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Washington Post
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
At the Met, an unsettling new vision of ‘Salome' unfolds like a dream
Describing the new Metropolitan Opera production of 'Salome' feels a bit like recounting the details of a dream — the lines start to blur, the colors begin to drain, the details dissolve in the telling. This, it seems, is by design. German director Claus Guth made his Met debut on Tuesday with a gripping vision of Richard Strauss's 1905 thriller that expands beyond the bounds of its single act into a surreal study of one of opera's most unhinged antiheroines. Strauss's built his 'Salome' upon a libretto by Hedwig Lachmann, itself a German translation of Oscar Wilde's scandalous 1893 play of the same name, which first plumbed the dark psychological potential of the biblical tale — like the lecherous gaze of Salome's stepfather King Herod, the erotic power of her 'Dance of the Seven Veils,' or her own lurid fascination with the body of the imprisoned Jochanaan (most notably his head). Guth's version feels fully situated in these subconscious levels. The setting is shifted from the first century A.D. to the waning years of the Victorian era — at times the monochromatic palace designed by Etienne Pluss (also making his Met debut) could be a model of Wilde's own dark imagination. This is especially so when the entire palace elevates to reveal a spindly staircase to the cavernous cistern below, where Jochanaan wastes away in chains. Guth's black-and-white treatment might suggest a minimalist approach, but the creative team maximizes possibilities without excess conceptual clutter. This includes Ursula Kudrna's costumes — like the animal masked revelers engaged in a pursuit out of 'Eyes Wide Shut'; Olaf Freese's lighting design, which destabilized the set with its shifting shadows; and Roland Horvath's projections, which conjured a sinister fizz of white dust rising from the palace floor — an insistent reminder of the cruelty below. But above the crisp conceptualization and clean execution of Guth's vision, 'Salome' soars thanks to a stellar cast of singers. Soprano Elza van den Heever debuted her Salome in Lydia Steier's 2022 production for Paris Opera, and her grip on the character was tight enough to leave marks. She brought the perfect balance of winsome innocence and iridescent rage to her performance, which highlighted the heat and heft of her instrument, but also her keen dramatic sensibilities. In addition to van den Heever, there are six other Salomes — ghostly iterations of the princess as she matures. They hang around the palace, lurk around the dungeon, and, one by one, perform a 'Dance of the Seven Veils' that sheds garish light on her unstable state. Baritone Peter Mattei, who recently sung Starbuck in the Met's 'Moby Dick,' was a magnificent Jochanaan. He was powerful enough bellowing from the offstage depths of the cistern, but was most moving in the flesh — his big voice in defiance of the pale, gaunt body coiled in the corner. Tenor Gerhard Siegel offered a dynamic and devilish Herod, his voice well-suited to the king's swings between power and impotence — especially as he tries to win his stepdaughter's affections ('Salome komm trink Wein mit mir'). Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung brought sharp intensity to her crimson-gowned Herodias. And tenor Piotr Buszewski sung a sympathetic Narraboth, whose departure in Guth's telling is a bit less self-imposed. The night's other big star was Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who ably steered the nonstop ride through Strauss's whirlwind score, including its cache of sound effects (like the rising winds in the strings, or those ugly pinched notes on double bass that anticipate Jochanaan's beheading). And he ensured that Strauss's orchestral palette burst with all of the colors forgone onstage by Guth — the music bristles with xylophone, harmonium, castanets and a lowing heckelphone (an oboe of sorts first deployed in 'Salome'). While Guth's 'Salome' is pulled between extremes — the unrelenting black of the palace and the chalk-white walls of the prison, for instance — the magic of this production is the way it illuminates the gray area in between, the unresolved traumas and unanswered questions. Guth sheds just enough light on the opera for us to see it anew, but smartly, not enough to wake us from the dream. 'Salome' runs at the Metropolitan Opera through May 24,
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: The Met Opera's New ‘Salome' Fractures Its Princess
The first sound in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of 'Salome' isn't the wriggle of clarinet that begins Strauss's score. It's the tinkle of a music box, while a little girl plays with a doll at the lip of the stage. Projected on the curtain behind her is a giant image of herself, slowly twirling. She suddenly gets angry at the toy and begins beating it against the ground. Even before the orchestra squirms in, Claus Guth's grimly effective staging has made clear its preoccupations: childhood, dancing, violence. Guth, one of Europe's busiest directors and making his Met debut with this production, is also fascinated by multiple versions of the self. Starring the soprano Elza van den Heever — simultaneously innocent and hardened, sounding silvery yet secure — this 'Salome,' which opened on Tuesday, gives its title character not one youthful double, but six. The group of Salomes, progressing in age from perhaps a kindergartner to the 16-year-old played by van den Heever, is dressed in matching dark frocks, giving hints of 'The Shining' and Diane Arbus photographs. Guth, placing the action in a dour black mansion around the turn of the 20th century, has shifted from ancient to modern times Strauss's 100-minute, one-act adaptation of Oscar Wilde's scandalous play. 'Salome' depicts, in decadent music inspired by the flowery language of the Symbolists, the biblical princess who was drawn to and rejected by John the Baptist and who demanded that he be decapitated by her depraved stepfather, King Herod. The fin-de-siècle setting adds to all this overripeness a touch of early psychoanalysis, an excavation of Salome's troubled past. The Dance of the Seven Veils, historically often a Gypsy Rose Lee-style striptease, is here a solemn parade of the seven Salomes, overseen by van den Heever and showing her years of abuse by Herod. This is a tad heavy-handed, but it doesn't feel made up out of nowhere; Herod's lust for Salome is explicit in the libretto, even if it's not clear he's acted on it. Guth's production — the Met's first new 'Salome' since 2004, when Jürgen Flimm, in the midst of the Iraq War, set the opera in the contemporary Middle East — feels very much of our time, an era obsessed with identifying and processing trauma. While the stark set (by Etienne Pluss), costumes (Ursula Kudrna) and lighting (Olaf Freese) don't evoke the jeweled colors of the score, they have a severity that might well have pleased Strauss, who said he wanted the Dance of the Seven Veils to be 'as serious and measured as possible.' Van den Heever is serious and measured, too. As in Strauss's 'Die Frau Ohne Schatten' at the Met earlier this season, her high register can both softly float and powerfully soar. If she lacks some force lower down, making the conversational passages early in the opera a bit muted, she paces herself smartly, leaving ample stamina and focus for Salome's great final monologue to be affectingly direct and sincere. Her Salome has a habit of mimicry. When she copies the gestures that Jochanaan — the opera's John the Baptist — makes while praying, we realize queasily that her molesting of the servant Narraboth earlier must have been an echo of the way she herself has been touched. It's almost always a stretch for a star of 'Salome' to be persuasive as a 16-year-old, but the presence of the doubles actually makes van den Heever, who is in her mid-40s, seem younger — an organic outgrowth of real children — than she might have if she were on her own. The baritone Peter Mattei is a fierce and roaring Jochanaan, held captive in an airy basement space painted the same powdery white that he is. The frenzied yet articulate tenor Gerhard Siegel, a veteran Herod, oozes unctuous entitlement. As Herodias, his wife and Salome's mother, the mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung might overdo boozy, chain-smoking cynicism, but she adds a memorable edge of anxiety. Guth's eerie spectacle is heightened by the simmering panache of the Met Orchestra's performance under its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. A trick of conducting 'Salome' is to make an ensemble of over 100 play, for much of the score, with catlike grace, and Nézet-Séguin keeps the music simmering between grand explosions. The intensity is unremitting, but so is the transparency of the complex textures; even pianissimo flute trills register as Salome sings near the end that Jochanaan's body is like 'a garden full of doves.' Not everything about the production is successful. The projections that are occasionally thrown on the stern set to show its walls shaking or disintegrating look silly. Animal head masks, meant to be sinister, come off as halfhearted gestures toward 'Eyes Wide Shut'-esque eroticism. But Guth's work is largely thoughtful and expressive. Much of Salome's final outpouring, ostensibly delivered to Jochanaan's head, is instead sung as private musings. Her younger doubles, who have previously been scattered and isolated, now surround her, their hands reaching out to touch her. The reintegration of a fractured self, the ultimate aim of therapy, has been achieved. Yet Guth doesn't depict the ending as a triumphant realization of Salome's fantasies of revenge. Instead, with Herod screaming at his soldiers to kill her, she merely walks upstage into a dense mist. (The loud hiss of the smoke machine makes an unfortunate counterpoint to Strauss's climactic music.) The final sight is Herodias reaching toward Salome, as the doubles did. ('Let me save you'? 'Take me with you'?) But Salome, whether going toward literal death or something more symbolic, is going on her own. A few minutes before, she claimed to have arrived at an understanding of the secret of love and death; maybe that secret is that she will always be alone, scarred by what she's endured. Well over a century after its premiere, 'Salome' has lost its onetime ability to shock. At its best, perhaps, it can sadden. It certainly does at the Met, in Guth's gloomy staging and van den Heever's sober, committed performance.
Chicago Tribune
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Seven Veils' review: The operatics are everywhere in this backstage melodrama
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan scored a fair-sized sensation with his 1996 Canadian Opera Company production of the Richard Strauss opera 'Salome' — the one about the stepdaughter of the depraved King Herod, her Dance of the Seven Veils, Salome's lust for John the Baptist and the circumstances forcing Salome to settle for a kiss on the lips of her beloved's beheaded head instead. Psychosexually forward, Egoyan's staging went on to Houston Grand Opera and Vancouver Opera, which co-produced the 'Salome' production with the Canadian company. Egoyan then revisited 'Salome' in 2023. But he had more thoughts about the material he wanted to realize for a new medium. Re-using the physical production, dominated by Derek McLane's strikingly angular scenic design, Egoyan had an idea for a movie about a director, new to opera, restaging her late mentor and semi-secret lover's triumph while a big pot of backstage operatics simmers away. 'Seven Veils,' starring Amanda Seyfried, is the result. The themes are deadly serious: In the fictional narrative cooked up by Egoyan, staging this 'Salome' finds Seyfried's fraught character confronting the memory of her abuser-father and her childhood sexual trauma while exploring how life can illuminate and amplify art. At the same time, Egoyan's impulses lean toward a kind of wry melodrama, and a slew of narrative developments and hidden agendas. From what we see of the Egoyan stage production of 'Salome' in 'Seven Veils,' it looks like a winner; the movie, unfortunately, is a mixed bag, though still fairly absorbing. 'Small but meaningful': That's how Jeanine, Seyfried's character, describes the tweaks she has in mind for the 'Salome' restaging she has been hired to direct. Her late mentor, who encouraged Jeanine's ideas while exploiting her sexually, represents a legendary figure, especially to his widow (Lanette Ware), now the opera company's general manager. She's likely aware of the affair her husband had with Jeanine. Meantime, there are present-day affairs underway in this busy operatic troupe, and also a considerable number of underminers. At one point, Jeanine sits for an interview with a podcaster and it takes roughly eight seconds of screen time for him to establish his bona fides as a world-class weasel. Jeanine also is dealing with an uncertain marriage (they're in a tentative open-it-up phase) and a mother living with Alzheimer's, whose caregiver is involved with Jeanine's semi-quasi-separated husband. It's a lot. Seyfried, who has worked with writer-director Egoyan before on the super-ripe erotic drama 'Chloe' (2009), finesses some zig-zaggy tonal swerves confidently and well. The writing, however, wobbles. And in that regard the screenplay's inventions are wholly unlike Egoyan's own staging of 'Salome,' as judged by what we see of it in the cinematic riff 'Seven Veils.' Running time: 1:47
