| IN HIS affection for the waltz, Richard Strauss is often compared to his namesake (but no relation) Johann Strauss II. But a closer parallel, in both life and art, is Franz Lehár. Contemporaries, they wrote their best work before 1914, they kept their heads down under the Third Reich (Strauss with a Jewish daughter-in-law, Lehár with a Jewish wife), they died ten months apart in the late 1940s — and they both wrote waltzes.
What is more, Strauss’s first operatic success was premièred in the same month, December 1905, as Lehár’s masterpiece. (By a strange coincidence, The Merry Widow is being staged next month by the English National Opera.)
The early years of Salome’s existence were marked by controversy. The Kaiser remarked that the opera would do the composer much harm; Strauss later commented that the harm financed the building of his villa at Garmisch in Bavaria. In Vienna, the Archbishop prevented a production from taking place under Mahler at the Court Opera, while in New York the opera was taken off after one performance. Conducted by Beecham, it reached Covent Garden in 1910, but only after modifications demanded by the Lord Chamber-lain.
Nowadays, Salome is practically a repertory piece, and this new production by David McVicar is the sixth at Covent Garden since the war. The libretto was adapted from the contemporary German translation of Salomé, the play that the virtually bilingual Oscar Wilde wrote in French.
Play and opera are dominated by the moon, of which there was no sign in Es Devlin’s set. In fact, the action was not merely indoors: it took place in a grubby, white-tiled changing-room, with a sink and, upstage, what looked like urinals. On the left was the grille covering the cistern imprisoning John the Baptist; on the right, a curved staircase. Why Herod should have wanted to bring his dinner guests down to such an unappealing place it was hard to fathom.
Nevertheless, the production was gripping from the start. A man was at work with mop and bucket as the besotted young officer Narraboth rhapsodised over Salome’s beauty, and the guards chatted about the prisoner. Servants are dressed in black and white — I tried hard not to think of the bellhops in Jonathan Miller’s Mikado — and there are rifles for the soldiers and a revolver for Narraboth, whose suicide leads to the reappearance of the cleaner.
Salome rushes in, taking refuge from her stepfather’s ogling, and commands that the Baptist — Jokanaan in German, four syllables — be brought forth.
Vocally, the honours of the evening belonged to Michael Volle, who invested Jokanaan’s diatonic banalities with a splendour that they scarcely deserved. His fulminations against Herod, Herodias, and Salome herself were stentorian, but, supported by the sensitive conducting of Philippe Jordan, he was all tenderness when speaking of Christ.
Thomas Moser, a portly figure in evening dress, cut an almost sane figure in Wilde’s gallery of grotesques. As Herodias, Michaela Schuster — the turquoise of her dress virtually the only colour — showed she could cackle with the best.
What of Salome? Nadja Michael was magnificent, from petulant teen-ager to bloodsoaked harpy (and this production is not for the shockable). Squalliness at the top, unsurprising in a singer who only recently moved from mezzo to soprano, was a small price to pay for such intensity. The staging of the Dance of the Seven Veils, most of which is — yes! — a waltz, was short on eroticism. But it was a memorable evening.
Further performances on 8 and 12 March. The production will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 10 May.
www.roh.org.uk
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