Nearing the end of its 2024-25 season, the Metropolitan Opera has presented a new production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, with its Music Director in the pit and a noted German director, Claus Guth, in charge of onstage happenings. Since its staging, mise en scene, and Personenregie are all elements of just another auteurial contemporization (though a theatrically savvy one), I’ll reserve comment on it, and on the performances, till we’ve taken a look at the work itself and the extreme demands and opportunities attendant on its interpretation.
Of the two principal legatees of the 19th Century’s operatic traditions, Strauss and Puccini, it was Strauss who made the more definitive break. And while that break is certainly evident in his music, it was fundamentally dramaturgical. In four of the five operas on which his reputation stands, he forsook the E-19 protagonist couple metanarrative for other plot-and-character formulations, and in the fifth (Der Rosenkavalier) he and Hofmannsthal made a deliberately inverted, wistful use of it by way of farewell.(I) It was Salome that announced this break, and with a vengeance, though Strauss had run up warning flags in his earlier operatic attempts and above all in his tone poems, whose programmatic content had nothing to do with the metanarrative. The tone poems, though, did engage iconic cultural subjects with music that might be harmonically unsettling and orchestrally graphic, but could still be listened to on a more abstract level of contact with the subject, or even as “absolute” music, provided the listener can let go of symphonic structural expectations. Operas, even the few that are abstractly or symbolically conceived, cannot be received that way, and for Salome, Strauss took for his text an already notorious play by a once-acclaimed outcast playwright. He’d seen the play in Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of Oscar Wilde’s original French at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where the title role was played by Gertrud Eysoldt, a longtime leading actress of that famous ensemble, rivaled only by Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre for its influence on modern theatrical practice. That production had a long run for the time and place, and from all that we can learn it seems safe to attribute to it a revelatory artistic impact that translated directly into Strauss’ treatment of the subject.
An important part of that treatment was a re-purposing of late-E-19 voice types—specifically, Wagnerian ones. Strauss wrote for voices whose format (that is, their weights and resonance properties relative to their expected tessituras and range extensions) corresponded to Wagnerian models. But he demanded new behaviors of them. For instance, we recognize quickly what we think of as a Straussian soprano line, asking for the sustainment and shading of long, high phrases with an expert control of dynamics, and we can see this as an extension of Isolde’s Liebestod or the Siegfried Brünnhilde’s “Ewig war ich.” But Strauss also requires of his sopranos—especially in his two great tragedies, Salome and Elektra—an easy descent into the depths and a deftness and pointed strength of wordplay in the lower-middle range that Wagner would have reserved for his Beckmesser or, in a much gentler context, Eva in conversational mode. The part of Salome is full of this in her early scenes, often alternating with higher outbursts, and again in the final scene. In the former, for depth try “Wie schwarz es da drunten ist!” through to “Es ist wie eine Gruft,” (“How black it is down there! . . . It’s like a grave . . .”), down to the low G-flat, then sustaining low B-flat as she peers down into the cistern. For strong word-pointing, listen to the two pages beginning with “Warum sieht mich der Tetrach fortwährend so an?” through “brutale, ungeschlachter Römer mit ihrer plumpen Sprache” (“Why is the Tetrarch incessantly gazing at me? . . . [those] brutal, loutish Romans with their dull, clumsy speech.”) Note two things: first, how this tessitura hangs about just below and above the passaggio register transition, middle C to F, and second, how very like a jaded society woman Salome sounds upon her entrance, with her comment on the tiresome Jews, Egyptians, and Romans. It’s not only her creepy Stepdad Herod who’s chased her out for some fresh air, and she seems quite accustomed to dealing with it all. (Keep this observation in mind—I’ll be following up on it below.)
Footnotes
| ↑I | That is: the opening premise is exactly that of the E-19 story, i. e., a noble lover singing the praises of, and aspiring to, a married lady of higher station. And as the narrative proceeds its courtly manner is punctiliously enacted to music that makes us feel its pull. But while the admonition that the right people marry the right people is obeyed in terms of our emotional response, the class standings of the new couple are reversed (Octavian is the aristocrat, Sophie the daughter of new money with pretensions) and the happy ending is shaded by a sense of loss, of a societal transition that smacks more of inevitability than of “progress.” |
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