Metropolitan Opera Archives

"Salome," that once scandalous and scandalizing aberration of the Muse, seems at last to have become acceptable to the operatic hearth and home, along with "Mignon," "Lohengrin," "Aida" and all the other members in unimpeachable standing. Forgotten are the epithets of old, those malodorous vegetables of disesteem that were flung at the indelicate heroine of Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss when she disclosed herself at the Metropolitan a generation ago. "Monstrous," "pestilential," "mephitic," "abhorrent," "diseased," "polluted," "bestial," "loathsome" - those are but a few. The others are not for advertisement on this modest and blushful bulletin board.

In those days, tender-minded souls, contemplating the scene in which the exigent daughter of Herodias fondles the severed head of John, were filled with alarm for the safety of the moral order. They feared, as Mr. Ernest Newman (safe in unregenerate London) remarked at the time, "that if women in general were suddenly to become abnormally morbid, conceive perverse passions for clergymen, have those holy men decapitated when their advances were rejected, and then start kissing the severed heads in a blind fury of love and revenge in the middle of the drawing room, the house-holder would feel the earth rocking beneath his feet."

Thus does Time extenuate even the most formidable assaults upon the hearth and home.

If operagoers with long memories wish to be convinced that this has happened, they have only to witness the current performance of "Salome" at the Metropolitan, in the 1938 revival. I was obliged to miss the first disclosure of this new production several weeks ago, but I was present at last night's repetition with Miss Marjorie Lawrence as the heroine (if one may call her that) and an admirably balanced cast of principals as her associates.

I cannot remember that I have ever sat among a calmer audience. In the old days at the Manhattan Opera House, with Matchless Mary as Princess of Judea (to say nothing of the unforgettable first day at the Metropolitan), the observers in Mr. Hammerstein's auditorium sat tense and taut almost from the time that the curtain rose on Narraboth's first phrase. And in those days it was scarcely possible to listen without quickened breath to that terrific moment in the climactic scene when one heard those deliriously pounding drum-strokes in the orchestra under the maddened tremolandi of the violins as the waiting Salome bent over the cistern in agonized suspense, and the black arm of the Negro executioner was thrust up from the cistern bearing the head of the Prophet on a silver dish, and the orchestra burst into that insensate cry of terrible, exultant transport as Salome seized her trophy, and Herod hid his face with his cloak, and Herodias smiled and fanned herself.

All these things happened duly on the stage last night, and in the orchestra (which is an incomparably finer one that Mr. Hammerstein had at his disposal years ago); and Strauss's "Salome" is still a masterpiece that stands alone in music. Nothing in the least like it ever left the hand of a musician. Its flaws are obvious; but it towers superbly among the tonal stage-works of our time, and the sense of pity and of terror still flows from it into the receptive spirit, and subdues one.

Why, then, did it surprisingly leave cold last night at least one observer who has long studied and cherished and extolled the work?

I am not sure that I know. I can at this moment turn to those final pages in the score, and reading them in silence, get from them all that I know they hold of beauty and terror and intensity. I suspect that it was probably because of the failure of some point of contact between certain essential elements in the performance and myself.

Of Miss Lawrence's "Salome" I can find little to set down but praise. Her performance is magnificently able. She acts the part with skill and adroitness and imagination; she sings it very well - though the quality of her voice is neither sensuous nor persuasive; and her dance is an astonishing achievement.

But there was something lacking. Miss Lawrence never for a moment gave me the illusion that she was Salome, that she had felt to the center of the role, or had fused her imagination with those of Wilde and Strauss. She brought to her performance of the role almost everything it needs except intensity, the power to create dramatic tension and sustain it.

And this characteristic, strangely enough, I found reflected in the conducting of Strauss's gorgeous and terrific orchestra by that excellent musician, Ettore Panizza. Mr. Panizza brought to his task an admirable sensibility, delicacy, finesse, fine taste in phrasing and proportion. He, too, gave us almost everything but that quality of insupportable tension without which "Salome" is not "Salome," but just another opera - a superb one, but not the unique masterpiece that we have known.

The performances of the other principals were extraordinarily fine, especially that of René Maison as the neurasthenic Herod, with his jittery lusts and superstitious fears. Mr. Maison's suggestion of the decadence and cruelty and cowardice of the character could scarcely have been bettered. Nor could Mme. Branzell's dénotement of Herodias. Mr. Huehn's Jokanaan was sung with beauty and dignity and fervor, though his denunciations might well have been more wrathful.

The performance of "Salome" was preceded by a repetition of Stravinsky's ballet. "Apollon Musagete."

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