So, at the Metropolitan Opera we’ve had this entertainment of Claus Guth’s, advertised as Salome, with terrific words pinched from Oscar Wilde and terrific music swiped from Richard Strauss. From the standpoint of critical principle, there is nothing to be said about it beyond what’s implied in the preceding paragraph. One either subscribes to the auteurial dispensation, in which case the director may, to cop a phrase, “do whatever the hell he wants,” or one doesn’t, and he mayn’t. Belonging to the latter camp, I’ll pick out two or three salient points for brief comment, and write a few words about the performances.

Time and place: I should precede the noun “contemporization” with the adjective “relative.” In a program interview, Guth asks us to consider the time of the opera’s creation, one of technological, intellectual, and social turbulence, “. . . a moment when everything seems to explode, when time accelerates, and art veers off in many directions.” He is arguing, in other words, for a time-of-composition setting. That time was, at least in retrospect, as he describes, and no doubt Guth means us to connect it to our own. But please: disruptive as those times were and are, they are small potatoes when compared with the epochal one of the original, as suggested above, and it was from his vision of that that Strauss’ overwhelming music flowed. Don’t worry, fin de siecle Europe is already there, in the music. We’re meant to hear the one and see the other.

Setting: Claus, this is an outdoor show. The lush garden in the Palestinian night, that moon of projected aspects, the sense of space for all the garden’s inhabitants.^(I) And the sense of what’s seen and heard from offstage, the supper inside the palace, the sounds of the Baptist’s voice from below, and then on his emergence: “Wo ist er? . . . and then, “Wo ist SIE?“, declaimed out into the world, not sung to himself in the basement. Given the reversal, the basement set (by Etienne Pluss) is a good one, very atmospheric in its very wrong way, and the Met can save some storage expense by throwing out the redundant one for Fidelio, just seen. Inside or out, we don’t need the rope for Jochanaan. An effect without a cause. This guy’s not going anywhere.^(II) The upstairs setting (a big, dark room in a big, dark house, everyone in black and standing at attention) succeeds only in suppressing any sense of space and color, and in rendering the personages of the opening scenes anonymous.