San Francisco Opera unveils Salome for 2009/2010 season

January 28, 12:30 PMSF Opera ExaminerCindy Warner

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San Francisco Opera unveils Salome this season, the Strauss opera based on the Oscar Wilde play.  Princess Salome gets rejected by John the Baptist and demands his head on a silver platter in this biblical story.  However the libretto like Oscar Wilde reads like poetry, ironic and colorful, full of temptations and seductions.  Yet is it so ironic?

Last night I picked up the DVD of Salome by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden with Maria Ewing and Michael Devlin.  Maria came to SFO as Salome in the Summer of 1993.  The DVD is from 1992 and Maria is wife of the opera director at Covent Garden.  So I suppose her nakedness is nothing he hasn't seen before.  Nothing deviant there, nope.   In any event.  It’s by Strauss and in German.  I compared it to Oscar Wilde’s play.  Oscar had censor troubles in England so he wrote it in French, not his own language.   Consequently Salome played in France while Oscar served a prison sentence.  It's all one act but it's quality not quantity. 

Enter Salome. 

German soprano Nadja Michael is pictured above as Salome and below, as herself.   Nadja herself escaped from East Germany about twenty years ago when she was eighteen.  She was a swimmer.  Good lungs.  She also plans to play Tosca, who is supposed to be a young girl like Salome (sixteen years old), although Tosca is mature with a career.

Although John the Baptist rejects Salome and Princess demands his head, I have to say a few things in defense of the young virgin and here’s why. 

Her first words as she rushes on stage:

I cannot stay here.

Salome talks wistfully of the white moon, pure like a virgin maiden undefiled. Princess Salome is a virgin but feels defiled. The story will be about the sins of the parent being visited upon the daughter. To that end the imprisoned prophet emerges only to condemn the abominations of Salome’s world, specifically mother and step-father. 

Cast

It’s music to Salome’s young ears.   She is as much a victim of the abominations as the prophet.  Yet she needs a real father if not the Heavenly Father but it’s probably too late.  For each of them.  Nevertheless the harsher the prophet’s words, the more she is drawn to him in her desperation to escape the Babylon he condemns. The harsher gentle John sounds the more virtuous he seems to her. Is this not why troubled women find themselves drawn to abusive men? Her determination to have him escalates with each rejection and condemnation. She must have this bad boy with his long black hair, white skin and red mouth, he is her salvation and her escape.   Even if most claim not to understand his drunken rants about the apocalypse.

So she renders herself a prisoner of love. Yet has she not become a predator to survive alone, trying to use a man whose hands remain tethered.  If she cannot impose her will on a prisoner, there must be no hope.  Yet while any other prisoner would probably welcome her naïve advances, the prophet is innocent too.   Moreover John the Baptist is so filled with apocalyptic fervor.  He sounds equally filled with outrage and revulsion by the spoiled girl's twisted demands.  He refuses to even look at her.  Simultaneously in her desperation she is blinded by what she says is love. It’s her instinct for self preservation though too at work.  Salome in her confusion and madness calls it the mystery of love with it’s bitter taste. Or is that blood.  No matter.  He’s her knight in shining armor or at least Holy ghostly white hide. She never heard the old adage,

 If you love somebody let them go, and if they come back to you . . .

Meanwhile Jokanaan, John the Baptist, cries out from his deep, dark, cold cistern only for the coming of the Messiah. Foretelling Salome's future, he specifically condemns women since Eve.  He will make an example out of Salome's wanton mother as a warning to all other women.  The Messiah not Salome shall end the abomination.  Jokanaan says further if the damned of Sodom and Babylon —Salome’s parents--don’t come and confess the Lord will raise his hand to them.

Indeed Salome desperately needs exactly this salvation from the sins of others. She feels trapped in a world of debauchery and vulgarity, surrounded by

• a lecherous step father
• an incestuous tramp of a mother
• their cadres of Jews
• barbarians who spill their wine on the pavement
• Greeks from Smyrna with painted eyes and cheeks and frizzed hair curled in columns
• Egyptians with long nails
• Romans brutal and coarse, with their uncouth jargon.

(List from The Plays of Oscar Wilde, The Modern Library, Random House, page five.)

Salome then feels so desperate to find sanctuary with somebody virtuous that she is driven to a monstrous act to get it.  Don't molestation victims act out in sexually agressive ways?  In doing so she confuses the message with the messenger, a mere vessel.

Red runs throughout symbolizing anger and lust and death.  In the end, red is not just a scarlet letter but an entire red robe over her naked body, which she unveils during her dance of seduction.

This dance with it’s perfume is only thinly veiled as amusement for the lecherous and incestuous.  It's no magic trick for privileged party guests as in Rigoletto a few years ago.  At the duke’s raucous party magicians reveal a biblical Eve,  the fair haired dancer naked under her cloak and offering her apple to the guests mischievously.

However Salome's dance is no game although it is a trick, a deadly and sadistic one.  She dances possessed.  She unveils herself more in a swirl of torment and red heat than flirtation or mischief.  Concluding with the stripping of the seventh and final veil, she stands naked and triumphant.  She stands in the spotlight, arms stretched overhead.  In the DVD there's no secret lingerie underneath.  It turns out to be, to everybody’s horror, Salome's act of dominance, in anticipation of triumph not submission. What she demands and finally collects royally in return will bring a chilling end to the lecherous step-father’s lust. Her monstrousness as Herod calls it does serve the purpose of breaking the spell over Herod. Yet Salome’s freedom and power is mercifully short-lived, crushed beneath the shields of the soldiers as prophecied.  is that all they did?

Herod who believed in bad omens thought bringing back the dead was a bad idea and even Jokanaan never in all his rants about blasphemy touched on necrophilia.

 The return of Greer Grimsley

 Oscar Wilde and the 'love that dares not speak it's name'