If your reference point is Strauss’s lush, decadent fever dream, you can set that aside. Gerald Barry’s Salome takes Oscar Wilde’s play, dismantles it, rewires it, and sends it back out into the world as something closer to controlled chaos. It is sharp, strange, very funny in places, and occasionally veers into something that feels borderline deranged.
Making its Irish premiere at New Music Dublin 2026 with the National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, this is an opera with little interest in behaving itself. There is no languid dance of the seven veils. Instead, Salome types. Repeatedly. Obsessively. While everything around her begins to slip.
Barry’s own description of the work reads like a list of competing fixations: voyeurism, the moon, God, sex, hysteria, blood, typing, Frankenstein, The Blue Danube. On paper, it sounds excessive. In performance, it resolves into something far more deliberate and unsettling.
The outline of Wilde’s story is still there. Desire, power, rejection, and the consequences that follow. But Barry approaches it less as a tragedy and more as a kind of grotesque farce that keeps tipping into something darker. Characters fixate and repeat themselves. Language shifts between English and French. The orchestra does not simply accompany; it interrupts, provokes, and at times seems to join in.
Voices are pushed to their limits, often to the point where expression starts to feel mechanical. Moments that appear to offer clarity quickly dissolve into something more absurd. Even the famous demand for the head arrives almost offhandedly, as though it is just another item on an increasingly unhinged list of requests.
What emerges is not parody, but a tightly controlled kind of instability. There is a logic to it, but it is Barry’s logic, not Wilde’s, and not one that offers easy footing.
This performance reunites the original cast, with Alison Scherzer’s unflinching Salome at its centre, and Amy Ní Fhearraigh as a Queen who meets the chaos head-on. Under Jérôme Kuhn, the National Symphony Orchestra Ireland has the unenviable role of holding the whole thing together while it constantly threatens to come apart.
At just over an hour, the piece does not linger. It builds, escalates, and disappears before you have fully processed what you have seen.
That transience is part of its effect.
New Music Dublin has built its reputation on work that resists easy categorisation, and Salome sits squarely in that space. It is excessive, abrasive, occasionally ridiculous, and entirely compelling.
If you are looking for something polished and reassuring, this will not offer it. If you are looking for something that unsettles you slightly and stays with you afterwards, it very likely will.
Gerald Barry’s Salome will be performed at the National Concert Hall on Friday, 17 April at 7.30 pm as part of New Music Dublin 2026.
Visit www.newmusicdublin.ie for tickets.
Credit: Salome at the Theater Magdeburg (Photos: Edyata Dufaj)
