[Met Performance] CID:295480

New Production

Salome
Metropolitan Opera House, Mon, February 20, 1989

Debut : Bernard Fitch, Byl Thompson, Jürgen Rose




Salome (118)
Richard Strauss | Oscar Wilde
Salome
Eva Marton

Herod
Richard Cassilly

Herodias
Helga Dernesch

Jochanaan
Bernd Weikl

Narraboth
Mark Baker

Page
Brenda Boozer

Jew
James Courtney

Jew
Philip Creech

Jew
Bernard Fitch [Debut]

Jew
John Gilmore

Jew
Anthony Laciura

Nazarene
David Hamilton

Nazarene
Jan-Hendrik Rootering

Soldier
Ara Berberian

Soldier
Terry Cook

Cappadocian
Philip Cokorinos

Slave
Yun Deng

Executioner
Byl Thompson [Debut]


Conductor
Marek Janowski


Director
Nikolaus Lehnhoff

Designer
Jürgen Rose [Debut]

Lighting Designer
Gil Wechsler





Salome received eight performances this season.

FUNDING:
Production gift of the Annie Laurie Aitken Charitable Trust, and The Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust

Review 1:

Review of Frederick M. Winship for United Press International

Met's "Salome" puts sizzle in New York theater season

New York (UPI) - The Metropolitan Opera may have the best show in town with its new contemporized "Salome," a gory thriller with a gloriously sexy score. The production which opened Monday, the first of eight this season, milks the lurid Richard Strauss opera based on Oscar Wilde's novel for all it's worth. With the stupendous Eva Marton singing the title role, this is undoubtedly the Met's best "Salome" since Ljuba Welitsch scorched the scenery at the old Met Opera House in 1949.

Marton only recently added the role of the depraved Judaean princess who lusts after John the Baptist's head to her repertory. She is giving her first performances of the role here for West German director Nikolaus Lehnhoff, making his debut at the met. Lehnhoff sees Salome in the light of the 20th century, rather than the time of Christ when Herod, Salome's stepfather, ruled Judea.

"Oscar Wilde used the biblical story to express the feeling of his time, the turn of this century, which had a climate of morbidity and decadence, a collapse of the old civilization," Lehnhoff said in an interview prior to [first] night. "Now we are at the end of our century and the climate is in many respects similar to that time, closer to apocalypse than ever before. You get this kind of Fellini feeling. The time is five minutes to midnight. The place could be Berlin in the 1920's or the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center in 1989. "Herod's court is a brutal world that considers profit, power and exploitation to be the meaning of life. Does that sound familiar?"

Lenhoff and his set and costume designer Jurgen Rose has placed the one-act opera in a grimy back courtyard of Herod's palace, raked at an angle that suggests a recent earthquake, snaked about with pipes, and littered with oil barrels. Glimpsed above, past the balcony of the two-level set, are the marble columns and the gilded murals of the palace interior where an orgy is in progress. Unlike other "Salome" productions, this one does not invite us to the party. We only get the spillover of the Herod family and their guests, garbed in Yves St. Laurent-inspired gowns and punk leather suits, who are fascinated by the rantings of Jochanaan (the Baptist) who is incarcerated in a subterranean prison.

Despite Jochanaan fulminations against the lecherous Herodias, Herod's wife and Salome's mother, Salome falls in love with Jochanaan, who rejects her and urges her to accept Christ as her savior. Salome's revenge is to win Jochanaan's head on a platter as a reward for dancing for her enamored stepfather. Herod, who believes Jochanaan is truly a holy man, resists Salome's demand, offering her any other reward she desires, but finally gives in. When he witnesses Salome's ecstatic seance with Jochanaan's head, ending with a kiss, he realizes that she is a mad monster and orders her crushed to death by the shields of palace guards. For some reason, Lenhoff eliminated the shield-crushing climax intended by Strauss, ending the opera with Herod shouting for the guards through a courtyard gate. It robs "Salome" of its final curtain punch but otherwise the production is as richly decadent as any fan of Ken Russell movies and Sidney Sheldon novels could wish.

Marton's dance of the seven veils may not be the essence of grace, but it has a certain Gypsy Rose Lee quality, since she begins by stripping off her elbow-length gloves and continues by removing overskirts until she gets down to a long satin nightgown that Welitsch, who stripped to her last diaphanous thread, would have abhorred. The Budapest-born dramatic soprano makes up for any terpsichorian lack with a sincerely felt characterization and the full benefit of the big, vital, splendidly flexible voice that has given her a virtual monopoly on one of opera's other great princess roles, Turandot. Her realization of Strauss' lurking melodic love-death theme in the final moments of the opera is as close to a musical orgasm as you get in opera.

Contributing to the effectiveness of this most sensational of music dramas is a fine cast headed by Richard Cassilly as the neurotic Herod, Helga Dernesch as a cooly elegant Herodias rather than the usual drunken nag, Mark Baker as Narraboth and last, but not least, Berndt Weikl of the clarion baritone voice as a towering Jochanaan. Conductor Marek Janowski gives a transcendant reading of Strauss' supernal score.

"Salome" will be broadcast nationally by Texaco-Metropolitan opera radio stations on March 11 at 3 p.m. EDT.

Review 2:

Peter G. Davis in New York Magazine
PARTY GIRL
Some chilling moments stand out in this “Salome,” but as a musical experience, the new Met production offers meager gifts.

Opera’s most deliciously decadent study in perversity, Salome is back at the Metropolitan in an imaginative, carefully thought-out, infuriatingly perverse new production. Half the audience on open*ing night seemed vastly entertained, while the rest obviously hated every minute and registered noisy disapproval. See it for yourself. At least the Met has stirred up some dust, created a bit of healthy controversy and even started a few fights.


The vote from here, more in sadness than in anger, is "nay." What director Nikolaus Lehnhoff and designer Jurgen Rose have put onstage might possibly be appropriate and effective for someone's opera about a rotten society dancing on the edge of a volcano, but Strauss's” Salome” is not that. There is nothing especially symbolic about Oscar Wilde's overripe biblical play, which conjures up an exact time, place, and mood with very specific images — the cool moon, the sultry night, desert winds blowing hot and cold across Herod's exotically decorated open-air terrace — and Strauss supplied a score equally precise and potently atmospheric. Rose's set suggests none of this. At the Met, we are in a claustrophobically enclosed room that resembles a harshly lit, heavy-metal seventies disco, its tilted walls frozen in a state of imminent collapse — a powerful and striking visual conception that contradicts the sickly-sweet, decayed luxuriance of this "fin-de-siècle" text and music at every turn.


Salome may be a spoiled teenager, and there are no doubt many legitimate ways to play the role, but surely Eva Marton's flouncing about in a child's pink party dress with huge shoulder puffs and matching satin gloves is not a reasonable option. Crouching over John the Baptist's cistern, the poor woman looks like a Hostess Sno Ball. Perhaps Marton should demand the heads of Messrs. Rose and Lehnhoff for turning her into such a silly goose, since with proper dramatic and musical guidance she could surely be a spectacular Salome. Her voice is firm, opulent, and tireless, and all the right temperamental instincts are there, just asking to be tamed, disciplined, and pointed in the right direction.


Many other strange, colorfully dressed creatures representing different ages and cultures wander about the stage, apparently to remind us that corruption is timeless and universal. True enough, but since neither Wilde nor Strauss ever intended to send such a pretentious message, these irrelevant cosmetic inventions are distracting and dilute the opera's impact. Some chilling moments stand out, and they deserve to be seen in a more convincing production: Salome wrapping herself in the prophet's black cloak as she silently hatches her ghastly plan; Herodias slinking off on the headsman's arm; an exhausted Salome alive at the end, as the set is bathed in a morgue-like pallor and an impotent Herod orders nonexistent soldiers to execute her.


As a musical experience, this Salome offers meager gifts, apart from Marton's potential in the title role. Helga Dernesch's trashy Herodias is probably the most vivid vocal and dramatic presence onstage, since Richard Cassilly (Herod), Bernd Weikl (Jokanaan), and Mark Baker (Narraboth) do little more than cooperate obediently with the production team. Marek Janowski conducts, communicating only a fraction of the score's instrumental brilliance and color.



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