Salome

This evening I went to the opera of 8 pm, in the Staatsoper Berlin at Unter den Linden. Paid 7 euro for a ticket, which is dirt cheap indeed but gets you only a "Hörplatz", which means you literally can't see a thing. Luckily, lots of places in that part (at the utter left, on the top floor) were empty so I was able to "upgrade" to a place of 16 euro, where I could see most of the Bühne with some stretching of back and neck.
The hall is very nice, exactly as one would imagine a classy opera building. Check out the Fotogalerie.
The play itself was Salome by Richard Strauss, which is based on a play by Oscar Wilde. The story is actually quite fucked up, with a drunk king, an imprisoned prophet and a manipulative, murderous bitch princess. One would expect an opera to be about love and passion and sweet things - which this was, but distorted and over-the-top with a strong undercurrent of human excesses. Seems like the public on the original viewings thought about the same, the play was forbidden or censored on many occasions.
Captivating story though, I wasn't bored for a minute.

The decor was kind of a desillusion, as I expected an opera decor to be lush and baroque with false perspective, plants, gold and candles and all that stuff - kind of like the opera hall itself. None of that though, only the most necessary of attributes were there, the multiple floors consisting of off-the-shelf scaffolding with some canvas. Funny thing too: the soldiers carried machine guns and wore modern uniforms, where the king and the prophet wore ancient clothes. Old and new seemed to be mixed randomly.
That didn't matter much, though, as the singing, music and acting were excellent. Very impressive how the actors managed to bring a dramatic story like this on stage and let their voice fill a whole opera hall - not amplified.
Good thing were the projected texts synchronised with the singing (in German), which were a great help to understand the storyline.

The picture is an official one from the website, with different actors than those I saw. It shows Herodias, the angry wife of Herod (who is in the back). Salome is dancing for Herod, much to the disgust of Herodias. Salome is Herod's stepdaughter.

The names and storyline are based on stories out of the Bible, bit I don't know how original they are. Should check that out.