Conductor: Valery Gergiev
Production: Jürgen Flimm
Set and Costume Designer: Santo Loquasto
Lighting Designer: James F. Ingalls
Choreographer: Doug Varone
Characters in order
of vocal appearance:
Narraboth: Matthew Polenzani
The Page: Katharine Goeldner
First Soldier: Peter Volpe
Second Soldier: Richard Bernstein
Jochanaan: Albert Dohmen (Debut)
A Cappadocian: Andrew Gangestad
Salome: Karita Mattila
A Slave: Vanessa Cariddi (Debut)
Herod: Allan Glassman (replacing Siegfried
Jerusalem)
Herodias: Larissa Diadkova
First Jew: Joel Sorensen (replacing Allan
Glassman)
Second Jew: Roy Cornelius Smith
Third Jew: Adam Klein
Fourth Jew: John Easterlin (Debut)
Fifth Jew: LeRoy Lehr
First Nazarene: Morris Robinson
Second Nazarene: Charles Edwin Taylor
In all my years of attending
performances at the Met, I have never encountered
the kind of tumultuous roar that greeted Karita
Mattila at her first curtain call, following
her astounding triumph in the title role of
Salome. Even after reading reports
of her performance in Paris last fall, I was
not prepared for her over-the-top courage
last night, and as she emerged in a black
robe from behind the curtain, the audience
erupted into an ecstatic torrent of cheering
and a hailstorm of bravas. Mattila
not only possesses one of the world’s greatest
instruments – a creamy soprano with enough
power to sear like a laser beam – but is also
one of the most uninhibited actresses to appear
onstage in quite some time. Taking complete
advantage of both, director Jürgen Flimm
encouraged her to take some memorable risks,
and among many comments I heard was one friend
who said she had not seen this kind of physical
performance at the house in years.
The role is problematic,
since Salome is only supposed to be sixteen
years old, and there is no way any adolescent
singer, or even most non-adolescents, could
meet the extreme vocal demands Richard Strauss
places on his spoiled anti-heroine. So anyone
attempting the role has the pressure not only
to negotiate the singing pitfalls, but to
convince the audience as best she can that
she is a flirty, sexual, coy, immature teenager
who whose desires are so unpredictable and
lurid that even her own father has her destroyed.
Costumed in a champagne-colored
backless dress, and with girlish waves of
blonde hair, Mattila may not have physically
looked sixteen, but was nevertheless entirely
convincing with her keenly conceived image
of the role. Whether in subtle gestures such
as twirling her hair in boredom or absent-mindedly
dangling a leg over a chair arm, or in bolder
strokes such as casually kicking Narraboth
out of her path after he dies – this was a
performance that could be an object lesson
in acting for the operatic stage.
I trust everyone in
the audience caught her doing a perfect split
at one point, seen on the roof of the structure
housing Jochanaan. I’m sorry, but doing a
split is not the territory of singers,
or of most actors, but of dancers – and not
even all of them can manage it. For
a 43-year-old stage actress to be that limber
in a Shakespeare play would be impressive.
But for a 43-year-old soprano to show
such agility, while faced with some of the
most formidably treacherous vocals in all
of opera is truly something out of the ordinary.
The demands of making
the character convincing are mirrored in the
score, which plays a similar tug-of-war with
one’s allegiance. The desire to surrender
to the music is tempered by the knowledge
of exactly what one is surrendering to, since
some of Strauss’ most rapturous inspirations
accompany some of the most disgusting depictions
of fetishistic necrophilia. In the final scene,
Mattila is sprawled on her stomach on the
floor, gazing at Jochanaan’s head in her hands
and lustily mashing her lips all over it.
As the music rises, she releases the head
and rolls over on her back in ecstasy, after
what is clearly a sexual climax.
As Narraboth and almost
unrecognizable in a huge turban, Matthew Polenzani
was wonderful in a role that seems far too
short when someone with talent is singing.
Tonight he was spectacular and then some.
In his Met debut, Albert Dohmen was imposing
as the doomed Jochanaan, projecting an ominous
presence from inside the stage. The fine singer
Siegfried Jerusalem, scheduled as Herod, was
unfortunately ill and out for the evening,
but his replacement was Allan Glassman, whose
eyes glazed with horror said it all, and he
did a more than marvelous job on short notice.
Also excellent was Larissa
Diadkova, who sailed through Herodias dressed
in a dark velvety green, one of Santo Loquasto’s
many effective takes on "desert contemporary."
As Herod pleaded in vain not to carry out
Salome’s impetuous, horrifying request, Diadkova
taunted him, mocking his dilemma and not incidentally,
showing where her daughter received her training.
Amid the bravos
for the production team, some jeers could
be heard in the audience; I vote firmly with
the former crowd in admiration for the lyrical,
I think downright beautiful set that in many
cases offered Mattila and everyone else in
the cast some interesting movement options
(like that split). The brilliant Loquasto
offered us Herod’s palace as a round platform
of clear Lucite, gleamingly lit from underneath,
with chairs and tables scattered about and
a spiral staircase in the center disappearing
down below, perhaps a luxury oasis just outside
of Jerusalem, built by Donald Trump.
Encircling the Lucite
floor is a high wall of red and orange mosaic
tile, lit with wall sconces, with a large
staircase encircling the room’s high walls
and used to dramatic effect as Salome enters
for the Dance of the Seven Veils. The
edge of the palace juts right out into a sea
of sand dunes, carved from massive waves of
plywood by someone who perhaps admires Frank
Gehry. At the edge of the desert, just to
the right of the palace is the cistern, looking
here like a jagged, open wound in the ground,
with a creaky wooden apparatus housing a hand-crank
to raise and lower the cage housing the prophet
Jochanaan.
My only puzzlement in
Jürgen Flimm’s otherwise stellar direction
was the recurring presence of a group of black-clad
figures with angel wings in the upper right
corner – first one, then three, then seven
or eight – slowly, constantly assembling,
shifting about and disbanding at the top of
the sand dunes. I thought they might be the
palace guards, or angels of death, but neither
seemed to be the case. And one staging quibble:
if I recall, the final scene has Salome killed
as a group of soldiers descends upon
her. Here, as Salome lies exhausted, a lone
soldier slowly approaches her, drawing his
sword as the curtain falls. Impressions can
change in the days after seeing a thrilling
production like this one, but somehow the
single warrior seemed anticlimactic.
In an interview prior
to the premiere, Mattila said she prepared
for the Dance of the Seven Veils by
dancing around her hotel room, listening to
music of Bruce Springsteen and Tina Turner.
How many contemporary opera stars would confess
to such homework? As the brilliantly orchestrated
sequence began, with Mattila extending a leg
over the top of the staircase, she seemed
to slide her way down in sinuous abandon.
I wasn’t crazy about her costume for this
sequence, only because the pants and jacket
abruptly telegraphed "43-year-old-woman"
and the illusion of adolescence seemed to
evaporate. But never mind. As the dance progressed,
with two gentlemen in black tie tugging her
pants off with their teeth, Mattila’s erotic
determination only increased as she sat down
and placed her buttocks squarely in Herod’s
lap, squirming against his crotch before another
layer of clothing came off and found her in
a black bustier and short silk slip. If anything,
she seemed almost more comfortable with her
impending nakedness, the onlookers as hypnotized
as Herod by the pornographic proceedings.
Gergiev and the orchestra
seemed positively infused with the magnificent
score, immersing themselves and us in Strauss’
huge walls of sound colored with some marvelous
effects. During the final scene, over a low
tremolo come a series of razor-sharp notes
that I never realized were written not for
violin or cello, but for double bass playing
a harmonic high up the string almost near
the bridge. And of course there’s that obsessive
flute trill that seems to go on forever. The
Met’s brilliant musicians, perhaps partially
eclipsed on what they must have sensed was
an historic evening, nevertheless brought
out all the weird colors everywhere.
In the final scene,
as Mattila writhed onstage and let her voice
pour out over Loquasto’s desert, the rest
of the emotionally devastated cast was scattered
about the palace grounds dazed, seemingly
semi-conscious. As Salome makes love to Jochanaan’s
head, Strauss gives her some of his most sublime,
soaring and climactic vocal lines (which Mattila
traversed with complete, effortless control)
as if to say, the Universe itself nods in
approval at your ridiculous, embarrassing,
wretchedly subhuman desires.
Whatever one’s interpretation,
no doubt the Universe also approves of a performance
like this one – a history-making beacon that
will be no doubt be considered something of
a benchmark for a very long time.
Bruce Hodges
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