“Salome”, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen
Dana Rufolo in Ghent
10 January 2025
Daringly, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen produced Salome by Richard Strauss (1905) under the baton of Alejo Pérez and the direction of Ersan Mondtag as a tale of lust in its guises as sexual lust and a lust for power.
Photo credit: OBV – Annemie Augustijns.
The production featuring Allison Cook on 10 January, the day I saw it (she alternates with Astrid Kessler), is a quixotic fusion of dramatic and stage set styles that is enlivened by a musical interpretation which unusually emphasizes the extreme surrealistic elements in Strauss’ composition; the orchestra evoked Strauss’ musical renditions of violent storms and wind with nuances of intensity, grounding the opera in the elements, which are wild and therefore untamable.
The cast – which includes Angela Denoke as Salome’s mother Herodias, Florian Stern as the tetrarch Herod who is Salome’s stepfather (in alternation with Thomas Blondelle), Michael Kupfer-Radecky as the prophet Jochanaan, known as John the Baptist (alternating with Kostas Smoriginas), and Denzil Delaere as the soldier Narraboth who is hopelessly in love with Salome – reveal great operatic strength, as they proved capable of projecting their voices over even the most sonorous of musical moments.
Strauss’s opera Salome uses a libretto taken from Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play Salomé which was first published in French to avoid a British law then in place that literature could not be based on a story derived from the Bible. Wilde himself wrote the French original.
Strauss’s opera races towards its grim finale of Salome’s stepfather ordering her murder after she embraces and kisses the head of the prophet Jochanaan in an emotional scene where revenge merges with passion and love. Herod fears that Salome’s wanton act will provoke the wrath of an avenging God. But what we see before our eyes is Salome on stage with the dead prophet and lost in her own reverie, psychologically separate from the court scene around her, and it is that danger – the knowledge of her potential independence – that draws out Herod’s fear. Violence, the ever-present sight of shotguns trained on characters by disciplined soldiers who are ready to obey Herod in a flash, has already created an onstage atmosphere where normality has been subsumed by fear.
Photo credit: OBV – Annemie Augustijns.
Jochanaan denounced Herodias because as a widow she married her first husband’s brother, Herod; it is immoral he proclaims. This is not a modern thought, but his denunciation stirs Herod’s sense of guilt although he does not appear to have been responsible for his brother’s death. Additionally, Jochanaan announces that a true saviour (Jesus) will soon arrive. These prophesies frighten Herod, who is unsure of his ability to remain in power in light of the changes that Jochanaan predicts. Herod is only the equivalent of a governor; the true monarch is Caesar, and he is caught between being the autocratic ruler over the people of his domain and being subservient to a greater power.
Mondtag, who not only directed but also designed the set and the costumes, compares Herod to Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, who rules his country with autocratic cruelty and yet is a mere pawn in the hands of the Russian despot Vladimir Putin. Hence, Mondtag’s eclectic set fuses a medieval castle with a huge carved face of a man who could be either Herod or Lukashenko and a woman who is carved in the style of Soviet art who represents Salome. Although the political message that tyranny resurfaces through the ages is clear, the effect of the confounding of the past (after all, Jochanaan is murdered the old-fashioned way, with his head cut off from his body with a sword) with the presence of guns everywhere is to give us the sense that at any moment things might spiral out of control. This supports the orchestra’s emphasis of the surrealistic moments in Strauss’ piece, while dramatically the support that keeps everything under control is sexual lust.
That Salome is not played as a virginal late adolescent (as Asmik Gregorian played her in the 2018 Salzburg Festival version) but as a seasoned woman – even if still the daughter of Herodias who is presently married to Herod – already has implications for the interpretation of the entire opera. She responds to sexual cues from her stepfather as someone experienced and able to decode their meaning. To get what she wants – which is the murder of the prophet Jochanaan as an act of vengeance– she is prepared to perform the “Dance of the Seven Veils” for her stepfather, as the script requires; Strauss’s orchestration dedicates ten minutes for this dance.
Salome is also, in this specific production, prepared to be raped. But the vengeance she seeks comes from a combination of loyalty towards her mother (who is insulted by Jochanaan) and by blatant egotism: we see how she is passionately drawn to Jochanaan, as he is to her, in a well-acted scene, but he will not yield to “temptation” and so he pushes her away and condemns her as sinful (in the sense that women are reputed to be sinful, a thinking we nowadays associate with the Taliban and their reprehensible treatment of women as seducer-devils and which was represented in the set design – also by Mondtag – where side panels on the revolving stage portray female horned witches from the medieval period).
Double meanings creep in everywhere in this production, setting atremble any confidence in solid earth beneath one’s feet. Hence, rehearsals of Salome began on the very day Donald Trump won the election in the United States. And Mondtag’s set design, which portrays the exterior of Herod’s castle and, after a 180-degree turn, the stage architecture of the interior of the castle where minor acolytes argue over religious matters and the women of the castle dance with Salome, upon her stepfather’s request, in body suits that make them appear nude, again juxtaposes power politics and the sexual power of the human body.
Salome, Oscar Wilde’s drama, has virtually never been produced as a play ever since Strauss chose it as the libretto for his opera. But in either artistic medium, the director is confronted with the major weakness in the drama, which is that Wilde doesn’t make it sufficiently clear why Jochanaan’s pronouncements are so frightful to Herod and Herodias.
Salome does not see Jochanaan first; she hears his booming voice – and its strangeness disturbs her and arouses her curiosity. Then, she sees him, and when she does, she falls in love. Love for Jochanaan provokes an outburst of wild feelings that are new to Salome – and by extension to everyone else who is present. Wilde implies that the human voice and its message of a new world order can hypnotically transform human beings. That is a perfect idea on which to build an opera, even if intellectually it seems offensive and demeaning to think we can fall so easily under the spell of another person. I believe that Mondtag intuited this contradiction and chose to resolve the problem in favor of the intellectual by pointing out that sexual attraction, initially for Salome an expression of love, becomes, in this stage world, an expression of power.
