Evan Zimmerman

In 1966-67, the first season in its Lincoln Center house, the Metropolitan Opera offered its first-ever production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. Designed to show off the new house’s multiple, hydraulic stages, Robert O’Hearn’s set moved up and down between the imperial gardens on high and the proletarian underworld below. The same capacity impresses still.

In the Met’s new Salome, directed by Claus Guth and designed by Etienne Pluss, Herod’s palace is a cavernous black box with Victorian ornaments that rises portentously to reveal an equally grandiose apparent cellar space beneath it, the makeshift prison in which John the Baptist (Jochanaan) is chained to a rear corner. When the captain of the guard (in this production the head butler) agrees to Salome’s demand to speak with the prisoner, they both descend into the cellar to the music that usually accompanies Jochanaan’s emergence from his cistern.

As Salome descended the treacherous triple-angled stairway, followed by the morbidly curious captain/butler Narraboth, a kind of déjà-vu occurred to me. Wasn’t this scene strangely reminiscent of Act II of Fidelio, of Leonore’s descent into Florestan’s prison dungeon followed by the jailkeeper Rocco—who, like Narraboth, is also following orders?

Karen Almond

“Es muss schrecklich sein, in so einer schwarzen Höhle zu leben” (it must be terrible to live in such a black cave), wonders Salome; “wie kalt ist es in diesen unterirdischen Gewölben”(how cold it is in these underground caverns), comments Leonore. Who ever thought to find any similarity between Fidelio and Salome? No such intention is likely to have inspired either Guth’s production or Pluss‘s set. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition yields some dividends.

Exactly a century separates the first version of Beethoven’s Fidelio (called Leonore, 1805) from Strauss’s Salome (1905). The Fidelio story originated in a late 19^th-century play based on a true story; the Salome story has sources in the New Testament (Mark and Matthew) and in the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus. Each involves an unjustly incarcerated political prisoner who cries out with considerable dignity.

The difference is in their significant others. One of them is rescued by his heroic wife. The other is murdered at the will of a vengeful teenager. The first carries the transformative optimism of a revolutionary age; the second is overwhelmed by the oppressive atmosphere of declining empire– whether that of the Romans or the Victorians or the Habsburgs. I’ll leave it to historians of antiquity and Bible scholars to comment on the source depictions of cultural pessimism and perverse sexuality. We call the years around the turn of the 20^thcentury the fin-de-siècle because the time and mood suggest the end of an old era more than the start of a new one.

Evan Zimmerman

On the other hand, those same fin-de-siècle years—say the decade from Oscar Wilde’s Salome to Richard Strauss’s—were marked also by revolutions in human understanding. These include the invention of sexuality, both as a principle of identity and as a scientific discourse. The invention of sexuality included homosexuality as a marker of identity rather than a classification of an act. Personally and politically, sexuality now carried a double potential. Liberating when tied to the emancipatory politics of the sense of a new era, it could also debilitate when saddled with cultural and political despair. In the first column: first-wave feminism and gay rights; in the second: misogyny and the association of femininity with hysteria and perversion. From Wilde to Strauss, Salome lives in this second column.

In her widely read 1970 book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett argued that Salome’s fixation on John the Baptist’s skin, hair, and mouth in Wilde’s play could be understood as the displacement of male (Wilde’s) homosexual desire. Perhaps, but the ironic outcome of this notion is its repetition of the play’s own basic misogyny. First rendered into a figure of perversion, Salome now vanished completely as a woman. Of course, the play also accomplishes literally this act of violence in Salome’s execution on Herod’s orders. In the Biblical account, Salome is said to go on to a later life, one including marriage and children.

Claus Guth’s Salome is not executed by Herod’s soldiers; she simply retreats upstage. A reminiscence of Patrice Chéreau’s Elektra, who stares into space at the moment of her scripted death? But unlike Elektra, who understands everything, Salome understands nothing. Is she escaping the palace? Has she learned something about violence and recovery? Her survival may avoid a misogynistic cliché —that link between opera more generally and “the undoing of women,” in Catherine Clément’s now classic formulation.

Evan Zimmerman

But Guth’s production carries its own endemic misogyny. On the one hand, Guth’s Salome is explicitly and convincingly portrayed as a victim of childhood sexual abuse, most likely at the hand of her stepfather Herod. So much is entirely supported by the text: “Es ist seltsam, dass der Mann meiner Mutter mich so ansieht” (It is strange for my mother’s husband to look at me that way). As reviews have widely commented, Guth’s production unfolds through a series of pantomimes involving a series of doubles embodying stages of Salome’s childhood and adolescence. And as Zachary Woolfe aptly noted in his review, Salome’s manipulation of Narraboth involves abusive fondling that can be inferred as a repetition, an acting out, of her own history of victimization by Herod.

Trauma involves the undoing of the self, and there is no overestimating its devastation. But that is not to say that recovery is impossible, at least to a level of functionality. Such was the basic premise of Sigmund Freud’s early psychoanalytic theory.  Having witnessed innumerable cases of abused young women during his apprenticeship at the fabled Paris Salpêtrière hospital, Freud developed his initial theory of “hysteria” as an illness resulting from the trauma of rape. As this first articulation developed into a general theory of the unconscious, Freud abandoned what became known euphemistically as the “seduction theory,” replacing sexual victimization as the basic problem with the repressed desire for sexual contact, a shift for which he has been amply criticized.

Evan Zimmerman

For these critics, Freud’s change of position resulted from the denial that sexual abuse could exist in such overwhelming numbers. The repetition or “acting out” of trauma, whether through incapacitating psychosomatic symptoms or through the serial displacement of the original violence into the abuse of other victims, makes clear the lack of recovery. The “working through” of both trauma and its recurrences—for Freud the normative alternative to “acting out”—is potentially restorative of both functionality and moral agency.

These paths are fraught with political issues. Though the inability to work through past trauma cannot be assumed to constitute failure—that would amount to blaming the victim—the assumption that working through is categorically not possible can also amount to a misogynistic prejudice. And that’s where Guth’s production of Salome falls short.

For Salome to turn simply into a kind of deviant, as her necrophilia seems more than ever to illustrate in Guth’s final scene—seems only to consign her to the same world of depravity that consumed her early life. In this respect the production unintentionally repeats the same sort of violence against girls and women that it portrays in the first place. Salome’s final walk-out remains illegible. In fairness, perhaps any legibility would require a signal from the work itself that is simply not there.

Evan Zimmerman

The paradigms of decadence and symbolism into which Wilde and Strauss insert their versions of the Salome story involve a retreat into sensual interiorities that leave little room for the outside world of political or moral functioning. The psychoanalytic paradigm that emerges at this time pays rigorous attention to deep realms of desire and violence. These become the topography of the unconscious, which Freud claimed to be the first to chart scientifically while at the same time crediting poets and other artists with its pre-scientific understanding.

In his clinical practice, Freud strove to relieve patients who were suffering from incapacitating symptoms, disturbances rising from the unconscious and resulting from unhealed psychic wounds. “Wound” is the translation of the Greek word “trauma.” In describing the goal of such treatment as functionality and explicitly not as happiness, Freud hoped to restore these patients to a kind of citizenship in the world. In other words, to a moral and political life, at whatever scale.

Beethoven’s Leonore is the epitome of the moral citizen, understood in late 18^th century, Kantian terms of universal principles and laws. Her personal and political values are identical. Her rescue of her husband extends seamlessly to the liberation of scores of political prisoners. Before she recognizes her husband, she vows to rescue the unknown prisoner in the dungeon, no matter who he may be. In the mid-20^th century this principle of universality became known as human rights, including the right to sexuality itself.