Peter Brook's Salome

In 1949, Brook was the director of productions at the Opera House, Covent Garden. From this privileged position, he started to work on Richard Strauss' Salome, with Oscar Wilde's libretto. He picked as stage designer a controversial figure at that time, Salvador Dali. Brook went to Spain not to work with Dali on a set, but on a "hallucinatory fantasy".

Before the production opening, Brook was writing: "Strauss' music is the hallucination-producing drug which induces the same emotional reaction as the highly stylised, artificial, rhetorical and elaborate visual imagery of Wilde's original... The task of the producer and designer is to find the same approach in "theatre style" which Wilde supplies in his dialogue."

Brook connected to Dali plagiaristically, he returned to London with an amazing portfolio. He remembers awkwardly Gala running after him to get a receipt for it. He did not understand why was she afraid of plagiarism or unauthorised sales. I guess seeing them working together was enough to understand the hysterical identification of Brook with Dali's ideas.

But the story is not over: on his way back, Brook experienced what his biographer, Michael Kustow, calls "an encounter that might have figured in a Dali nightmare." Brook was held and robbed in a forest by what the English press called "Spanish bandits" (some underground Republican militias), armed with rifles, machine guns and grenades. They took the car and all their belongings. Brook asked them if he can keep Dali's drawings in exchange of his silk pyjamas. The bandits tied everyone up and threw the designs at Brook's feet.

"I was as close to death a young life being extinguished as one could think - I know that I was terrified. But ten minutes later, I was only aware of the comic side of it" remembers Brook. His identification with Dali's work went so further that it denied the materiality of his own life, the only material connection to reality was given by the Salome drawings.

But the real attack came in London, where critics were unmerciful with Salome: one of them, Ernest Newman, wrote "Of the production in general, it is difficult to speak in the restrained language appropriate to a Sunday paper. One absurdity followed fast on the heels of another..."

Brook wrote an answer to his virulent critics containing "The critics all decided that Dali and I were only out to annoy them. There, at least, I might claim that they underestimated us; if that have been our intention I think that between us we might have done much worse..." This "us" reminds me a lot of Freud-Fliess connection and the long letters about another "us".

The first result was that Brook lost his job, his contract as Director of Productions at Covent Garden was not renewed in 1950. Musical Opinion's comment is remarkable: "his meteoric rise to such an exalted post at the age of twenty-seven was an artistic mistake on the part of authorities who should have had more respect for tradition than to permit it to be the plaything of a young experimentalist. "