Child sex abuse. “There are many indications that she [Salome] was sexually abused by him [Herod],” Guth tells us. Oh? Where? Her second line (“Warum sieht mir der Tetrarch,” etc.) is not that of a girl accustomed to encounters; that girl would know why. That Herod has developed a lust for her is obvious—so has Narraboth, don’t look at her!—but trawling the text for these indications, I don’t find any. We will discover them, I believe, only in the fevered brain of our auteur. But see the next item.

The dance. Who’s been paying for the ballet lessons? My guess is Herodias. Not literally, of course, but through the example of her behavior. Jochanaan has been invoking the wrath of the Lord on both Salome’s stepfather and her mother, the latter specifically on the grounds of her extreme sexual liberality, and it is the condemnations of the mother, not of Herod, that have intrigued Salome. She knows instantly what he’s referring to, and insists on it with the soldiers and Narraboth. And that is what leads her to lay the seductive moves she’s learned from her mother on Narraboth to summon the prophet into the open air. Surely the general ambience of the court also plays a role. Night after Galilean night, after all, what’s to distract us at dinner time?—bring on the dancing girls. She’s gotten good at it, enjoys it, and has seen the power it exerts over men.

Guth uses the Dance of the Seven Veils as the turning point of his scenario, in which he upends the tragic tale of a young woman with plenty of agency who uses the dance to get what she wants and pays for it with her life, into the story of a long-abused victim who acquires some agency with the dance and then magically strides off into a presumably halcyon future with a strong whiff of #MeToo in the smokey air—words, music, and elementary common sense to the contrary notwithstanding. To do this, he employs the six extra Salomes he’s had tagging along through the action to represent earlier stages of his victim’s oft-transgressed girlhood, one veil per girl, with the 16-year-old Salome acting as dance master and yanking the veils.^(I) By this means, with the now senselessly Oriental music winding along, she sticks it to Herod, if we buy it. And many did. Guth is a practiced creator of theatre effects, and with the little coup at the opera’s end, the thudding chords that were written to underscore the blows of the soldiers’ shields now standing in for triumphant exit music, they cheered and clapped for his tacky tabloid tale with its utterly unearned happy end.