Lusted after by one powerful man and rejected by another, a young woman avenges herself by setting up a chain of events that result in the quick death of one and foreshadows that of the other, but dies herself in doing so. The plot of Salome is simple, but it gets complicated in its telling and not only because of its undercurrents. Do the conductor and orchestra do justice to Richard Strauss' complex score? Is the staging too simple or so creative as to distort? Are the principals up to their demanding roles?
The Wiener Staatsoper’s new production mostly hits the mark. Applause goes to director Cyril Teste for his use of live video projected onto the back wall of the stage showing us faces, expressions and actions that help flesh out the action. The olfactory accompaniment created by master parfumier Francis Kurkdjian that wafts through the auditorium during the Dance of the Seven Veils is a nice gag. More daring was Teste’s placing of three Salomes on stage, two of them children. One is fledgling ballerina Anna Chesnova, whose chillingly evocative interpretation of the dance expressed something Strauss only hints at – Salome’s sexual abuse at a very young age by Herodes, Tetrarch of Judea.
Additionally, her presence rids the stage of a potential pitfall. Few sopranos personifying the title role can dance convincingly to the level needed to do erotic justice to the veil dance, the opera’s choreographic centrepiece. Malin Byström – personifying the one Salome as Strauss had her – might have been up to the challenge, but we’ll never know. Her movements were kept to a few arm motions before Chesnova took to the stage (and dining table). Slightly older, the other child Salome, played by Margaryta Lazniuk, revealed who the Princess of Judea was – or could have been – before the sexually exploitative patriarchy surrounding her turned her into a monster. While Byström’s Salome raged over the rejection of her love by the prophet Jochanaan, Lazniuk's Salome cuddled up to him, the man whose head will end up on a platter at Salome’s demand. Already a psychodrama as written, the Salome according to Teste took us deeper into what makes the protagonist – or is she a tragic heroine? – into who she is.
Yet while the direction focuses on patriarchy and childhood sexual abuse, the visuals downplay another very 21st-century conflict: the clash of cultures. It’s there in the theme of paganism running through the opera, as represented by the court of Herodes versus the Christianity of Jochanaan. But it’s not conveyed by Valérie Grall's set. If Teste and his crew wanted to underline how contemporary that conflict remains, they could have done better than letting the curtain rise on a dining table in what looks like a friendly get-together of relatives at the home of a well-to-do western family. Marie La Rocca's contemporary costumes, mostly the modern military uniforms, add to the disconnect.
Byström would have fitted all of Strauss’ requirements. He wanted a Salome with an “Isolde voice” and the Swedish lyric soprano more than delivered in vocal passages that pitted her power as the proudly defiant Princess of Judea against the fortissimos of a 102-instrument orchestra. But her voice lacked some of the vulnerability called for in the moments reflecting the frail emotional state of Salome the damaged child-woman in love – literally madly – with the first man who rejects her; Jochanaan, who sees in her not the beauty that drives her stepfather wild, but the depravity of her licentious mother, Herodias. Mezzo Michaela Schuster reprised her familiar role perfectly, as did Gerhard Siegel as Herodes. As Jochanaan, baritone Wolfgang Koch added to the richness of an evening dominated by Wagnerian voices. But while his singing conveyed the drama of his character, his acting didn’t, too passive to fully communicate the defiance of Christ’s messenger in the lion’s den of Judea’s royal court.
There was no passivity, though, in Philippe Jordan’s vigorous yet nuanced rendering of a score that skips from one key to the other, tonality to polytonality, and crashing percussion to a single solo instrument. The meaning of Strauss’ view that a “real musician must be able to compose a menu" may be hard to understand. But that was not the case for the musical bill of fare served up by Jordan and the Staatsoper orchestra. It more than helped make for a tasty evening at the opera.
