On May 9, the Opera Bastille saw one of the most anticipated debuts of the international operatic season: the soprano Lise Davidsen’s first Salome. Adapted from Oscar Wilde’s play, Richard Strauss’s one-act Salome depicts the Feast of Herod and the killing of John the Baptist, culminating with one of the most notoriously difficult passages in the dramatic-soprano repertoire, sealed with its infamous kiss.
The titular Salome is surrounded by her hallucinatory stepfather, the tetrarch Herod, passably sung by the tenor Gerhard Siegel, who depended on acting over voice for characterization; Herodias, her despotic mother, portrayed by Ekaterina Gubanova, whose rich, occasionally wobbling mezzo lent a suitably deranged demeanor; and her object of desire, John the Baptist, sung by Johan Reuter, whose bass-baritone voice had a rather weak lower register for this baritone role. In the pit was Mark Wigglesworth, who led the orchestra with a cataclysmic fervor upholding Strauss’s direction for the cacophonous Salome: a “scherzo with a fatal conclusion.”
Salome the opera hinges on Salome the character, a role Strauss conceived as a “sixteen-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde.” It’s a task demanding resounding power and lightness, the ability to flood an opera house and then descend to a whisper. The Opera Bastille poses a unique challenge for any Salome, as the already titanic role needs to fill the largest house in Europe, which also happens to be more than a touch acoustically dry. Davidsen, the foremost Wagnerian soprano of our time, is already a Strauss veteran: she has under her belt the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, the title role of Ariadne auf Naxos, and Elektra’s Chrysothemis. But Salome, like Elektra, is a different breed of role, one without any intermissions to recuperate, a marathon that ends in a sprint.
There are different strains of famous Salomes throughout history. On one side there are such singers as Birgit Nilsson, exhibiting power at the sacrifice of nuance. On the other you find performers such as Montserrat Caballé, whose sweet tones embody despair but cannot fire above Strauss’s largest orchestra. Perhaps because of her youth and tremendous stature (she’s almost six feet two), Davidsen has the dexterity and force to channel both. She’s at once silvery-sweet and stentorian, nimble and sustained. Hers is a voice that keeps going without a hint of fatigue, growing more powerful and luminous toward the finale than seems physically possible.
Davidsen’s Salome is an atypical interpretation. Instead of the usual coquette, her Salome is sullen, a chain-smoker with a withdrawn air. Her declaration “I will not stay there/ I cannot stay there!” as she enters the stage and exits the party takes the form not of a tempestuous declaration, as is common for the role, but rather that of a dejected sigh. She leans against the wall and lights the first of many cigarettes. It’s one of the creative liberties taken by the director Lydia Steier, who amplifies the debauchery of Herod’s feast and excuses Salome from the festivities.
With the assistance of the set director Momme Hinrichs, Steier turns Herod’s palace into a cold brutalist enclosure, simultaneously a luxurious penthouse and an execution chamber. As Salome smokes, armed guards drag unwilling half-naked women into the party, held in a Philip Johnson–style room through whose glass walls we see these women violated, killed, and dragged out by hazmat-suited workers. It’s a cycle that continues for perhaps longer than is necessary but makes an important declaration: this is a place where no desire goes unquenched.
And Salome is about, if anything, desire—its decline after our fall into modernity. Herod and his partygoers emblematize this post-everything decadence, consuming without end while dressed in outfits somewhere between Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, an atemporal cacophony of Mayan headdresses and seventeenth-century court attire—total excess. Gubanova’s Herodias walks around with enormous, exposed breasts, nipples pierced. She could double for Le Grand Macabre’ssadistic Mescalina. Against all this stands Salome, clad not in extravagant festive dress but rather French military-style gray raincoat and boots, the attire of someone who spends parties not partying but smoking outside in defiance of the elements. During one of these breaks, she first hears John the Baptist. Steier thus shifts the impetus for their meeting as spurred not by drunken curiosity, but instead by Salome’s own dissatisfaction.
In Steier’s vision, the contact between Salome and John is more complicated than a spoiled princess finding the single thing she cannot have. This Salome is, unlike the party attendees, a creature of distaste. Her revulsion toward the party drives her outside toward the saint’s voice, in whose proclamations of doom and destruction she hears, for the first time, a hint of herself, her truest and most recondite desires. This explains her fixation on the baptist’s mouth, a want she first confuses for his body, then his hair, before locating its true source. Salome’s displeasure is the equal opposite to her parents’ overabundance: annihilating everything is the same as consuming it all.
After this initial confrontation, Steier takes ever-greater directorial liberties. As John the Baptist is dragged back to his cell, Salome goes into a convulsive state, thrashing about on the floor and masturbating on stage, experiencing the violence of passion for the first time. It’s a foil to her dance of the seven veils; Salome remains motionless as Herod gropes and undresses her, eventually becoming an indifferent participant in a rape-orgy (or is it consensual?) from which she emerges bloodied and shattered. It’s reminiscent of one of Wilde’s original lines—cut by Strauss in the opera due to censorship concerns—during which Salome cradles the baptist’s head, saying, “I was a virgin and you deflowered me/ I was chaste, and you filled my veins with fire.” It is not Herod or his partygoers that destroy Salome, but the devastation of feeling, for the first time, the abyss of longing.
Salome often gets called a demented Tristan und Isolde, the demonic inversion of transcendent love. Steier understands inversions are often equivalents and turns the final necrophilic monologue into a Liebestod through an early double murder. Salome never receives the baptist’s head. Instead, she slowly dies from post-rape blood loss. A stand-in acts as this moribund Salome while Davidsen becomes a disembodied voice of her eternal soul. While one Salome bleeds out on the floor, the other embraces a reheaded John the Baptist and wonders if the bitter taste of their kiss is that of blood or love. But never has it mattered less. To love is to die, as Salome realizes: “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”