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Strauss,  Salome: (Revival) Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, Lothar Koenigs (conductor), Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 24.2.2009 (GPu)

Conductor: Lothar Koenigs
Director: André Engel
Designer: Nick Rieti
Costume Designer: Elizabeth Neumuller
Lighting Designer: André Diot
Choreographer: Françoise Grès
Chorus Master: Stephen Harris

Cast:
Salome: Erika Sunnegårdh
Jokanaan: Robert Hayward
Herod Antipas: Peter Hoare
Herodias: Sally Burgess
Narraboth: Ronin Tritschler
Herodias’ Page: Anna Burford
1^st Soldier: Alastair Moore
2^nd Soldier: Martin Lloyd
Cappadocian: Philip Lloyd-Evans
Slave: Samantha Hay
1^st Jew: Alasdair Elliot
2^nd Jew: Philip Lloyd Holtam
3^rd Jew: Huw Llewellyn
4^th Jew: Alun Rhys-Jenkins
5^th Jew: Laurence Cole
1^st Nazarene: Henry Waddington
2^nd Nazarene: Jack O’Kelly
Namaan (executioner): Paul Gyton


Just over one hundred and three years after its premiere (on the 9^th of December 1905 in Dresden) Strauss’ Salome retains its capacity to disturb and unsettle. This was so even (especially?) true in this production, which resolutely avoids anything that night be construed as sensational. It is a production almost startlingly devoid of blood: onstage deaths, which involve the cutting of the throat, produce no blood or mess and those so affected die quietly and without the slightest fuss. Jokanaan’s head can be – and is – clutched to the white clad bosom of Salome without leaving the slightest bloody trace of its presence, and it certainly never does anything so vulgar as drip blood onto the stage. Salome’s dance is a relatively demure affair and categorically involves no kind of unveiling. None of this is said, I should add, in the spirit of criticism; on the whole the experience is the better for such restraint – the sheer force of Strauss’ writing is allowed to make its impact, an impact which proves not to need any kind of visual supplementation of a sensationalist kind (in productions of this opera such sensationalism, in my experience makes either visual effect or music redundant, makes the one or the other seem de trop). And, for all that, the opera retains its power to disturb. Obsession, the exposure of an innocence so absolute that it can turn into its opposite without the least difficulty, a study in mental disturbance, a clash of moral and social values on an archetypal stage, a refusal to offer any explicit endorsement of conventional morality – all these, explored and expressed in the music, both instrumental and vocal, remain in many ways as challenging as they were over a hundred years ago, even if much in the world has changed since then.

The story of Salome – like any good ‘myth’ – changes to reflect the times of each successive reteller. We think of it as a biblical narrative, but it is worth remembering that Salome herself does not appear in the Biblical accounts. In Chapter Six of Mark, there appears the unnamed “daughter of Herodias” who “came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him”; so much so that Herod promises her whatever she asks of him. It is her mother Herodias who tells her to ask for the head of John the Baptist. Only later (in the work of Josephus) did this anonymous daughter acquire a name. But in a sense she still remained a kind of blank canvas, psychologically speaking, a tool manipulated by others, rather than an active, motivated individual. It remained for later generations of artists, writers and composers to fill in the blank, to create (and constantly recreate) the character. In medieval representations she is sometimes seen as a prepubescent girl doing gymnastic handstands to impress Herod (and others gathered as an audience), in a fashion which carries no obvious sexual overtones. Renaissance artists (such as Cranach) often concentrated on the image of a young, well-dressed Salome holding, on a platter, the head of John, exploiting the contrast between youthful beauty and the grotesquery of the decapitated John. By the time of Strauss, the art of the fin-de-siècle had given her a further new character. By now she was the initiator of the request for John’s head, no longer in need of any prompting from her mother. Gradually, in works such as Flaubert’s Herod, Eugenio de Castro’s Salome – let alone the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley – she became bound up with, and indeed an embodiment of, the nineteenth century Orientalist fantasy of the repressed sexuality of the Eastern woman, and yet another version of the femme fatale. Most directly, Salome reached Strauss through Oscar Wilde’s play, which (abridged) provided the libretto prepared by Hedwig Lachman. But it is relevant too, to remember all these other ‘Salomes’ and, indeed, to remember that Strauss was a near contemporary of Freud, and to bear in mind the extensive cultural connections between Vienna and the Munich in which Strauss grew up.

André Engel’s production, first performed in March 1988, uses a set by Nick Rieti which makes no attempt at any kind of ‘archaeological’ reproduction of the real or imagined setting of the Biblical narrative. This, surely, is as it should be – the Salome of the opera is not the Salome (or at any rate the anonymous daughter) of that original (very brief) narrative. She is a late nineteenth- early twentieth-century Salome. Rieti’s set is clearly inspired by the orientalism of that period, plausible in its use of Islamic decorative schemes which (while quite historically inappropriate to Biblical Judea) are entirely in keeping with the kind of attitudes which are articulated in that reinvention of Salome which underpins Strauss’s opera. The setting itself and a few ‘modern’ touches (a newspaper, a cigarette) function to establish the fitting cultural context. In this and other respects the production generally works well, evoking a generalised sense of the orientally exotic which is appropriate to the times of the work’s conception, but not intrusive or limiting. One reservation is that there are moments when rather too many figures are gathered in ponderously static fashion on the stage and things slow down rather too much.

In a production which eschews the sensational the performances, musically speaking have to be good. And very largely they are here. Notoriously Strauss’ Salome requires – in an ideal world – a soloist capable of looking like a sinuous fifteen or sixteen year old and equipped with a voice powerful enough to sing Isolde. Such creatures are, to put it mildly, a rare breed! In Erika Sunnegårdh the WNO has found someone who comes very close to fulfilling both of these almost mutually irreconcilable demands. The WNO’s Artistic Director John Fisher evidently knew Sunnegårdh from his time at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Like Dimitri Pattas – also familiar to Fisher from the Metropolitan – who appears as Nemorino in this season’s L’elisir d’amore -  Sunnegårdh was making her UK debut. Both she and Pattas (who was in the audience at the first night of Salome) made very favourable impressions, and patrons of the WNO have good reason to be thankful for Fisher’s contacts with the Metropolitan opera. Lithe, and quite small, seemingly youthful of face (viewed from the stalls at any rate!), Sunnegårdh was a convincing teenager. With a fair repertoire of gesture and stance she sulked and pouted, teased and wheedled, skittishly contradicted herself and others with archetypal teenage rebelliousness. She convinced one that in the right circumstances the spoilt teenager might readily find the death of another a perfectly acceptable price to pay for the fulfilment of a whim presently felt as a peculiarly compelling obsession. For Wilde’s / Strauss’ Salome other people are not ‘real’, are merely conveniences for the satisfaction of her own fancies. Sunnegårdh sustained such a characterisation very well and – importantly – she largely had the voice to do justice to the enormous demands of that Strauss places on his Salome. Just occasionally the sheer weight of Strauss’ orchestral writing was too much for her and her words were lost to the audience; but such moments were relatively rare; far more commonly she retained a youthful-sounding sweetness of voice while managing to carry over the swells of the orchestra. The top end of her voice was particularly impressive and beautiful. Both dramatically and vocally this was a fine performance. To call it promising is not to suggest that it was in any serious way deficient right now; far from it – she deserved the very lengthy ovation she got at the end of the evening; but there are probably even better things yet to come from her.

Robert Hayward had stepped in at short notice to replace a sick Matthew Best. One had to make little or no allowance for the circumstances, however; Hayward’s was an authoritative and commanding performances, vocally certain and, in terms of characterisation, invested with moments of incipient weakness amidst the granite resolution that governed his actions. Peter Hoare convincingly portrayed the vacillations and fallibilities of Herod Antipas, victim both of his inability to control his own desires and mood swings and of the manipulations of stronger personalities around him. This was a depiction of power in weak hands, which sometimes offered a grim humour but for the most part was disturbing in its sense of the dangers inherent in such a personality’s occupation of such a position. The Herodias of Sally Burgess had a commanding, Lady-Macbeth-like ruthlessness and strength of desire, and in the manner of her contempt for her husband (as well as in her reactions to Jokanaan’s denunciations) she convinced one that her earlier years amounted to just the kind of ‘history’ for which the prophet berates her. Most of the lesser roles – such as those of Narraboth and Herodias’ Page were sung very competently.

But the evening belonged essentially to Sunnegårdh – and to Lothar Koenigs and the orchestra. Koenigs’ shaping of phrase, his rhythmic discipline and relentless, unforced impetus, as well as his sense of drama, were almost infallibly apt and he drew some very fine orchestral playing from the forces at his disposal. There were one or two passages were singers struggled with the sheer weight of sound, but these were not frequent and, in any case, such problems cannot always be laid at the feet of the conductor. His placement of the often startling orchestral effects created by Strauss was exemplary and – especially towards the end – orchestra, conductor and singer worked together beautifully and powerfully in what Ernest Newman aptly described as Salome’s final “ecstasy of perversity”. This was something like opera at its best, doing those things which no other art form can quite do. Even if the whole performance didn’t exist on quite such an exalted plane, enough of it at least approached such heights.

Glyn Pursglove


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