FIVE REASONS TO JOIN US FOR SALOME

In 1970 Seattle Opera promoted its first-ever production of Salome, the famous Bible-story shocker opera, with bumper stickers reading “Get a-head with Salome.” Sure, those were the glory days of cheesy marketing; but that approach was in fact appropriate for this fantastically over-the-top, campily outrageous show. By breaking every known bond of decency and ‘good taste,’ Salome turned Romanticism inside out and dragged all the arts kicking and screaming into the modern world. This masterpiece still has the power to shock, to intrigue, to provoke, to dazzle and delight and dismay and entertain and annoy and everything else one might want from a great night at the theater. Among Salome’s many attractions:

Kissing a severed head.
The Gospel according to Matthew tells us how the daughter of Herodias demanded they bring her John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter. But in this version, Salome then goes on to make love to the severed head, dying at the climax of the opera’s horrifyingly stupendous seventeen-minute conclusion. It’s like watching a train-wreck in slow motion—so awful and terrifying, you can’t look away.

We have Oscar Wilde to thank for this twisted spin on an old story. The great Irish playwright, poet, personality, and martyr-hero for the queer world wrote this Salome in 1892. His version inverts Romantic cliché and dramatizes the struggle (which Wilde knew all too well) between stern Puritanical asceticism and hedonistic overindulgence. Wilde explores extremes of unrequited longing and vengeful agonies of spurned desire while anticipating what the writer would later assert in The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “Each man kills the thing he loves.”

Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration of Salome’s final line, “I have kissed your mouth, John”

Death by mega-orchestra.
Where else can you go to the theater and hear a sound like this? The orchestra pit at McCaw Hall was designed for shows like Salome, which features 81 players on 39 different instruments. Wilde’s play was made into an opera in 1905 by Richard Strauss, German conductor/composer whose masterful ability to deploy a huge orchestra built the bridge between opera music and film music. Who but Strauss could have figured out how to portray in music the terrifying sound of the beating wings of the angel of death, fluttering over King Herod’s palace? Or have crafted John the Baptist’s stirringly noble entrance music, or Salome’s lushly sensuous Dance of the Seven Veils? Who but Strauss would have illustrated Salome’s impatience, as she waits for the executioner to behead the man who rejected her, with maddeningly pinched high notes, stabbed over and over by sforzando double basses playing way up in the range of the violin? Like Daphne, which we heard at McCaw Hall a few months ago, Salome is a tour de force for orchestra, and requires a symphony and conductor at the very top of their game.

 

Arpad Schmidhammer’s 1906 cartoon of “The New Orchestra of Richard Strauss”

Dance your Seven Veils…and then sing!
If Salome pushes a mighty orchestra to its limits, the title role poses an even greater challenge to the world’s leading sopranos. Salome is onstage for almost the entire (100-minute) opera; she sings and sings and sings, exulting in lascivious detail over every bit of John the Baptist’s body, then has to perform her Dance of the Seven Veils (disrobing in order to tantalize her lecherous step-father), and THEN, when she’s already exhausted, must sing that huge final climactic scene of love and death. Not to mention: what a character! What a challenge for an actor! Salome is a neglected, abused child; a spoiled and pampered princess; a young innocent, discovering love and desire for the first time; a master manipulator, wrapping men around her little finger, toying with her admirers like a cat with mice; and a vicious goddess, wreaking her depraved and fearsome revenge on an enfeebled and worn-out world.

At Seattle Opera, creating this complex character for the first time in her career, is Brenda Rae. She wowed us when she first came to Seattle for the title role of Semele, another manipulative nympho whose vanity, arrogance, and insatiable desire led to tragedy. As Semele she deployed her beautiful soprano voice in the acrobatics of Handel’s dazzling coloratura. But in Salome we’ll hear how Rae’s voice has grown since then, developing a heft and edge to slice through Strauss’s monstrous orchestra. Plus—this time, we’ll see her dancing!

 

Franz von Stuck’s 1906 painting of Salome

A pool onstage.
This sleek, stylish production of Salome comes to Seattle from Oscar Wilde’s hometown of Dublin, where it was first performed by Irish National Opera. Director Bruno Ravella and designer Leslie Travers set the story’s ancient conflict between sacred and profane in a grim modern concrete bunker wrapped around a vision of paradise: a garden which then rises up to reveal a water feature. John the Baptist performs his namesake activity in the pool, and rain pours down to wash away the burden of sin John says Salome has inherited from her mother Herodias. The clean, uncluttered visuals omit eschew any Orientalist femme fatale kitsch traditionally associated with Salome, focus attention on the opera’s intense psychodrama, and leave plenty of room for Strauss’s creepy-crawly music to send shivers down our spines.

 

Sinéad Campbell Wallace & Tómas Tómasson as Salome and Jokanaan in Irish National Opera’s Salome
Photo Patricio Cassinoni

Extreme opera.
All opera is extreme; just Salome is more extreme than most. It’s transgressive; it goes beyond any normal, accepted limit. (As in Spinal Tap, “Ours goes up to 11.”) What’s the genre of Salome? Hard to say; it’s certainly unlike any other show you’ve ever seen. It doesn’t have much in common with Wilde’s other theater-pieces, delightfully droll drawing-room comedies like An Ideal Husband or The Importance of Being Earnest. And Richard Strauss, who was just finding his voice as an opera composer, never wrote anything quite like Salome again (even if Elektra and Daphne are similarly intense one-actors pitting soprano vs. huge orchestra). Really, Salome creates its own genre: an unforgettable, inimitable amalgam of decadent romance, black comic satire, grisly horror, and heart-breaking tragedy. This is opera to the nth degree. You don’t want to miss it.

 

“Bring me the head of Richard Strauss!”
1905 Cartoon by Oskar Garvens