The first sound in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Salome” isn’t the wriggle of clarinet that begins Strauss’s score. It’s the tinkle of a music box, while a little girl plays with a doll at the lip of the stage. Projected on the curtain behind her is a giant image of herself, slowly twirling.
She suddenly gets angry at the toy and begins beating it against the ground. Even before the orchestra squirms in, Claus Guth’s grimly effective staging has made clear its preoccupations: childhood, dancing, violence.
Guth, one of Europe’s busiest directors and making his Met debut with this production, is also fascinated by multiple versions of the self. Starring the soprano Elza van den Heever — simultaneously innocent and hardened, sounding silvery yet secure — this “Salome,” which opened on Tuesday, gives its title character not one youthful double, but six.
The group of Salomes, progressing in age from perhaps a kindergartner to the 16-year-old played by van den Heever, is dressed in matching dark frocks, giving hints of “The Shining” and Diane Arbus photographs.
Guth, placing the action in a dour black mansion around the turn of the 20th century, has shifted from ancient to modern times Strauss’s 100-minute, one-act adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play. “Salome” depicts, in decadent music inspired by the flowery language of the Symbolists, the biblical princess who was drawn to and rejected by John the Baptist and who demanded that he be decapitated by her depraved stepfather, King Herod.
The fin-de-siècle setting adds to all this overripeness a touch of early psychoanalysis, an excavation of Salome’s troubled past. The Dance of the Seven Veils, historically often a Gypsy Rose Lee-style striptease, is here a solemn parade of the seven Salomes, overseen by van den Heever and showing her years of abuse by Herod. This is a tad heavy-handed, but it doesn’t feel made up out of nowhere; Herod’s lust for Salome is explicit in the libretto, even if it’s not clear he’s acted on it.
Guth’s production — the Met’s first new “Salome” since 2004, when Jürgen Flimm, in the midst of the Iraq War, set the opera in the contemporary Middle East — feels very much of our time, an era obsessed with identifying and processing trauma. While the stark set (by Etienne Pluss), costumes (Ursula Kudrna) and lighting (Olaf Freese) don’t evoke the jeweled colors of the score, they have a severity that might well have pleased Strauss, who said he wanted the Dance of the Seven Veils to be “as serious and measured as possible.”
Van den Heever is serious and measured, too. As in Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Met earlier this season, her high register can both softly float and powerfully soar. If she lacks some force lower down, making the conversational passages early in the opera a bit muted, she paces herself smartly, leaving ample stamina and focus for Salome’s great final monologue to be affectingly direct and sincere.
Her Salome has a habit of mimicry. When she copies the gestures that Jochanaan — the opera’s John the Baptist — makes while praying, we realize queasily that her molesting of the servant Narraboth earlier must have been an echo of the way she herself has been touched.
It’s almost always a stretch for a star of “Salome” to be persuasive as a 16-year-old, but the presence of the doubles actually makes van den Heever, who is in her mid-40s, seem younger — an organic outgrowth of real children — than she might have if she were on her own.
The baritone Peter Mattei is a fierce and roaring Jochanaan, held captive in an airy basement space painted the same powdery white that he is. The frenzied yet articulate tenor Gerhard Siegel, a veteran Herod, oozes unctuous entitlement. As Herodias, his wife and Salome’s mother, the mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung might overdo boozy, chain-smoking cynicism, but she adds a memorable edge of anxiety.
Guth’s eerie spectacle is heightened by the simmering panache of the Met Orchestra’s performance under its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. A trick of conducting “Salome” is to make an ensemble of over 100 play, for much of the score, with catlike grace, and Nézet-Séguin keeps the music simmering between grand explosions. The intensity is unremitting, but so is the transparency of the complex textures; even pianissimo flute trills register as Salome sings near the end that Jochanaan’s body is like “a garden full of doves.”
Not everything about the production is successful. The projections that are occasionally thrown on the stern set to show its walls shaking or disintegrating look silly. Animal head masks, meant to be sinister, come off as halfhearted gestures toward “Eyes Wide Shut”-esque eroticism.
But Guth’s work is largely thoughtful and expressive. Much of Salome’s final outpouring, ostensibly delivered to Jochanaan’s head, is instead sung as private musings. Her younger doubles, who have previously been scattered and isolated, now surround her, their hands reaching out to touch her. The reintegration of a fractured self, the ultimate aim of therapy, has been achieved.
Yet Guth doesn’t depict the ending as a triumphant realization of Salome’s fantasies of revenge. Instead, with Herod screaming at his soldiers to kill her, she merely walks upstage into a dense mist. (The loud hiss of the smoke machine makes an unfortunate counterpoint to Strauss’s climactic music.)
The final sight is Herodias reaching toward Salome, as the doubles did. (“Let me save you”? “Take me with you”?) But Salome, whether going toward literal death or something more symbolic, is going on her own. A few minutes before, she claimed to have arrived at an understanding of the secret of love and death; maybe that secret is that she will always be alone, scarred by what she’s endured.
Well over a century after its premiere, “Salome” has lost its onetime ability to shock. At its best, perhaps, it can sadden. It certainly does at the Met, in Guth’s gloomy staging and van den Heever’s sober, committed performance.
Salome
Through May 24 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
