How old is Salome when she dances for Herod and the head of John the Baptist? The Bible is ambiguous. In Aubrey Beardsley’s famous illustrations, she seems to shapeshift: at times, she looks young and androgynous, in other instances, she seems almost wizened, a crone older than Jochanaan. Is she 8 or 12 or 16 or 25? A young woman coming into a newfound sexual power, or a child who has had sexuality forced upon her from the time she could walk? In Claus Guth’s stellar new production of Salome, she is all of these ages and none.
Staged in deepest black and dingy white, Guth’s production is unapologetic in its symbolism. It opens on a girl playing with a doll in relative silence. She breaks off its arms moments before that famous clarinet solo announces the beginning of the opera proper. There’s a ram-headed statue in the corner of the cavernous black palace hall; animal-masked men menace a nude female dancer, her face also covered with a cat mask. When Salome descends into the cistern, a white-faced Jochanaan sits in one corner. In the other is a rocking horse along with other nursery toys. The same little girl from the prologue sits partly shaded from view. Phallic imagery (ram’s horns, spears, knives, play-swords) and dolls are everywhere. Salome herself is dressed like a doll. Her clothes are those of a very young girl, hung uneasily on a grown woman’s body.
SEE ALSO: How Soprano Elza van den Heever Is Tackling the Met’s ‘Salome’ Head On—or Off!
For Guth, Salome is first and foremost a story about sexual trauma: how it breaks apart a person, upends her agency, and warps her desires. This reading results in an intelligently directed and viciously watchable production by Guth and choreographer Sommer Ulrickson. Like all good Salomes, it’s deeply nasty. This opera is decadent, rancid, and marvelous, from its simile-laden libretto to its luscious score. Unlike many Salomes, Guth’s production has something to say about trauma.
With four planned productions of this story (not all by Strauss) in New York this year, we are living in the age of Salome. Sometimes such programming synchronicities just happen (sometimes they are even intentional), but I think this confluence of Salomes bespeaks a reckoning with opera’s past at the exact moment that women reckon with our present social and political reality. Earlier this year, Elizabeth Dinkova’s production for Heartbeat Opera insisted on inverting the gaze back onto the men, stripping Herod and Jochanaan both. It also seems that the rot cannot be removed; sometimes the whole family tree must be burned down. Guth’s production has very different aims. Salome is sadder here, her protests at Herod’s attempted seductions less bratty and more truly defiant. Salome is surprisingly sympathetic, even when she demands Jochanaan’s head. Of all things, we are rooting for her.
We’re also living in the age of Elza van den Heever, whom I suspect is the most outstanding Strauss soprano of her generation. Van den Heever was so searingly good as the Empress in the Met’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (where she got to play a much less complicated heroine) that it’s almost difficult to envision her as someone so young and so relentlessly screwed-up as Salome. Then she opens her mouth and out pour rivers of controlled, sparkling, and nuanced sound. Van den Heever’s Salome is anything but shrill; instead, the singer leverages her natural warmth to imbue Salome with a pitiable sensitivity, even as she swings wildly between aggressor and victim.
Her co-stars aren’t too shabby either, particularly Peter Mattei as Jochanaan and Piotr Buszewski’s Narraboth. Mattei, covered in white body paint with painful-looking skinned knees, seemed equally fascinated with Van den Heever’s princess as she was with him. His voice is powerful and a bit on the dry side, as if Jochanaan had been crying out in the wilderness for a long time. Buszewski brought a delectable tenor sound as the desperate captain who, in this production, impales himself on Salome’s spear (she barely notices). Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, decked out in a spectacularly hideous orange dress and wig, offers a Herodias who hides in fashion, while tenor Gerhard Siegel was a wonderfully nasal and histrionic Herod. All had to contend with Strauss’s colossal score, here played with brassy vigor by the orchestra and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
During the Dance of the Seven Veils, Guth and Ulrickson cash in all their symbolic checks. Salome “reveals” herself by unveiling six past versions of herself; first a child of only three or four, followed by girls of growing ages and heights. They each “dance” with a ram-headed double of Herod, who at first menaces and then openly abuses them, until finally, the current version comes to stab Herod’s doppelgänger as her stepfather watches in horror and arousal. The implications couldn’t be clearer; Herod has been raping her for years.
This is a shocking production not for its depravity, but for its honesty. It slices clean through the knot of euphemisms and the piling-up similes of the opera’s libretto, and—ironically, like the anti-poetic and thoroughly evil Herodias—insists on calling the moon the moon. What Herod has done to Salome, under the eye of her own selfish and ineffectual mother, has trapped her with her past selves and torpedoed her development. She’s unable to be the age she really is, having been simultaneously infantilized and forced into the adult world. The Dance is Salome’s way of witnessing her own trauma, of showing Herod back to himself. He doesn’t get it, but we do.
Some tableaux are truly stomach-flipping for their vile brilliance: Salome rubbing her face on the still-bleeding neck of a decapitated Jochanaan, Salome singing to the head as it rests on the shoulders of one of her younger doppelgängers, Salome resting her head in the space where Jochanaan’s should be. Guth’s production is not perfect. At times, its meanings are scattered, and it gets bogged down in symbolism. The projections are largely unnecessary, with one exception: when Herod worries about the wind, the projections make the whole stage shiver. A troupe of animal-masked dancers that haunted the background of many scenes felt overused after the first.
But the final cistern scene, in which Salome finally kisses the head, is a masterstroke. She is alone with the head yet still surrounded by all the versions of herself. The cistern suggests that Salome has never left this nursery-prison. We fear she might never leave it. But this production’s final moments make a bolder and better choice. Just as Herod calls for Salome’s death, the tetrarch himself collapses. As the black palace rooms recede, a blood-daubed Salome rises through the floor, coming face to face with the moon. She leaves her six other selves on the stairs and walks off into the night, Herod dead in her wake. The lights come down, catching her in freeze-frame. It’s an ambiguous ending, but it’s also a triumph. So is this production.
