Author: Jos Hermans
Oscar Wilde noted that his intention with Salome was to write a play about "a woman dancing with her bare feet in the blood of a man she craved for and had slain." He derailed the sexual obsession and lust of a young teenage girl as evil incarnate. Nothing, he claimed, can be as evil than the innocent erotic desires that are evoked from her unconscious.
And so in the finale of Richard Strauss' opera of the same name, we see the monster created by Wilde go down during a perverted love death. There is no catharsis. In Paris, Lydia Steier is inviting us to consider some corrections through a feminist reading that restores Salome to her capacity as the most humane character in the play.
First, she places the 16-year-old in a guilty landscape, amid the excesses of an extremely depraved society. Holding up a mirror to art lovers of their own dystopian reality is never a bad idea. Dramaturg Maurice Lenhard clarifies, "For stage director Lydia Steier, Salome is a not a victim. She is a woman who sees no way out of the corrupt system in which she lives. A system that makes her suffer and drives her to become an extremist. Her environment fuels her radicalisation. The society in which Lydia Steier sets this opera has lost all order of values. How far do we go if everything is possible? If the fate of others no longer touches us, if we only derive amusement from destruction? "
Momme Hinrich's set is a concrete-gray wall around a courtyard with a rusty staircase on the right leading to the hoary-lit room where Herod receives guests for his birthday party. These guests, visible through a large rectangular window, indulge in a barbaric orgy in which boys and particularly beautiful girls are abused, wrapped as gifts with only a red ribbon around their loins. The victims are also murdered, dismembered, before being wrapped in a bloody sheet before finally being thrown into a ditch by servants in safety suits sprinkling their remains with quicklime. It is of a violence that is shocking but also fits seamlessly to the explosive mixture of violence and eroticism that will rise from the orchestra pit for two hours. The opera thus takes on the character of an eschatological parable of doom as rarely before.
The soldiers are equipped as in video games. Tansel Akzeybek plays and sings a highly committed Narraboth. In the contact with Jochanaan, the 16-year-old princess discovers her sexuality. Her looks are gothic, with black bottines, black hair and a white blouse closed to the neck. "Stylizing herself as ultra-chaste is a radicalization that can only stem from an extreme detachment from her family," Steier believes. Jochanaan, confined in a cage raised from the cistern, is urged to calm himself with a stun gun during his presumptuous discourse. Iain Paterson is at times drowned out by the orchestra. Both in terms of vocal projection and gravitas, he falls a bit short. After his curse, Salome stills her surging urges in a masturbation act on the roof of the cage, resulting in a double orgasm, onstage and in the orchestra pit. Needless to say, the terrific second interlude is again the orchestral highlight of the evening.
Upon Herod's appearance, a tribune is rolled out for the guests. John Daszak is a fantastic Herod, a role in which he has grown since Romeo Castellucci's reading of the same work in Salzburg (2018). Here he is allowed more space by the director to show off his acting skills. It may be due to the recording but the voice immediately sounded very present, very clear, exquisitely articulated and without the narrowness in timbre that sometimes marred his performance. This is the best performance I have seen from Daszak to date. The Nazarenes are characterized as drag queens, the Jews as fat cigar-smoking dandies, dressed in the vein of Oscar Wilde. The scherzo with the bickering Jews was rarely so irritating and at the same time so musical. Herodias, a grotesque character with latex breasts and pierced nipples, flirts with the soldiers. The part does not suit Karita Matilla's voice very well.
The seven veils are the seven garments Herod extracts from Salome's body before raping her. The slow waltz seems to call for group participation. This is how Wim Vandekeybus had choreographed it in Amsterdam : as the collective dance of death of a world in decay. Steier follows with a gang rape. It serves as an alibi for Salome to move on to her terrorist act: demanding Jochanaan's head. From being an extremist, she becomes a terrorist. Her parents' system must disappear.
The solution Steier came up with for the finale comes close to a catharsis. Salome is duplicated in, on the one hand, a bloody extra who frolics with the prophet's head in a plastic bag and, on the other hand, the soprano who continues her ecstasy of the third scene in the cage together with the prophet who rejected her. By slowly hoisting the cage into the stage tower, the scene works as a transfiguration. "Man töte dieses Weib!" cries the tetrarch from the stairs just before he is, not entirely unexpectedly, shot down by his female page.
Strauss characterized Salome as a princess with an Isolde voice. And an Isolde is probably in the offing for Elza van den Heever as well. The timbre is warm, the vibrato is always under control, there are no passagio problems, and she finishes the finale with the dramatic bravura of an Isolde. An outstanding debut.
The absence of music director Gustavo Dudamel at this season opener was remarkable. Simone Young managed to project the space-filling, lush orchestral sound in all its violence into the auditorium. Often it is the low instruments that define the sound : the thunderclouds of the timpani, the morbidly resonant double basses, the pedal notes in the organ. But the soloistic statements also come out well : the bassoon and clarinet in the second interlude, the crystalline flutes and cello in the Dance, the penetrating high b-flat of the double bass during the murder of the prophet.
Watch the show at Medici TV, L’Opéra chez soi, Mezzo