnhilde's death compared

with your general run of a 19th-century opera heroine

who is probably going to get killed by someone, in some way?

I feel here with Brunnhilde that she doesn't die without hope.

She doesn't die without giving hope.

Her death will mean something and will give something to somebody else.

You might have thought Wagner had pushed musical

convention about as far as it could go.

But a new kind of modernism began pushing opera even

further into uncharted terrain.

The most shocking and salacious of them all

was written by another German, Richard Strauss.

Strauss often found his creative inspiration while he was travelling.

HORN BLAST

He was also a skilful player of the German card game, scat -

a bit like poker -

and he was thinking strategically about ways to make his musical mark.

He wanted to create a new type of opera,

modern in form, modern in content.

Something that was suitable for this modern age,

when the new discipline of psychoanalysis was

illuminating the darkest human desires.

All he needed was the right subject.

And in 1903, he found it.

He went to see a play called Salome by...

..Oscar Wilde.

This play had caused an enormous scandal, all over Europe,

because of its really shocking representation of female lust.

After the play, a friend of Strauss' said to him,

"My dear Strauss, surely you could make an opera out of that?"

And Strauss replied, "I'm already composing it."

Strauss arranged to show his Salome here in Dresden -

a progressive and freethinking kind of a place.

The opera houses in Vienna and Berlin

refused to consider such a scandalous work.

Strauss based his libretto on a German translation of Wilde's play,

illustrated here with Aubrey Beardsley's iconic images.

It's a Bible story.

Salome is the stepdaughter of King Herod.

Strauss sees Salome as a board, beautiful teenager.

And all the men at King Herod's court,

including King Herod himself, are totally in lust with her.

That's probably why, in this picture,

he's looking a bit shifty and guilty.

Now, in his prison, Herod is holding captive...

..John the Baptist.

Salome develops a huge, weird crush on John the Baptist.

But he rejects her.

She's furious about this and plots to have him killed.

How's Salome going to get that done?

Well, if she performs an erotic dance for her stepfather,

he will give her her heart's desire.

# Oompah, oompah, oompah, oompah, oompah, oompah

# Darry-ya, darry-ya!

# Darry-ya, darry-ya! #

It kind of gets our blood boiling and prepares us,

then winds us down, for the start of a sultry dance.

This slow waltz, which is building and building and building

and becomes a faster waltz.

And then he pulls back again.

It's like a seduction, in a way, isn't it?

It's something that's creepy,

in that it creates the rhythm of lovemaking.

Once the dance is finished, Herod is in ecstasy.

He offers her anything in his kingdom. He offers her his kingdom!

But Salome says, "I want one thing," and she says it sweetly.

And now she gets louder and louder and more demanding.

And the tension is unbelievable.

And it is sickening, somehow.

And that was the effect that Strauss was looking for,

something that would definitely shock.

The rehearsals at Dresden's Semperoper didn't go smoothly.

His Salome, the soprano Frau Wittich,

refused to perform the dance.

"I'm a decent woman!", she said.

Strauss - there he is - had to bring in a body double for that scene.

Strauss was canny enough to know

that controversy boosted ticket sales.

And including what was basically

a ten-minute strip tease couldn't hurt.

But he may have been up to even more than that.

Strauss' musical portrayal of Salome reflected how

ideas about women were changing.

Over in Vienna, Sigmund Freud was studying the drives that

lurk in the unconscious mind.

The teenage Salome's sexual appetites,

not to mention her lecherous stepfather,

read like one of Freud's case studies.

At the same time, the movement for women's rights

and suffrage was gaining ground.

And Dresden artists were pioneering expressionism.

Like in this cheerful woodcut by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

What is he trying to express, then?

To me, it looks like anger,

it's horrible, it's grim, it's miserable -

it's not a very attractive image at all, is it?

No, but I think he's trying to show her as she is.

There's no sense of the 19th-century

tradition of idealising the woman's form.

It's very naturalistic.

It's, "This is my girlfriend, you can see her."

I've notice he's pushing her forwards, with his hands, isn't he?

-He's saying, "Here she is."

-"Here she is."

-"Take her or leave her."

KATE LAUGHS

And I also think on the way her nipples are painted red

and her lips are red, it's quite a sexual image.

What was the relationship, Kate, between these expressionists

and Salome and Strauss?

Salome is such a complex character,

she's on the one hand kind of innocent, and on the other,

she's this teenager becoming in control of her own destiny.

So she sort of embodied this slight fear of women at this time

and the women's rights movement.

Women were just joining universities,

becoming more than just mothers and wives.

And really taking a new role in the 20th century.

Dresden was at the heart of this artistic movement,

but also central to the women's rights movement.

Well, now that you've said that, you can

see her as somebody who it's a bit fearsome, intimidating.

Perhaps there's something impressive about her after all.

Yes, like Salome, there's a sense that she's a

complex character, but she's growing to become a powerful woman.

How Strauss' Salome expresses that power is still shocking.

The severed head of John the Baptist is brought to Salome, as she asked.

She is ecstatic.

And this prepares us for a final scene,

which is as horrible as it is fascinating.

She sings the words, "You wouldn't give your lips to me..."

Music, where the orchestra is literally screaming.

It's almost not music, it's pushing music to the limits.

And she sings erotically to that head.

She kisses its mouth.

And yet, so much of this scene is beautiful to listen to.

That's what's... I think that's the most shocking thing.

And I think this is the genius of Strauss,

the great manipulator of our emotions.

She will die a violent death.

But she is happy she has made love to the man

she imagined she was in love with.

The censors in Vienna banned Salome until 1918,

saying its perverted sensuality was morally repugnant.

It was a rather different story at Dresden's Semperoper

on the 9th of December 1905.

Shocking and disgusting though Salome was,

the audience in Dresden loved it.

On the first night, there were 38 curtain calls.

The Kaiser said,

"I'm sorry that Strauss has written this Salome, because I like him,

"and that kind of thing will do him a lot of damage."

But Strauss said, "Huh! That damage is what built me my villa."

By 1911, Salome had been performed successfully in just

about every European capital.

Though here in London, in 1910, there was no severed head,

only a silver platter covered by a napkin.

Strauss' opera helps to fuel the Salo-mania craze

for Wilde's play across Europe and the USA.

This is a silent version from the 1920s.

Although there probably would have been a piano or something

playing along to give you a live musical accompaniment.

It might look a little bit tame by today's standards,

but this was shocking and raunchy.

Just as shocking to some,

by that time many women across Western Europe had the vote.

Operas kept being composed and produced,

but modernist music was getting more and more challenging.

And cinema was taking over.

On our European tour,

we've seen how great operas captured the spirit of their times.

But are they still relevant today?

Tony, what would you say that Carmen or La Boheme

or the Ring Cycle or Salome still have to offer us today?

All these operas are stories about people.

Theatre and opera theatre should function as a mirror.

I think we look at these people and we put ourselves in their place.

Even though these people suffer, can we learn from somebody's suffering?

Can we learn from their passion,

can we learn from the struggles between characters?

It's a school, it's a mirror, it's empathy.

It's all of the above.

It's a treasure.

Coming to opera makes you a better human being?

When you put it like that, it sounds great!