Its astounding final scene elevates Salome from an efficient thriller to a masterpiece of subtext: an opera that makes scaldingly clear its protagonist’s interior torment even as its Aestheticist libretto disdains such bourgeois quantities as “torment” or “interior.” In Wilde’s script, it’s the soul that dare not speak its name. This perversely, frees—forces!—Strauss’s music to sing it.
What conflict shimmers between book and score! In Wilde, Salome’s list of Jochanaan’s three enticements (his body, his hair, his lips) is elegantly echoed by Herod’s lures (his wine, his apple, his throne.) When wine and apples return to haunt the text of Salome’s mad final monologue, we feel the turbulence of the Salome/Herod relationship all the more strongly for Wilde’s discreet refusal to locate it. Meanwhile, Strauss’s score describes everything, no matter how fleeting—winds, birds, quarreling rabbis—and his glittering chromatic harmonies make everywhere audible the suffering that Wilde’s glamourous text elides. Isolde’s firelight dances beneath a translucent Art Nouveau lampshade.
Out in the world, the news, of course, is the excellent Karita Mattila, returning to the Met after her triumphant assumption of this role in 2004. Hers is a startlingly unsentimental view of this princess. Hair flying, thighs twitching, Mattila’s Salome is very much her jaded parents’ daughter: toying with underlings, be they imprisoned desert prophets or heartsick palace guards, is nothing new to her. The blitheness of her approach for the first two-thirds of the opera does raise the stakes of the final scene—she needs to reveal and peak the character more or less simultaneously. And this she does, and movingly.
But this journal—I say with both with respect and gratitude— is concerned more with pieces than performers. I am happy to echo all the lovely things said elsewhere about this production. Last night, the champion was Mattila. Every night, the miracle is Salome.