{"id":5407,"date":"2025-05-05T15:23:18","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T15:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/05\/observer-opera-reviews-salome-at-the-met-with-elza-van-den-heever\/"},"modified":"2025-05-05T15:23:19","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T15:23:19","slug":"observer-opera-reviews-salome-at-the-met-with-elza-van-den-heever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/05\/observer-opera-reviews-salome-at-the-met-with-elza-van-den-heever\/","title":{"rendered":"Observer Opera Reviews: \u2018Salome\u2019 at the Met With Elza van den Heever"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Elza van den Heever and Peter Mattei. Photo: Evan Zimmerman \/ Met Opera<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How old is Salome when she dances for Herod and the head of John the Baptist? The Bible is ambiguous. In Aubrey Beardsley<\/a>\u2019s famous illustrations, she seems to shapeshift: at times, she looks young and androgynous, in other instances, she seems almost wizened, a crone older than Jochanaan. Is she 8 or 12 or 16 or 25? A young woman coming into a newfound sexual power, or a child who has had sexuality forced upon her from the time she could walk? In Claus Guth<\/a>\u2019s stellar new production of Salome, <\/i>she is all of these ages and none.<\/p>\n

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Staged in deepest black and dingy white, Guth\u2019s production is unapologetic in its symbolism. It opens on a girl playing with a doll in relative silence. She breaks off its arms moments before that famous clarinet solo announces the beginning of the opera proper. There\u2019s a ram-headed statue in the corner of the cavernous black palace hall; animal-masked men menace a nude female dancer, her face also covered with a cat mask. When Salome descends into the cistern, a white-faced Jochanaan sits in one corner. In the other is a rocking horse along with other nursery toys. The same little girl from the prologue sits partly shaded from view. Phallic imagery (ram\u2019s horns, spears, knives, play-swords) and dolls are everywhere. Salome herself is dressed like a doll. Her clothes are those of a very young girl, hung uneasily on a grown woman\u2019s body.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: <\/i><\/b>How Soprano Elza van den Heever Is Tackling the Met\u2019s \u2018Salome\u2019 Head On\u2014or Off!<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For Guth, Salome<\/i> is first and foremost a story about sexual trauma: how it breaks apart a person, upends her agency, and warps her desires. This reading results in an intelligently directed and viciously watchable production by Guth and choreographer Sommer Ulrickson<\/a>. Like all good Salome<\/i>s, it\u2019s deeply nasty. This opera is decadent, rancid, and marvelous, from its simile-laden libretto to its luscious score. Unlike many Salome<\/i>s, Guth\u2019s production has something to say about trauma.<\/p>\n

With four planned productions of this story (not all by Strauss) in New York this year, we are living in the age of Salome. Sometimes such programming synchronicities just happen (sometimes they are even intentional), but I think this confluence of Salomes bespeaks a reckoning with opera\u2019s past at the exact moment that women reckon with our present social and political reality. Earlier this year, Elizabeth Dinkova<\/a>\u2019s production for Heartbeat Opera insisted on inverting the gaze back onto the men, stripping Herod and Jochanaan both. It also seems that the rot cannot be removed; sometimes the whole family tree must be burned down. Guth\u2019s production has very different aims. Salome is sadder here, her protests at Herod\u2019s attempted seductions less bratty and more truly defiant. Salome is surprisingly sympathetic, even when she demands Jochanaan\u2019s head. Of all things, we are rooting for her.<\/p>\n

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The production offers a new take on the Dance of the Seven Veils. Photo: Evan Zimmerman \/ Met Opera<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We\u2019re also living in the age of Elza van den Heever<\/a>, whom I suspect is the most outstanding Strauss soprano of her generation. Van den Heever was so searingly good as the Empress in the Met\u2019s Die Frau ohne Schatten<\/i><\/a> (where she got to play a much less complicated heroine) that it\u2019s almost difficult to envision her as someone so young and so relentlessly screwed-up as Salome. Then she opens her mouth and out pour rivers of controlled, sparkling, and nuanced sound. Van den Heever\u2019s Salome is anything but shrill; instead, the singer leverages her natural warmth to imbue Salome with a pitiable sensitivity, even as she swings wildly between aggressor and victim.<\/p>\n

Her co-stars aren\u2019t too shabby either, particularly Peter Mattei<\/a> as Jochanaan and Piotr Buszewski<\/a>\u2019s Narraboth. Mattei, covered in white body paint with painful-looking skinned knees, seemed equally fascinated with Van den Heever\u2019s princess as she was with him. His voice is powerful and a bit on the dry side, as if Jochanaan had been crying out in the wilderness for a long time. Buszewski brought a delectable tenor sound as the desperate captain who, in this production, impales himself on Salome\u2019s spear (she barely notices). Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung<\/a>, decked out in a spectacularly hideous orange dress and wig, offers a Herodias who hides in fashion, while tenor Gerhard Siegel<\/a> was a wonderfully nasal and histrionic Herod. All had to contend with Strauss\u2019s colossal score, here played with brassy vigor by the orchestra and conducted by Yannick N\u00e9zet-S\u00e9guin.<\/p>\n

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All the Salomes. Photo: Evan Zimmerman \/ Met Opera<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During the Dance of the Seven Veils, Guth and Ulrickson cash in all their symbolic checks. Salome \u201creveals\u201d herself by unveiling six past versions of herself; first a child of only three or four, followed by girls of growing ages and heights. They each \u201cdance\u201d with a ram-headed double of Herod, who at first menaces and then openly abuses them, until finally, the current version comes to stab Herod\u2019s doppelg\u00e4nger as her stepfather watches in horror and arousal. The implications couldn\u2019t be clearer; Herod has been raping her for years.<\/p>\n

This is a shocking production not for its depravity, but for its honesty. It slices clean through the knot of euphemisms and the piling-up similes of the opera\u2019s libretto, and\u2014ironically, like the anti-poetic and thoroughly evil Herodias\u2014insists on calling the moon the moon. What Herod has done to Salome, under the eye of her own selfish and ineffectual mother, has trapped her with her past selves and torpedoed her development. She\u2019s unable to be the age she really is, having been simultaneously infantilized and forced into the adult world. The Dance is Salome\u2019s way of witnessing her own trauma, of showing Herod back to himself. He doesn\u2019t get it, but we do.<\/p>\n

Some tableaux are truly stomach-flipping for their vile brilliance: Salome rubbing her face on the still-bleeding neck of a decapitated Jochanaan, Salome singing to the head as it rests on the shoulders of one of her younger doppelg\u00e4ngers, Salome resting her head in the space where Jochanaan\u2019s should be. Guth\u2019s production is not perfect. At times, its meanings are scattered, and it gets bogged down in symbolism. The projections are largely unnecessary, with one exception: when Herod worries about the wind, the projections make the whole stage shiver. A troupe of animal-masked dancers that haunted the background of many scenes felt overused after the first.<\/p>\n

But the final cistern scene, in which Salome finally kisses the head, is a masterstroke. She is alone with the head yet still surrounded by all the versions of herself. The cistern suggests that Salome has never left this nursery-prison. We fear she might never leave it. But this production\u2019s final moments make a bolder and better choice. Just as Herod calls for Salome\u2019s death, the tetrarch himself collapses. As the black palace rooms recede, a blood-daubed Salome rises through the floor, coming face to face with the moon. She leaves her six other selves on the stairs and walks off into the night, Herod dead in her wake. The lights come down, catching her in freeze-frame. It\u2019s an ambiguous ending, but it\u2019s also a triumph. So is this production.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\"Claus<\/p><\/div>\n