Metropolitan Opera Archives

Salome received ten performances this season.
Beginning with this appearance and for the next three seasons, Grace Bumbry was listed in company programs as Grace Melzia Bumbry. Arthur Mitchell choreographed the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Review 1:

Review of Louis Snyder in The Christian Science Monitor

As the third opera of its [first] week, the Metropolitan brought "Salome" back again with Grace Bumbry singing the title role for the first time here.

Visually, Miss Bumbry is one of the most successful Salomes to have done the role in recent Met history. She is short of stature, beautiful of face, and moves with an appropriately feline grace. Her approach to the part is not the eel-like, sinuous one-this is a thinking rather than a slinking princess-and she conveys through her acting a visible transition from obsessive puzzlement to angry frustration at her rejection by the prophet Jokanaan.

Vocally Miss Bumbry, who has been venturing from the mezzo into the soprano repertory of late, did a compelling job, if indeed her higher register was frequently taxed to the extreme. Much of its natural mellowness is sacrificed in the contention with Straussian instrumentation, and this, of course, is where the Salomes with bigger voices (and stronger frames) have the advantage. At the evening's end, her rewards in acclaim were ovation-size.

Conducting the opera here for the first time, the Met's principal conductor, James Levine, did what he had done for Verdi's "II Trovatore" on [the season's first] night-washed its musical face sparkling clean. The orchestra sang and sighed, shrieked and groaned, in an oceanic wash of dynamically gauged sound. It would take some thinking back to recall when this score has been so freshly approached.

Search by season: 1973-74

Search by title: Salome,

Met careers