Strauss’s ‘Salome’ Gets a New Staging at the Metropolitan Opera

The first sound in the metropolitan operas, a new production of “Salomé” is not the return of the clarinet that begins the Strauss score. It is the tintineo of a music box, while a girl plays with a doll on the stage lip. Projected in the curtain behind her there is a giant image of herself, turning slowly.

Suddenly he gets angry with the toy and begins to hit him against the ground. Even before the orchestra was twisted, Claus Guth’s bleak staging has made his concerns: childhood, dance, violence.

Guth, one of the most busy directors in Europe and makes his debut with this production, is also fascinated by multiple versions of the self. Starring the soprano Elza Van Den Heever – Ely innocent and hardened and hardened, which sounds silver but sure, this “Salome”, which opened on Tuesday, gives its main character not a double youth, but six.

The Salomes group, which progresses from perhaps a kindergarten to the 16 -year -old played by Van Den Heever, is dressed in dark dresses, giving clues of “The Shining” and Diane Arbus photographs.

Guth, placing the action in a hard black mansion at the beginning of the 20th century, has changed the adaptation of a single act of ancient times to the modern times of the 100 -minute scandalous game of Oscar Wilde. “Salome” represents, in the decadent music inspired by the flowery language of the symbolists, the biblical princess that was attracted and rejected by John the Baptist and who demanded that he be beheaded by his depraved stepfather, King Herod.

The end-siècle environment adds to all this on a touch of early psychoanalysis, an excavation of salo problems. The dance of the seven veils, historically often a striptease in the gypsy style of Rose Lee, is here a solemn parade of the seven Salome, supervised by Van Den Heever and showing his years of abuse by Herod. This is a bit heavy, but does not feel invented from nothing; Herod’s lust by Salomé is explicit in the libretto, even if it is not clear that he has acted in him.

Guth’s production, the first new “Salomé” of the Met since 2004, when Jürgen Flimm, in the middle of the Iraq war, established the opera in the contemporary Middle East, feels much of our time, an was obsessed with identifying and processing trauma. While the set Stark (from Etienne Pluss), the costumes (Ursula Kudrna) and the lighting (Olaf Freese) do not evoke the colors of the score, they have a gravity that could 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 “Die Frau Ohne Treasures” by Strauss in the with the with earlier this season, his high record can float gently and powerful. If Sheed lacks some force below, which makes the conversation passages at the beginning of the opera be silenced a little, walking intelligently, leaving a wide resistance and the approach so that the great final monologue of Salo is affectionately directly and sincere.

His Salome has a mimic habit. When copying the gestures that jochan, the John the Baptist opera does, while we pray, we realize that his sexual abuse of servant Narnaboth must before have an ultrasound in the way the leaf has been touched.

It is almost always a stretch for a “Salome” star to be persuasive as a 16 -year -old girl, but the presence of real doubles makes Van Den Heever, who is about 40 years old, seems younger, an organic consequence of her truth.

The baritone Peter Mattei is a fierce and roar jochhanaan, captive hero in a basement space painted the same dusty white it is. The frantic but articulated tenor Gerhard Siegel, a veteran Herod, oozes unequal right. Like Herodias, his wife and Salomé’s mother, the mezzo-soprano Michelle Deyoung could exaggerate, the cynicism of smoking in chain, but adds a memorable advantage of anxiety.

Guth’s mysterious show is raised by the style over low heat of the orchestra’s performance under its musical director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. A trick of directing “Salome” is to make a set or around 100 playing, during much of the score, with Grace like Gat Like, and Nézet-Séguin maintains music over low heat between great explosions. The intensity is incessant, but so is the transparency of complex textures; Even pianissimo flute trills are recorded while Salome sings close to the end that Jochanan’s body is like “a garden full of pigeons.”

Not everything about production is successful. The projections that occasionally throw themselves into the stern game to show that their walls tremble or disintegrate are silly. The masks of the head of the animals, destined to be sinister, detach themselves as gestures with heart we have towards the erotic of “very closed eyes”.

But Guth’s work is largely thoughtful and expressive. Much of Salomé’s final effusion, ostesible delivered to Joochan’s head, is sung as private reflections. His younger doubles, who have been scattered and isolated previously, now surround her, her hands extend to touch her. The reintegration of a fractured self has been achieved, the ultimate goal of therapy.

However, Guth does not represent the end as a triumphal realization of Salomé’s revenge fantasies. Instead, with Herod shouting her soldiers to kill her, she simply enters a dense fog. (The strong whistle of the smoke machine makes an unfortunate counterpoint with the climatic music of Strauss).

The final view is that Herodias extends to Salome, as the doubles did. (“Let me save you”? “Take me with you”?) But Salome, either for literal or something more symbolic death, is going on his own. A few minutes before, he said he came to understand the secret of love and death; Maybe that secret is that it will always be alone, marked by what you have endured.

More than a century after its premiere, “Salome” has lost its capacity for shock. In the best case, perhaps, you can be sad. He certainly does it with, in the gloomy staging of Guth and the sober and committed performance of Van Den Heever.

Salle

Until May 24 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; Metopera.org.