Gone Girl

Leading German opera director Claus Guth makes his Met debut with a revealing new staging of Strauss’s Salome that shines a light into the darkest shadows of the human mind. Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes the podium, and high-powered soprano Elza van den Heever stars as the title character, whom Guth sees as a survivor fighting to escape a stolen childhood. By Jay Goodwin

Since the very beginning, Salome has been a mystery. Despite a rich catalogue of artworks inspired by the biblical princess who demanded the head of John the Baptist, we know almost nothing about her. If not for a passing mention in an obscure historical tract, we wouldn’t even know her name. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark relate only that a daughter of Herodias danced for her stepfather, the tetrarch Herod, who was so pleased that he promised her anything she might request. At her mother’s direction, she chose her ghastly reward.

For 2,000 years, the story has been a popular subject, and its details have been repeatedly adjusted to conform with—or purposely violate—the morals and orthodoxies of each passing age. Prominent examples include paintings by Titian, Caravaggio, and Gustave Moreau; a story by Flaubert that was adapted by Massenet for the operatic stage; and Oscar Wilde’s scandalous fin-de-siecle drama, which led to Strauss’s seminal opera.

A scene from Strauss’s Salome

“With Salome, it is extremely important to consider the time in which it was created,” says Claus Guth, the in-demand German director who makes his Met debut this season with the company’s first new staging of the opera in more than 20 years. “Sometimes history goes on in a normal, slow rhythm for a long time, and then suddenly there is a moment when everything seems to explode, when time accelerates, and art veers off in many directions.” The turbulent years surrounding the turn of the 20th century represent one such inflection point, as scientific and technological advances, bold new avenues of intellectual inquiry, and rapid social changes drove Europe to discard the prudish, repressive mores—and the stability—of the Victorian era.

For Guth, it made sense to set the action in this period of upheaval, and with set designer Etienne Pluss, he has created an ornate but monochromatic Victorian palace for Herod and his court. “It’s a world full of details, full of sculptures, but the strange thing is that it’s all black,” Guth says. “You only see the details when they suddenly come into the light.” Crucially, the perfectly polished façade has no windows and conceals dark corners for dirty deeds. “We show in the beginning that, behind the curtains, a party is going on. Sexuality happens unseen, in a different room,” he says. “We were inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which has this same kind of atmosphere—normal people behaving normally in the daytime, but you’d never expect the parallel life they lead at night.”

A scene from Salome

Intentionally provocative, Wilde’s 1893 play developed Salome’s story into a complex psychological study, delving into the motivations, fears, sexual desires, deviant acts, and traumas of its characters. A prurient aspect to the relationship between Herod and his stepdaughter was not new, but Salome’s elaborately seductive Dance of the Seven Veils, her sexual obsession with John the Baptist, and her necrophilic antics with his severed head were Wilde’s inventions, and they understandably shocked the public—as they still do today. “But great art is meant to get into areas of emotion that are challenging and complicated,” says Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who takes the podium for the new production.

Strauss further amplified the retelling with an astonishing, white-hot score that broke from a host of traditional operatic expectations and made the drama more visceral and more disturbingly ambiguous—and introduced one of the repertory’s most distinctive and fearsome roles. The composer famously described his Salome as “a 16-year-old girl with the voice of Isolde.” This neatly illustrates some of the impossible demands on the leading soprano. But it does not fully capture the dramatic challenge of portraying an emotionally stunted adolescent driven to near-total mental collapse. Salome’s hazy backstory and wildly shifting impulses also mean that, more than almost any other operatic figure, the essence of her character is up to the director and the singer to decide.

“I’m trying to tell the story of a girl growing up in a brutal world full of lies, suddenly realizing that something is wrong and looking for a way to free herself,” says Guth. “But in order to get there, she has to destroy the world she’s living in.” This sympathetic reading is made powerfully clear before a single word is sung. During the introductory orchestral music, the audience sees a younger version of Salome walking playfully through the mansion with a doll, driving home the fact that not long ago, she was just a vulnerable, trusting child surrounded by the deception and perversity of the court. “This girl was raised like a puppet, completely in terror of the moods of her stepfather,” Guth says. “There are many indications that she was sexually abused by him, and when Herod says, ‘Dance for me,’ we sense that it is something he has said to her many times before.” The innocent spirit of this betrayed young girl must still be inside the older Salome, even as she shakes the walls of the auditorium in her Wagnerian final scenes.

Elza van den Heever, pictured in Strauss’s Elektra, sings the title role of the composer’s similarly searing Salome.

Rising to meet these many demands is soprano Elza van den Heever, who has shown off her vocal power and beauty many times at the Met, including triumphs as Elisabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Senta in Wagner’s Die Fliegende Holländer, and Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck. And after entirely shaving her head for her 2012 company debut as Queen Elizabeth I in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, she has few equals for dramatic commitment. “She is a radical and serious artist who puts every part of her soul into a role like this,” says Guth. “This is exactly what you need, someone who will take every risk.” When she debuted her Salome recently at the Paris Opera, Le Monde raved about her complete command, proclaiming her a “stage and vocal presence for the ages.”

Van den Heever reunites with her Wozzeck co-star Peter Mattei.

Joining van den Heever as Jochanaan (as John the Baptist is called in the opera) is baritone Peter Mattei, long regarded as one of opera’s most intense and compelling actors, and one of its most glamorous voices. In addition to headlining Wozzeck alongside van den Heever, he starred in the Met’s recent new productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Verdi’s Don Carlo, among many other roles. 

In Guth’s production, it is particularly important that Jochanaan and Salome have convincing chemistry because their relationship becomes the key to her escape. As she descends to the cellar where he is held prisoner, she suddenly finds herself in another world. Instead of polished inky black, Jochanaan’s domain is covered in chalky white. And whereas designer Ursula Kudrna’s costumes for the upstairs residents are all-black and all-covering, with not a single inch of skin beyond the face showing, Jochanaan is nearly naked. “He’s all skin and hair and smell,” Guth says. “It’s something extremely sensual for the first time in her life, and she learns that someone can attract her in a very physical way and can reject her in a very physical way. We see the huge desire and excitement she has to explore this relationship because it’s her first contact with something real.”

A scene from Salome

Judging purely by the libretto, it seems that Salome and Jochanaan talk forever past one another, unable to hear what the other is saying. But Guth sees it differently. “She watches him very carefully, and she sees an archaic, simple, but very determined man,” he says. “She sees that he means what he says, and mostly what he says, in the face of her wild demands, is ‘no.’ And so she learns from him how she can confront the people upstairs.” Likewise, Guth believes Jochanaan senses that Salome is not actually part of the system that locked him away, and that he can use her to his own ends. “You put things you don’t want to hear down in the basement, but they can still scream up from there,” Guth says. “In Jochanaan, Herod has brought a bomb into his cellar, which in the end will destroy his world.”

Armed with her new determination and perspective, Salome is ready for the opera’s crucial turning point, the Dance of the Seven Veils—and Guth makes it the centerpiece of his staging. When Herod, portrayed by tenor Gerhard Siegel, demands that she dance for him, she agrees to do so, but it becomes a public confrontation, told through flashback. Using a sequence of progressively older Salome doubles that enter in turn, each veil becomes Salome at a different stage of childhood, being taught—or groomed—by Herod as she dances for him. It is an accusation of terrible force, made in front of her mother (sung by mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung), which makes clear that Herodias has enabled this all along by willfully looking away. “From here on, Salome has enormous power,” Guth says. “Herod knows that things are getting out of his control.”

A scene from Salome

It may seem counterintuitive, in Guth’s narrative, that Salome would still want Jochanaan to be beheaded. But although he has served a useful purpose for her, he nevertheless represents only a partial truth about the world, and his is an unsustainably inflexible philosophy. She must leave everything behind and forge a new path, chart a new moral course of her own. “For me, an opera like this speaks in symbols, using extreme examples to depict things that happen in reality for every human being,” Guth says. “In this context, killing somebody means letting go of an idea or a constraint.”

For the director, when examined from this symbolic perspective, the opera has an inspiring and universal message. “Ultimately, Salome is a story of finding your own values,” he says. “It’s a proposal to be radical in the way you discover who you are, and this is only possible if you communicate with your dreams, with your fears, with the things underneath the rational daytime world. So this is something we should all be interested in.”

Jay Goodwin is the Met’s Editorial Director.