Met’s new “Salome” mixes dark backstory with vocal, orchestral bravura
Strauss’s Salome returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening in a new production by Claus Guth. It is Guth’s first assignment at the Met, coming rather late in the 61-year-old German opera director’s career. For those who have wondered why a sixteen-year-old girl can be so emotionally twisted and sexually depraved, he provides one answer.
With the house completely dark, a small girl in a black velvet dress with a white collar and black bow appears center stage with a doll. There is no music; rather, eerie tinkling sounds. She is not playing with the doll, but dismembering it. When she slams the doll to the floor, the clarinetist plays the ascending scale, which begins the opera.
In these few seconds, Guth establishes that Salome was one disturbed little girl. They also helped to still the audience, which was needed, as a loud wisecrack about a cellphone prompted a burst of laughter in the darkened house.
Nonetheless, the scene is unnecessary. The first few measures alone establish mood and foreshadow the story’s trajectory. Guth’s deep dive into Salome’s psyche doesn’t require a prelude that Strauss didn’t write.
The director further updates the action to the late Victorian era from Galilee in the early first century C.E. This corresponds to when Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy, on which the opera is based, was first published in French in 1893. Instead of a stone and marble palace, Herod resides in an austere mansion. The main room is black, while the cellar, in which Jochanaan languishes chained to the walls, is an eerie white. Guth employs the Met’s stage elevators to transition between the two scenes.
Egyptians are among the guests at the party that opens the opera, and Guth runs with that as a theme. The stage is dominated by a large statue of an Egyptian deity with the head of a ram. The rowdy partygoers wear similar outfits, cavorting with a beautiful naked blond woman whom they hoist high above their heads. Guth leaves no doubt that Herod’s palace is a hotbed of lasciviousness.
The opening tableau and updating apart, Guth mostly sticks to the plot. His twist is to illuminate the reason for Salome’s warped psyche. From early childhood, she was sexually abused. There is not one Salome, but seven of different ages, all dressed in the identical black dress, which infantilizes and fetishizes them. The younger ones silently witness the oldest Salome’s descent into madness, including a very young one sitting on a shelf holding a teddy bear as Salome attempts to seduce Jochanaan.
Wilde’s play is awash with symbolism, and Guth provides it. The silver mirror and tray upon which Salome demands that Jochanaan’s severed head be delivered to her are the same. Servants hold them to reflect the Dance of the Seven Veils, but the head is brought to Salome by one of her younger selves cradled in her arms, not on a silver platter. More subtle is the use of video to depict the winds and whirl of insects that haunt Herod. The stage is bathed in soft light from the large moon, just as called for, as Herod orders his servants to kill Salome.
Guth does not shy away from depicting sex and gore. Apart from the beautiful blonde, there is no other nudity, but plenty of steamy action. Narraboth gropes and mounts Salome, as she manipulates him into letting her speak to Jochanaan. More than once, Salome clutches her dress and begins to masturbate. The beheaded Jochanaan sits bound to his chair, his neck a bloody stump.
Not one, but seven Salomes perform the Dance of the Seven Veils to Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Met Orchestra’s dazzling, sensuous playing. It was gripping and horrifying to watch the seven Salomes relive the trauma of their childhood. The youngest slipped their veils and danced like marionettes clutched tight to a male teacher. The cane he used to punish them became a spear in the oldest Salome that pierced him through the heart. Without baring an inch of flesh, Guth made the Dance of the Seven Veils the emotional climax that Strauss intended.
Elza van den Heever embodied Strauss’s description of the singer he desired in this role as “a 16-year-old princess with the voice of Isolde.” The black dress visually infantilized Salome, while van den Heever’s complete immersion in the psyche of a teenage girl did so dramatically. Her transformation into a sexually charged woman was achieved by slipping out of the dress. A simple white sheath made all the difference, but was no symbol of innocence.
Van den Heever has ventured into Wagner (and Beethoven’s Leonore) but steered clear of Isolde. Her luminous soprano, however, mostly does full justice to Salome. The role extends downward into the contralto range, and there she struggled to be heard. Above the staff, it was another matter with van den Heever’s voice slicing through the dense orchestra with ease and beauty. The soprano not only conquered but triumphed in this notoriously difficult role.
Peter Mattei thundered as Jochanaan, sight unseen. Placing him in the pit, rather than amplification, created the volume and force. Mattei’s Jochanaan was cadaverously thin and ashen white as the fearsome and fearless prophet who berates Herodius and bewitches her daughter. It’s a one-dimensional role to which Mattei brings his characteristic nuance as a singer and actor.
Tenor Gerhard Siegel’s dark-suited Herod dominated the stage. Siegel captured the king’s lewdness, but also his mysticism, enthralled by Jochanaan’s holiness and power. Wearing a lurid orange wig and ruched velvet gown of the same color, Michelle DeYoung’s Herodias was called upon to do little more than pose, snipe at her husband, and sip champagne. All she had to do was knock on the wall, and a trap door opened to reveal a hand holding a bottle.
Piotr Buszewski’s Narraboth was forthright in voice and character. Besotted by the forbidden fruit of a princess, he wasn’t driven to suicide by Salome’s depravity, but accidentally impaled on a baluster she had removed from a staircase. As the Page, Tamara Mumford, a participant in the Met’s Lindemann Young Artists Development Program, also made a vivid impression.
Nézet-Séguin led the Met Orchestra in a performance in which orchestral color dazzled as much as the silvery, silken sheen of sound. He was attentive to balance, but on rare occasions, enthusiasm got the better of him. Aside from that, he sculpted a performance of intricate detail that captured the full arc of the drama.
There was one final departure from the libretto. After Herod orders his guards to kill Salome, she simply walks to the rear of the stage, bathed in moonlight. It was a cathartic, transcendent moment in which Salome triumphed over her past.
Salome runs through May 24. metopera.org
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