Evan Zimmerman

Consistently attending the Met Opera has taught me the value of a production that both has a reading of the opera and can use the medium of the stage to articulate it. Claus Guth, making his Met debut after decades of high-profile work in Europe, has this rarified ability, and he has staged a Salome with an assertive interpretation of the opera, if not a groundbreaking or particularly complex one. Luckily, his cast is equipped to bring the nuance and power Richard Strauss’s masterpiece deserves after nearly ten years’ absence from the Met Opera stage. 

Guth’s Salome is a story about child sexual abuse, and his emphasis is on his heroine’s interior landscape and psychological development. Fittingly, set designer Etienne Pluss has built a grim and gloomy Victorian mansion, a classic haunted house—a time-honored allegory for a troubled psyche. 

The house, Herod’s palace, hid glimpses of spectral presences and aberrant sexuality within its austere and windowless walls; projections (by Roland Horvath, also known as rocafilm) that periodically sent the walls into freaky, seismic shivers, hands that emerged from walls to grope at the cast, men in animal masks who stalked in a pack after a nude dancer. 

But the most expressive specters were the ghosts of Salome past, a coterie of child performers who doubled Elza van den Heever’s Salome. The children haunted Herod’s house and Salome’s psyche, ghosts of the childhood he took from her. 

Evan Zimmerman

The child doubles were an uncanny and effective way of communicating Guth’s take on Salome—namely, that her blood-thirsty fixation on Jochanaan is not deranged sadism but a product of the kind of sexual violence that often begets more sexual violence. In the Dance of the Seven Veils, van den Heever’s Salome-Prime revealed a succession of Salomes, one per veil, in ascending order of age, each dancing a pas-de-deux with a Herod stand-in that staged more explicitly the abuse evoked by the ghostly presence of the child. 

One might argue that Strauss’s opera already allegorizes child sexual abuse—that, in fact, the Dance of the Seven Veils is already a depiction of incest and sexual assault, even when not presenting physical contact between Herod and Salome. A real cynic might even be tempted to glance at her opera staging bingo card, to see if she has “silent child double” between “nude dancer” and “fog machine.” 

Indeed, Guth’s psychological reading of Salome was somewhat reliant on literalizing the opera’s subtext—but even as I personally prefer my Salomes a little more enigmatic, I don’t begrudge Guth his didacticism. It was tastefully deployed, for one thing, with only very occasional moments of groan-worthiness such as the opening sequence in which, absent an overture to stage, a music box melody and whistling wind sound effects to soundtracked a performance by a child Salome. 

It was well blocked, for another, with a consistent vocabulary of gesture, used to appealingly clarifying ends. As Jochanaan prayed, for example, Salome began to mimic the ritualistic motions of his arms—a sign that she was enraptured by his body, even as his words made no impact on her. 

The production’s subtler symbolism of the haunted house, with its half-glimpsed eroticism and its prisoner in the basement, was also quite effective. Below Herod’s gothic palace was a chalky white dungeon, Jochanaan’s prison, which lifted into view as the whole upper set rose up on the Met’s stage elevator. 

The color contrast between the two spaces was impactful, as was the visual of the set lifting into the heavens—I enjoyed watching Elza van den Heever descend a wrought-iron staircase as a massive set ascended around her almost as much as I did last December, when she did exactly that in Die Frau ohne Schatten. 

As in that Frau, the vertically arranged sets were not just a visually impressive use of the Met’s cavernous stage but a way of demonstrating that the two playing spaces are not detached worlds but linked and prone to spillover. If the house was Salome’s psyche, Jochanaan was trapped in the basement of her unconscious, where her childhood toys were also stored. And while Herod may have thought that stashing Jochanaan in the basement would keep him contained, a basement is still part of a house, just as the unconscious is still part of the mind; Jochanaan’s presence was constantly breaking through the barrier between the upper set and the lower. 

First there were the subtle projections of swirling chalk dust eddies that seemed to seep relentlessly up through the floorboards from the prison below. Then there was the prophet’s voice—also uncontainable, blazing forth, even with his body chained up out of sight. 

Evan Zimmerman

In his role debut as Jochanaan, Peter Mattei was revelatory. I am certain the naysayers who consistently object to Mattei singing anything with more heft than Eugene Onegin will emerge to call him miscast in the role, but to my ears this could not be further from the truth. 

Jochanaan spends most of the opera as a disembodied voice—before, ultimately, being reduced to a voiceless, dismembered head. Mattei, for his part, has a voice that does not sound like any other living human being’s. When his voice first rang out invisibly, its sheer beauty was terrifying, like a hand in a velvet glove reaching from nowhere to grip the nape of your neck, hard. Mattei’s stage presence is always imposing—he’s a big guy, with a big personality onstage—but when audience and Salome finally laid eyes upon him in captivity, nearly nude and smeared head to toe with white paint, he looked almost like the monster in a horror film. Salome, addressing his finally silenced head, says that Jochanaan’s “voice was like incense;” it’s as good a description of Mattei’s headily seductive sound as any I can think of.  

Mattei and Elza van den Heever last sang together at the Met in the 2019-20 season’s Wozzeck, and, in Salome, they once again proved an excellent pair. Wrangling over his fanaticism and her sexuality—in the only scene where both characters are visible and alive—both Mattei and van den Heever gave voice to the constant flux between Jochanaan and Salome as they talked at, to, and through one another. Briefly, it would seem like a real conversation between the two of them was possible, but then Mattei’s tone would revert to roaring zeal or van den Heever’s to feverish ecstasy, and the moment would be broken. It’s a treat to hear vocal acting so nuanced in opera, and even more so to hear two such performers together. 

Stranded between childhood and adulthood, Elza van den Heever’s Salome mingled moments of childlike vocal sweetness with a soaring, rapturous sound that was undeniably adult. In her physicality, too, van den Heever was credible as the teenaged princess. Awkward in her body, yet clearly used to being the center of attention, van den Heever’s Salome was a young woman coming dangerously into her own over the course of the almost two hours (more on this topic later) run. 

Given van den Heever’s stage presence and confidence in the role, it was disappointing that she had so little to do during the Dance of the Seven Veils. Certainly, there are many more interesting potential uses of that music than just a strip tease, but to reduce Salome to making presentational gestures at a series of dancers is a wasted opportunity for ten minutes of character development or even just ten minutes of command over center stage. 

Also a little underwhelming was van den Heever’s lower register, which did not always make it all the way over the orchestra’s mighty din. This issue, however, I am unwilling to lay entirely at van den Heever’s feet. Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s conducting was a curious and frustrating thing, at times sublime and at times a little sedate. At times, even, it was a little sedated—Salome should really not be running two full hours. Worse, the performance was afflicted by Nézet-Séguin’s quirky, periodic refusal to cohere the orchestra to the singers. 

I remember a Met Elektra in 2018, where the orchestral sound was so magnificent and massive that there was but one consistently audible member of the cast: Elza van den Heever, as Chrysothemis. Alas, as Salome, van den Heever was not quite so lucky. There’s no question that Nézet-Séguin was able to get some awe-inspiring sounds out of the pit. Particularly in interludes where the orchestra took center stage, he invoked holy terror and ecstasy. But, elsewhere, he seemed almost to try to out-diva his diva. Sadly, when the conductor wins a diva-off, everybody loses. 

Evan Zimmerman

On the subject of diva-offs—the night’s most unexpected diva, certainly, was Gerhard Siegel as Herod. Ridiculously high energy and with a clarion-clear voice that somehow only made him seem more of a neurotic wreck, Siegel’s performance was funny, loathsome, demented, and downright scene-stealing. 

Poor Michelle DeYoung, on the other hand, had little to do as Herodias besides swill champagne and get felt up with the spectral hands coming out of the walls. The lack of character definition was helped neither by DeYoung’s voice, which was somewhat hooted and easily overpowered, nor by a bright red wig that, with the gothic mansion setting, evoked Catherine O’Hara in Beetlejuice to an unfortunate degree. 

Opening the opera as Narraboth and the Page, Piotr Buszewski and Tamara Mumford both cut appealing, ingenue-ish figures. His tenor was dashingly heroic; her mezzo lush and tragic. Both sang with such commitment you’d think the opera was the tragic tale of a page and a captain of the guard. (However, Ursula Kudrna‘s costumes had both dressed as household footmen.)

As the opera reached its chillingly beautiful conclusion, however, any moments of disjunction and distraction were easy to forgive. (Well, except for an infuriatingly loud fog machine; don’t forget to check that bingo card! There’s a “free” space. It’s “projections.”) 

In those final moments, Van den Heever’s Salome addressed with a hushed kind of calm the face that had sparked such violent and erotic fervor within her—confused, perhaps, that such a lifeless thing could have had such an effect. Why wouldn’t he look at her? Were his lips bitter with blood? Or with love? 

Even here, in the stark white basement of her unconscious mind, surrounded by the stunted and fractured ghosts of her younger self, Salome found no easy answers, no convenient self knowledge. But as the orchestra teetered on the edge of romanticism and revulsion, as van den Heever’s voice ascended to shivering delirium, as the set lifted her up to face her ambiguous fate, the music affirmed Salome’s rapture, not her doubt. What does it matter? Wherever that stage elevator was taking her, it certainly was not her stepfather’s house anymore.

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