Salome and the yoke of Baphomet
When your inner child comes back to bite
I went to the opening night of Strauss’s Salome at the Met this week. It was such fun, such a good and nourishing evening. Besides the music itself, there’s an exciting sort of frenzy that comes from attending an opening night, particularly one for a new production. We’re all waiting to see if an old story can be made new, can be made sexier, sadder, more complete.
There is an added benefit if you’re “in the biz,” so to speak, because you see a lot of people you know. I attended with three friends, two of whom are singers, and saw at least ten to fifteen other colleagues in the house. Lots of kisses and schmoozing and “I heard you were great in that!” “Have you heard back about next season yet?”
I felt a twang of nervousness while speaking to my colleagues, simply because Salome is the role I’ve most recently performed, albeit with a much smaller company. To its credit, however, the company I sang with presented quite a nuanced take on the story, and even made some choices I preferred to the Met’s version. But I felt I still hadn’t shaken off the shadows of the role, which made me anxious.
Salome is a difficult opera to square for many reasons. It’s a blistering, shattering psychological portrayal of an antihero. It presents themes like incest, abuse and murder flatly, starkly. The story builds, simmering for an hour, and then explodes in a tumult of catharsis and horror and something that feels almost uncomfortably close to real human emotion. It doesn’t have the repetition, the choruses, the inner structure of most operas that lend a semblance of both unreality and manageability. There are no scene divisions, no big arias that will end with a bis, bis. It simply goes, and goes, and goes, until it ends.
Nevertheless, it strikes an eternal chord. The brutal, winding sinew of Strauss’s score is both so romantic and so modernist that it invites new adaptations. In this new iteration, directed by Claus Guth, the setting is a macabre, Victorian-ish mansion, populated by a silent mass of servants, watching like figures from an Edward Gorey illustration at the walls, and party goers on a slightly elevated level, who chase around a naked figure wearing the head of a ram.
This ram’s head was part of Guth’s symbol-heavy conception of the opera. The ram’s head evoked the sinister goat figure of Baphomet, and looms eerily at several points in the opera. The demonic symbol never gets much of a denouement, except for the destruction of a statue by Salome nearing the end of the opera. Interestingly, there is a ram-headed god in Ancient Egyptian religion, called Khnum, who represents fertility, rebirth and regeneration. Perhaps Guth’s idea was a merging of the two, as Salome’s sexuality turns monstrous.
The predominant symbol, and one which I have never seen in a Salome production, was the addition of six ghostly Salomes, dressed identically to Elza van den Heever's title character, in black, lace necked dresses and platinum blonde wigs. These Salome copies, ranging in age from perhaps 6 to 14, shadowed Salome throughout the opera, perhaps as incarnations of the inner child she is trying to heal, or haunted memories of the abuse Salome has endured at the hands of her stepfather, King Herod.
Peter Mattei’s Jochanaan was a familiar representation. Trapped in the basement of Salome’s home, he is chained and dressed in a loincloth, and covered in a powdery white paint, as though he has emerged from the smog of Pompeii. For most of the production we do not see Jochanaan, but can hear his voice echoing throughout the upper part of the house, like Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason, wailing and beseeching his God. He and Salome only have one scene together (at least, one scene when he is alive). There is some striking chemistry between the two, but the lack of his physical presence is ultimately felt.
Van der Heever’s talents are on riotous display in the final scene of the opera, and the audience’s excitement could be felt into the upper rafters. Her upper timbre is extraordinarily resonant, Germanic in quality, and launched icily to the rooftop. The six echoes of Salome wrap themselves along the staircase in a gentle, snakelike show of support as van de Heever kneels in front of them, singing to Jochanaan’s decapitated head. The effect is ghostly, striking; as if to show that all of the lives that Salome has lived have been leading, inexorably to this point.
This post isn’t meant to be a review; more of a reaction that I can’t help but write, because Salome as a work of art still rings like a bell in my chest. I have never, thankfully, experienced the horrors of her young life. But as a teenager I have felt versions of what she felt. The gnawing pain of yearning so acutely I thought I would die. Wanting to be treated like an adult, and resorting to more and more extreme tactics to prove my own adultness. The feeling of wanting something so badly that being destroyed by it was a secondary concern.
My friend Perri and I were sitting behind an older gentleman at the opera, who said that he had attended all of the Met’s productions of Salome since the 70s. He didn’t understand why they were making a new one, particularly as the Met was always expressing financial concerns. However, as the curtain fell, after multiple rounds of frenetic applause for the singers and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, he turned to me, grinning.
“Best one yet. Best one yet.”