Strauss’s ‘Salome’ in concert (2nd review)

What was the fuss about? The libretto, to begin with, was an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s hyper-decadent stage play, Salome, which included a literal striptease followed by the decapitation of a saint and a love act performed on the head of the corpse. After Verdi and Wagner, opera was hardly decorous, but this was uncharted territory for the bourgeois stage. Strauss himself had been criticized for his previous opera, Feuersnot, which had featured a female orgasm portrayed musically by the orchestra. But Salome involved a version of the Biblical story in Mark and Matthew, including the putative temptation of Christian tradition’s third holiest personage, John the Baptist (called here by his Hebrew name, Jochanaan). Certainly it was a long way from the Gospels to Oscar Wilde.

Strauss had another figure in mind as well. Although he had made his reputation with a series of orchestral tone poems, Strauss’s ultimate ambition lay with opera, and with Salome the die was cast: From then on until the mid-1940s, his compositional efforts were overwhelming directed toward the stage. For a German composer to take on opera, however, meant taking on Wagner. Strauss’s first two operas were clearly indebted to him. With Salome, Strauss intended to compete head-on with the master.

Biblical liberties

The lush score, for a huge post-Romantic orchestra including six horns and six clarinets, is woven from a series of key leitmotifs — the signature innovation of Wagnerian opera — placed at the service of a tale of erotomania and sexual depravity. Wagner had placed adulterous love frankly onstage with Tristan und Isolde, even if the lovers’ passion was idealized and ultimately doomed. This concept was seen as culturally liberating by such figures as Nietzsche, but Wagner appeared to at least partially repent in Parsifal, the ode to Christian legend that was his final work. Strauss, in Salome, not only represented passion in the frankest terms — he had already done that in Feuersnot — but tied it to one of the most tragic episodes in the New Testament: the beheading of St. John.

Salome was the daughter of Herodias, the wife of Herod the Great, King of Judaea. She is not mentioned in the Bible; rather, an unnamed dancing girl is depicted as entertaining Herod at a banquet. Wilde conflated Salome with the girl and made her the object of Herod’s incestuous lust; at the same time he portrayed her own lust for the captive prophet John, who thunders his prophecies against the corrupt court. Spurned by John, Salome is begged by a besotted Herod to dance for him, and she does so, but only on the condition that he grant her any wish. The dance is meant to end with Salome’s nudity, and some performers, including Catherine Malfitano, have played it that way (stripped to a body stocking for our own primmer times).

Placating the critics

When Salome states her wish for John’s head, an appalled Herod (a far cry from the historical figure, who killed at least three of his sons) tries to divert her, but is forced by his oath to comply. Salome cradles and kisses the severed head on the mouth, and the opera ends suddenly with the cohort of Jewish priests that has served as a chorus surrounding and killing her. This happens so quickly that there can be no suggestion of a moral order being restored; rather, it is Strauss and his librettist, Hedwig Lachmann, anticipating the critics’ scandalized reaction to their erotic display.

As for the real Salome, no such fate awaited her; she was favorably commented on by historians and lived into her 70s or 80s.

Strauss’s music is rich and abounding, and Salome’s dance — the celebrated Dance of the Seven Veils — is one of the great moments of musical Orientalism. The score was also notable for the powerfully dissonant chord that punctuates its action at measure 360 of the final scene, which generated as great a controversy as the opera’s subject itself. Mahler took due note of its effect, trumping it with an even more prolonged such chord in his Tenth Symphony.

One of Strauss’s ambitions in Salome was to distill the Wagnerian style into a more normally scaled operatic experience. In this ambition he succeeded: Salome runs in a single uninterrupted act that lasts just under two hours. Despite its scope, moreover, it’s easily accommodated by a single set and has frequently been staged in a concert version with singers to the fore.

Homoerotic fantasy

The Philadelphia Orchestra presentation, a collaborative effort with the Opera Company of Philadelphia, opted for an elevated performance space set to the rear of the stage. This staging made the Orchestra the star of the performance, and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin lost no opportunity to exploit it. The singers had to make heroic exertions to rise above the tides of sound, but soprano Camilla Nylund (Salome) and bass baritone Alan Held (Jochanaan) were up to the task, although John Mac Master’s querulous Herod and Birgit Remmert’s static Herodias were less well realized.

Nylund, who did her own dancing, fluttered but did not dispense with her veils, diaphanously designed by Vita Tzykun. Less credible was Salome’s lustful description of the dusty desert prophet’s blackest of black hair, whitest of white skin, and reddest of red lips. This is clearly Wilde’s own homoerotic fantasy, but Strauss’s music seeks to convey the involuntary sexual allure of Jochanaan’s ecstatic vision and prophetic drive. This is the force his Salome responds to and yearns to incorporate into herself, one way or another.

To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.