“The secret of love is greater than the secret of death,” declaims Richard Strauss’ Salome as she contemplates the severed head of John the Baptist in the composer’s searing one-act opera. Salome, the object of the lust of her stepfather Herod—the Biblical tyrant who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents—was enamored of the prophet (Jochanaan in the opera) who foretold Christ’s coming in his own time.
Contemplating him while he is imprisoned in a well, where Herod cast him to punish slurs against his wife Herodias, Salome’s obsession with the prophet turns out to be as intense as his rejection of her. Resisting her wiles, Jochanaan curses her, sending her into murderous rage. When Herod asks Salome to dance for him, she demurs until he promises her anything she wants. After the dance, she asks for Jochanaan’s severed head. Herod implores her to take anything else—his treasures, his peacocks, half his kingdom, the mantle of the high priest, even the Holiest of Holies—but to no avail. The browbeaten ruler gives in and commands that Jochanaan’s head be cut off and given to Salome. Delectating in her power over the object of her obsession, she lasciviously kisses Jochanaan’s head, driving the disgusted Herod to order her death as well.
Obviously, this isn’t Mozart, and the performance history of Salome has not been easy. The Biblical Salome and her terrible deed appear in a handful of Gospel verses, but the Western imagination adopted her as a trope explored, among others, in literature by Gustave Flaubert and Stéphane Mallarmé, in painting by Gustave Moreau, and in drama by Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s French-language play of the same name, first published in 1893, invited associations with that author, who was denounced for his ‘decadence’ and ended up serving a life-breaking prison term for homosexuality. Wilde’s play remained prohibited from public performance in the United Kingdom until the 1930s.
Long before then, Richard Strauss saw a German stage production and adopted it as his first successful opera. A landmark of musical history from its 1905 premiere, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany denounced it as “filth,” to which Strauss, by no means a radical in any sense despite his searing score and provocative subject, quipped, “That filth is building my villa in Garmisch.” The villa still stands and remains in family ownership today, and the opera keeps its place as a guilty pleasure of the standard repertoire. The Metropolitan Opera famously canceled its premiere production after the first performance in 1907 and did not stage it again until 1934. Salome is believed to be the first opera in which a lead singer appeared naked, an exploit claimed by the soprano Carol Neblett in 1973.
Bold decadence is to be expected, but the Paris revival of Lydia Steier’s production, which premiered here in 2022, had as its major draw the role debut of the superstar Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, who has marched steadily through Strauss’ other major soprano parts and the lighter side of Richard Wagner’s soprano repertoire. As in many of those performances, the voice still has a way to go—a tall cliff for a role that Strauss said should be sung by a sixteen-year-old with the voice of Isolde, the towering high dramatic soprano title role in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Glorious high notes resounded with a splendid, full-bodied sound, but alas, the lower register necessary to make the part truly chilling remained elusive. Salome’s line quoted above, for example, needs to end on a sepulchral low G, but the note came out rather muted. Still, there can be no doubt that Davidsen has a splendid future, and her subsequent performances as Salome may equal the greats of yesteryear.
However, Steier’s gloomy production is a poor platform for such a talented singer. Like many productions dealing with overweening power, hers succumbs too easily to the temptation to set the work in a modern police state. Momme Hinrichs’s set is a concrete prison yard with high gray walls, and Jochanaan’s well is replaced by a dungeon with an elevator. A pit at stage right serves as a dumping ground for various dead bodies. A red-lit picture window reveals Herod’s court, a debauched and hypersexualized milieu where intercourse is casual and the connection between sex and death is portrayed in lurid detail.
For all its ‘shock value,’ the approach is unoriginal. Sir David McVicar’s production across the Channel at the Royal Opera House is also a gray prison. Jürgen Flimm’s Met production, which is due to be replaced next season, introduced debauched modern surroundings and an elevator-accessible dungeon more than twenty years ago. If there is not much new here, Steier’s hypersexualization of Herod and his milieu creates a logical chasm. We see pornographic depictions of his court, and Salome’s dance is reduced to a violent but rather clumsily concealed group sex act. Yet we know from the libretto that the ruler is timorous in his obsession with Salome, feels a keen haunting by the supernatural, and fundamentally fears God. If Herod presides over unbridled decadence, why is Salome’s indulgence in it so objectionable that he expends his longest scene trying to talk her out of Jochanaan’s murder and then orders her to be killed? The subtleties of obsession, which Strauss took from Wilde, in words as well as in music, are lost in garish condemnation of what Steier may imagine to be a brutal patriarchal world. And in that, much of the work is lost.
Davidsen’s qualified success stood out for international praise, but the rest of the cast also turned in a splendid performance. Johan Reuter’s Jochanaan was stentorian, devastating, and defiant. The tenor Gerhard Siegel owns the role of Herod on stages around the world and brought fine acting and a distinctive pinched sound to the ruler and his menace. Ekaterina Gubanova’s outlandish costume did nothing to cover up her splendid mezzo as it unveiled Herodias. Pavol Breslik sang more weakly as the officer Narraboth, whose own obsession for Salome goes unrecognized to the point of his suicide, but the character is far from strong. A supporting cast filled in the character of Herod’s dissipated court. Mark Wigglesworth led a slow performance that could have done much more to energize Strauss’s score.
