IS THIS REALLY ‘THE NASTIEST OPERA’?
Or is Salome a razor-sharp study of obsession: something Wilde knew all about?
Salome Coming to Bord Gáis Theatre Days: Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday
Afew years before he wrote the witty social satires that made him famous, Oscar Wilde wrote a shocker of a play, Salome, a bloody and controversial account of an obsessively lustful young girl, so enraged by John the Baptist, that she had him beheaded by Herod, tetrarch of Judea.
The Irish National Opera production of the Richard Strauss opera based on the play, in German with English surtitles, runs at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre this week, with the exceptional soprano Sinéad Campbell-Wallace in the hugely demanding role of Salome.
St Matthew’s gospel gives the story just 13 lines: St Mark gives it 15 lines.
The Strauss one-act opera, first performed in 1905, runs for about 100 minutes. It’s as luxuriously rich and sensuous musically as Wilde’s play is verbally lavish.
The name Salome is not used in either of the two original biblical accounts.
She’s just referred to as the daughter of Herodias, and it’s Herodias who tells her to have John beheaded. (He’s called Jokanaan in both play and opera).
Early critics were not enthusiastic about the opera. For one, it was ‘tawdry, showy and worthless’. Another said it ‘uncovered a woman’s diseased mind’. (Which is what Wilde and Strauss were actually aiming for.)
One distinguished writer was content just to call it, ‘the nastiest opera in existence’. The libretto sees lust as a hideous perversion of love: in the final scene of the English translation, Salome, holding the bloody decapitated head of Jokanaan, sings:
‘Would you not let me kiss your mouth Jokanaan? …Well I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth… as one bites a ripe fruit. I have kissed thy mouth: there was a bitter taste on my lips; was it the taste of love? Your head belongs to me. I will throw it to the dogs.’
Herod, although lusting after her himself, is so disgusted by her that he has his soldiers beat her to death.
There’s nothing like that in the Bible, though even there Herod is uncomfortable about the killing of John.
Not surprisingly, the opera had initial problems in some places. In Vienna, it took the censor 13 years to allow a performance because of the repulsive treatment of John the Baptist.
It took the English censor five years to give the opera his grudging approval, with some marvellous alterations: there was no severed head, just what looked like blood on a dish, the location was changed from Israel to Greece, and all biblical references were deleted.
The Guardian music critic Neville Cardus, writing years later, got the essence of the opera just about right, ‘In Salome, Strauss can live more courageously than any composer of his time: he can look into the heart of lust and see how sadly and pitifully beauty is poisoned there’.
The worst reaction was probably to a dress rehearsal at the New York Met in 1907, when the Sunday audience was appalled by the severed head of a biblical prophet being slobbered-over and mocked by a sexually deranged teenager.
That was the only performance the shocked management board allowed. It was another 27 years before the Met risked staging the opera again.
Composer-conductor Gustav Mahler had doubts about it on ethical and religious grounds, but he told his wife it was, ‘one of the most magnificent works that has been produced in our time’.
He considered the provocative dance of the seven veils the least inspired part of the opera, though audiences loved it, and it was possibly a reason why they were so enthusiastic: the dance
‘One early critic called the opera ‘tawdry, showy and worthless’
‘So appalled by the severed head, it was 27 years before it was staged again’
expresses all Salome’s lasciviousness, though the singer doesn’t have to remove all the veils.
In some early performances professional dancers were slipped in discreetly to do the dance sequence.
The opera is not in the usual style of aria-with-occasional-chorus numbers. It’s performed like fast-paced gritty musical dialogue backed up by elaborate orchestration that keeps the drama at high pitch up to the very end.
In the INO production the powerful tenor role of Herod will be sung by Vincent Wolfsteiner, Baritone Tómas Tómasson, so impressive here as Scarpia in Tosca a few years ago, sings Jokanaan, Imelda Drumm is Herodias and the other individual roles complete a full cast of 17.
Wilde’s play was originally written in French. The English translation was by Alfred Douglas (Bosie), the love of Wilde’s life. It’s possible now to see a link between Wilde’s dangerous obsession with Bosie and Herod’s infatuation with Salome.
■ Salome runs at The Bord Gáis Theatre on March 12, 14, and 16.