Heartbeat Opera launches its bold, seven-singer adaptation of Strauss’s explosive Salome at The Space at Irondale!

As we gear up for rehearsals, we interviewed Salome’s director Elizabeth Dinkova to give the Heartbeat community a glimpse of what’s in store.

Q: As a director, what drew you to Salome?

Dinkova: From its very first moments, this opera feels like a curse, but in the best possible way—you don’t want to look, and yet you can’t look away, you’re endlessly magnetized. To encounter an ensemble of nuanced, deeply disturbed and yet relatable characters trapped in prisons of their own making, in a way that feels both epic and also fresh and immediate, is rare.

q: Why do you think Salome still captivates audiences more than 100 years after its debut?

Dinkova: On one hand, Salome deals with all that is uncomfortable, provocative, and forbidden. There is hardly a taboo that doesn’t get broken in this opera. It’s a story of obsession—every character is painfully and inexorably drawn to things they shouldn’t want or have, and yet they can’t get rid of this desire or fascination. The most shocking thing about this opera is that it’s our current cultural moment in a nutshell—we’ve got this tunnel vision, glued to screens, trapped in echo chambers, endlessly titillated and terrified by the world we observe through our minuscule portals. On the other hand, Salome is also a story about the search for something to believe in - something pure, something moral, and the terror of being abandoned by a higher power. This need to be witnesses—to either be saved, or freed, or judged as guilty by somebody with absolute moral authority—also feels relatable in the present day.

q: How does this adaptation differ from traditional stagings of Salome?

Dinkova: This adaptation is radical in claiming that Salome already is an urgent story for right here and now. The process of adaptation has not been about twisting the story into something different, but about dusting off the cobwebs and removing the proverbial veils to show off Salome in all its nude glory—as a story of contemporary yearning that is relatable and truly unpredictable. We’ve reduced the cast of characters to a small group of fully fleshed, deeply flawed humans wrestling with their own complicity in the system that has trapped them.

Q: How did you balance honoring Strauss’s original vision while making the production fresh and innovative?

Dinkova: In its original conception, this piece is meant to shock—the angular libretto lifted straight from a play, the immorality of the characters, the titillation of the dance of the seven veils, and, of course, the severed head—all of that was scandalous to Strauss’s audiences. But does anything shock us now, in a world so inundated with sex, violence, and exploitation? So we’ve gone for a different kind of shock in our version, to turn the mirror back to the audience and say—this is you, this is me, this is all of us. And if we don’t like it, we better do something before we’ve reached the point of no return. Another shocking part of our concept is that we believe Salome is in fact a love story. How? You need to experience it to find out.

Q: What’s the one thing you’d want someone new to opera to know about Salome before seeing it?

Dinkova: This version is at once radically accessible—it’s in contemporary English—and radically ambitious—it is musically virtuosic and psychologically undeniable. The libretto is based on Oscar Wilde’s play, so it’s as close to a play rendered in song as opera gets. So there’s no barrier to understanding it or being moved by it - it’s a visceral, immediate experience that capitalizes on the soaring power and velocity of music without any of the pomp, circumstance, or pretension we might associate with opera.

Performances of Heartbeat Opera’s SALOME at The Space at Irondale from February 4 to 16. For tickets, click here.