IF RAMPED UP creepy is your thing, and you adore the complex disharmonies of fin de siècle European opera, you will relish every second of Salome, currently being screened by Metropolitan Opera at Ster Kinekor outlets in South Africa. Featuring South African soprano Elza van den Heever, in the eponymous role, Salome will either blow your mind or make appearances in your nightmares and have you running out, in terror, before its denouement.
Under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and the controversial pen of Oscar Wilde, this work was banned after its first performance in London in 1907. Whether that reflects on the values of the society of the time, or the potency of the work itself is a moot point: for a relatively hardened 21st century critic, it’s a difficult opera to watch, musically but also thematically.
Based on a snippet of a tale from the New Testament, involving a complex relationship between Herod’s step-daughter and the powers that be, it features Yochanaan (John the Baptist), played by baritone Peter Mattei in excruciating scenes that touch on cruelty, madness and disharmony, with a touch of necrophilia and unsettling nuances of child sexuality peppered into the mix. Salome has been painted as a heroine in many different interpretations of dance art and poetry over the years, but Strauss reveals her as more on the side of catatonically murderous than anything else. Director Claus Guth also draws from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, bringing in solemn little girls in black velvet frocks with crocheted collars, sporting the kind of blank stares that will haunt you.
It features a novel interpretation of the famous dance of the seven veils in which Salome trades her virtue for the head of Yochanaan. Here we see Salome as a five-year-old. A nine-year-old. A pre-teen. A sexually mature young person. The undertones and overtones of seduction and taboo are quite horrifying.
Van den Heever has a terrifying stage presence and a magnificent voice. But it is her grin in the most disturbing of situations that makes the whole opera shudder with a sense of the uncanny and something you want to turn away from, before you see it.
Unlike most Met Opera productions, this is a short work, of just one act, and sadly the casualty here, is that there are scant supporting programmes in the screening. Often it is those supporting programmes, featuring interviews with or about performers or idiosyncrasies in the works, that lend the seeing of the work user-friendliness, context and coherence. Here, it’s basically you and Salome’s grin for a good two hours.
- Salome was composed in 1902 by Richard Strauss to libretti by Hedwig Lachmann, which comprise a German translation of Oscar Wilde’s eponymous play of 1891. Directed for the Metropolitan Opera in New York by Claus Guth, it features design by Etienne Pluss (production); Ursula Kudrna (costumes); Sommer Ulrickson (choreography); Yvonne Gebauer (dramaturge) and Olaf Freese (lighting). Conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, it is performed by a cast headed by Piotr Buszewski, Michelle DeYoung, Peter Mattei, Chad Shelton, Gerhard Siegel and Elza van den Heever and has one last screening by Met Opera live at selected Art Nouveau movie theatres in South Africa, on Tuesday 3 June 2025 at 12:00.