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New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
For His Met Opera Debut, a Director Takes On ‘Salome'
The director Claus Guth, wearing a scarf and coat, was pacing the frigid auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera during a recent rehearsal of Strauss's 'Salome,' going over lighting and visual cues. It was only a few days before opening night, and he was optimistic. 'New York can carry you on an enormous, beautiful energy,' he said. 'It's an adrenaline — not a stressful feeling, but a sensation of being alive.' Guth, 61, who was born in Germany and has spent most of his career in Europe, has won acclaim for his experimental, exacting approach to operas new and old. Now, he is bringing those sensibilities to his Met debut, directing a new production of 'Salome' that opens on Tuesday. Inspired partly by Stanley Kubrick's film 'Eyes Wide Shut,' Guth has infused the opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's decadent retelling of the biblical story, with elements of a psychological thriller. Menacing figures walk around in ram masks on a black-and-white stage. A naked woman appears and disappears. A girl strokes a doll's hair before pulling out its arms and hitting it violently against the ground. Guth said he wanted to highlight the suffocating rules of the Victorian society portrayed in Wilde's play. He focuses on telling the back story of Salome, the 16-year-old princess and stepdaughter of King Herod, portraying her as a victim of abuse and trauma who becomes obsessed with John the Baptist, eventually demanding his head. 'I wanted to bring to life this rigid system — the invisible lines around what is allowed and what is not allowed,' Guth said. 'It's a portrait of a young woman growing up in this world, with its strange rules, trapped in a family prison.' 'Salome' is one of opera's most emotionally charged and demanding works. For Guth's staging, the Met has lined up the soprano Elza van den Heever in the title role; the baritone Peter Mattei as John the Baptist (known in the opera as Jochanaan); and the tenor Gerhard Siegel as King Herod. The Met's music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducts. Guth's Met debut is coming somewhat late in his career, but it is the start of a longer-term relationship with the company. In future seasons, the Met will import his 2023 staging of Handel's opera-oratorio 'Semele,' a co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, and his production of Janacek's 'Jenufa,' which premiered at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London in 2021. Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, described Guth as one of Europe's most inventive directors, saying his 'commitment to coherent storytelling' set him apart. 'There aren't that many directors who are brilliant enough to be original but are also able to tell the story in a way that doesn't require a guidebook to understand what you're seeing,' Gelb said. Guth was born in Frankfurt and grew up in what he has described as 'quiet, wealthy surroundings.' As a child, he dabbled in Super 8 films, but he felt he was not being exposed to the gritty realities of life. He moved to Munich for college, studying philosophy, literature and theater, with dreams of becoming a film director. In his 20s, he had an epiphany about opera while working as a camera assistant on a production at Bayreuth, the festival in Germany that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago. In this art form, Guth saw a way to combine his interests in music, theater and visual art. 'Suddenly, it clicked,' he said. 'My passions came together.' He rose swiftly in the European theater scene, with celebrated stagings of contemporary operas like Luciano Berio's 'Cronaca del Luogo' at the Salzburg Festival in 1999. He garnered praise for his unconventional approach to classics, especially those by Strauss and Wagner, including the 'Ring,' 'Der Fliegende Holländer' and 'Tannhäuser.' When Gelb approached Guth about staging a new 'Salome,' he already had a production under his belt at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. But Guth wanted to create something entirely different for his Met debut. 'It's boring for me to do the same thing,' he said. 'I need risk.' The Met's 'Salome' was originally planned as a co-production with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where it premiered in 2021. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, though, the Met cut ties with the Bolshoi and built its own sets for its staging. For his 'Salome,' Guth said, he wanted to give the title character a sense of agency — to show that she's 'not just the puppet and product of her education.' 'It's the biography of Salome — the development of a young person,' he said. 'I was looking for something that everybody could connect to.' Nézet-Séguin said that Guth had made 'Salome' freshly relevant by shining a light on the abuse of children and vulnerable people. 'He manages to emphasize a story that is really telling for our times,' Nézet-Séguin said, 'without detracting at all from the opera.' The Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the opera's defining scenes, is often portrayed as a striptease. But in Guth's version, the dance is a moment of reckoning, as seven versions of Salome, including van den Heever, portray the horrors of her upbringing. Van den Heever said Guth had created a 'dance of the fragmented mind, of the subconscious.' As a 'six-foot-tall person who is supposed to be in the body of a 16-year-old,' van den Heever said, she initially found it difficult to inhabit the character. But, she said, she was helped by Guth's clear vision of the opera and an emphasis on working as an ensemble. 'You are always part of a greater story,' she said. 'You're part of a tableau, of a painting.' In the lobby of the Met recently, Guth basked in the morning sun before heading to rehearsal. Although he has not worked at the Met, he is no stranger to New York. In 2023, he brought a show called 'Doppelganger' to the Park Avenue Armory, staging Schubert's 'Schwanengesang' as a dreamscape in a soldiers' hospital. He first encountered the Met in the 1980s, when he came to New York for an internship at CBS. Back then, as a young man, he bristled at the traditional, gaudy look of some productions. But he found himself drawn to the music. Decades later, he appreciates the energy and focus of the Met's singers, orchestra players, staff and crew. 'The Met is enormous, but it sometimes feels very intimate,' he said. 'I feel immense joy and gratitude. I feel at home.'
Boston Globe
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
John Nelson, conductor who championed Berlioz, dies at 83
He served for more than a decade as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, a group he helped elevate through national tours that stopped at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. He later worked for years in France, recording a complete set of Beethoven's symphonies while leading the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Nelson was a prolific guest conductor, directing major orchestras worldwide. He also won a Grammy Award for directing the English Chamber Orchestra and star soprano Kathleen Battle in a recording of Handel's 'Semele,' released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1993. Advertisement But he remained best known as an interpreter of Berlioz, whom he described as 'my patron saint in music.' He traced his interest in the French composer back to a conversation he had with his manager, Matthew Epstein, at age 28, when Mr. Nelson was a young Juilliard grad leading New Jersey's Pro Arte Chorale. Advertisement 'John,' he recalled Epstein saying, 'you need to do something to haul yourself out of your choral doldrums - something spicy and interesting that'll make a splash in New York. Why don't you do 'The Trojans?'' Commonly known by its French name, 'Les Troyens,' the opera was Berlioz's most ambitious work, retelling the tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas in a run time that regularly exceeds four hours. (The composer, who died in 1869, didn't live to see it performed in full.) Mr. Nelson told Gramophone magazine that he studied the work by picking up conductor Colin Davis's recently released 1970 recording of the opera - a listening experience he likened to 'being struck by a thunderbolt.' Deciding 'to go for broke,' as he put it, he and Epstein arranged for the Pro Arte Chorale to perform the opera in 1972, in concert at Carnegie Hall. It was one of the work's first full performances in the United States. 'It started around 7 P.M., ended around midnight, and at the end a mighty roar went up,' wrote New York Times classical music critic Harold C. Schonberg, praising the 'extraordinary vitality and understanding' that Mr. Nelson brought to the music. 'Carnegie Hall,' he continued, 'has heard nothing like that yell of approval since the 'Götterdämmerung' performance two seasons ago by Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony.' Decades later, Mr. Nelson dryly noted that in some ways the performance was a disaster for his choral group: 'It cost $50,000, which it took the board 10 years to pay off - and they lost their music director in the process.' Mr. Nelson left the company after directing high-profile concerts, including in 1973 when he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting 'Les Troyens' as a last-minute substitute for the group's ailing director, Rafael Kubelík. Advertisement Nearly 45 years later, in 2017, he made an acclaimed four-CD recording of the opera for the classical label Erato. Mr. Nelson said he spent about a year and a half planning the project and assembling the musicians, settling on a lineup that included France's Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, three choirs, and a 16-person cast led by Joyce DiDonato, Michael Spyres, and Marie-Nicole Lemieux. The album was named Gramophone's record of the year. It won top prizes at the International Opera Awards and France's Victoires de la Musique Classique. 'Nelson never allows the dramatic pace to slacken, which is no mean achievement in itself in a work that even its greatest admirers would admit has occasional longueurs,' music critic Andrew Clements wrote in the Guardian. The record, he added, was 'now unquestionably the version of Berlioz's masterpiece to have at home.' Mr. Nelson led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 with Evgeny Kissin as soloist in 2011. Stu Rosner John Wilton Nelson was born in San José, Costa Rica, on Dec. 6, 1941. His parents were Protestant American missionaries, his mother a nurse and his father a minister. Mr. Nelson said he spent much of his childhood traveling the countryside with his family, at times playing the accordion in a trio with his dad, who played the saxophone, and his brother, who played guitar. He was 6 when his family bought a Steinway piano for $50 and enrolled him in lessons. Mr. Nelson was later sent to the United States to study at a private school in Orlando. He continued at the piano, although he moved away from the instrument - eventually turning to conducting - after losing the tip of his right pinkie in a childhood accident, according to the magazine Christianity Today. Advertisement Mr. Nelson studied music at Wheaton College in Illinois, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1963. He went on to train in conducting at Juilliard, where he studied under Jean Morel, and received a master's degree in 1965. He taught at the school for a few years while launching his career, directing the Greenwich Philharmonia in Connecticut in addition to the Pro Arte Chorale. 'It was clear that I could not have a music directorship in a major city, so I went to the boondocks to settle down, work on repertoire and get my feet wet as a music director,' he told The Boston Globe in 1991, explaining his decision to join the Indianapolis Symphony. Mr. Nelson toured and recorded with the group while taking on additional responsibilities as director of the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and the Caramoor music center in Katonah, N.Y. But by 1987, he was tired and burned out and decided to leave his main job in Indianapolis. 'I said goodbye to the orchestra at the last stop of our first European tour, in Nuremberg,' he said in a Los Angeles Times interview. 'My wife and I got into the car and drove off into the sunset - to Paris.' Mr. Nelson and his wife, the former Anita Johnsen, married in 1964. She died in 2012. The John and Anita Nelson Center for Sacred Music at Wheaton, where she was also an alum, was later dedicated in their honor. Mr. Nelson leaves two daughters, Kirsten Nelson Hood and Kari Magdalena Chronopoulos; four grandsons; and three great-grandchildren. Advertisement After the success of his 'Les Troyens' recording, Mr. Nelson continued to record major works by Berlioz, reuniting with Erato and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg for well-received versions of 'La Damnation de Faust' (2019), 'Les Nuits d'Eté' and 'Harold en Italie' (both in 2022), and 'Roméo et Juliette' (2023). He also led a 2019 live recording of Berlioz's 'Requiem,' at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer's death. His final recording, with the English Concert & Choir, was of Handel's 'Messiah' (2023), an oratorio he had first conducted as a college sophomore, in a Baptist church with organ accompaniment. This time he led the performance at England's Coventry Cathedral, in a concert that was shaped 'with intelligence and flair,' Lindsay Kemp wrote in Gramophone. 'Just listen,' Kemp added, 'to the way he builds towards the 'Wonderful, Counsellor' outbursts in 'For unto us,' with the cellos at one point contributing joyful spread chords. Or how 'and of his Christ' stands out in the 'Hallelujah,' and the final 'amen' is so carefully unfolded. Nelson gets these kinds of things right time and again.'
