NEW YORK (AP) — Elza van den Heever’s portrayal of Salome sticks to her when she leaves the Metropolitan Opera for a rented apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
“Every night I wake up with the most disturbing nightmares, just random things that I dream and feel so real,” the South African soprano said. “There’s just a tinge of darkness that’s lying in my subconscious at the moment, and I wake up in a pool of sweat every single night with very, very weird, very strange things that I dream.”
Claus Guth’s intense and disturbing production of “Salome” opens Tuesday night and runs through May 24, the Met’s first new staging since 2004 of Strauss’ adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play. The May 17 performance will be televised to theaters worldwide.
Based on the biblical story of the Jewish princess who was the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, “Salome” provoked a scandalous reaction to its 1905 premiere. It is best known for the seductive dance of the seven veils that the princess performs for her lecherous stepfather in exchange for a gift of her choosing: the head of St. John the Baptist on a silver platter.
Body doubles show a shattered psyche
An acclaimed German director making his Met debut at age 61, Guth updates the setting to Victorian time and supplements Salome with six body doubles at various stages of youth, in black velvet dresses with white lace surrounding the neck and black bows. Guth wanted them to resemble organ pipes when standing together. Their blank expressions bring to mind the Grady twins haunting the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
“It’s one of my favorite movies,” Guth said. “Unconscious, I probably took something from there.”
Guth’s staging was first announced by the Met in 2017 as a coproduction with Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre starring Anna Netrebko. It debuted at the Bolshoi in 2021 with Asmik Grigorian, after Netrebko decided the role wasn’t right for her, and was to open the Met's 2021-22 season only to be pushed back because of the pandemic. Russia's attack on Ukraine prompted the Met to build its own sets.
Before Strauss’ opening note, a video of a young Salome is projected as a prerecorded celesta plays, evoking a music box. The set includes a doll, a stuffed animal and a hobby horse. During the dance, a Herod body double wearing a mask mixing ram and human in the style of Picasso pairs with each Salome in ascending age to project stages of abuse that left her irreparably scarred as she collapses.
“I definitely view it as fragments of memories that are being reconstructed by a brain that has been abused and tortured,” van den Heever said. “His perversity just overwhelms her. ... You see the way that Herod grooms the first three in particular and how his behavior becomes more violent and more cruel with the last three.”
Gerhard Siegel, the actual Herod, watches from a short distance as his lifetime of exploitation is depicted.
“What’s happening on stage is revolting, however, the power of it is that the music is just so beautiful it becomes even more beautiful when the actions on stage are more revolting,” Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin said. “So that contrast should make people uncomfortable and if we do it right, yes, they should be shocked.”
Working together for first time in 17 years
Van den Heever greeted Guth with a hug when rehearsals started last month and told him: “I’ve been looking forward to this for years.” Now 45, she last worked with Guth when he directed her 2008 European debut as Giorgetta in Puccini’s “Il Tabarro” at Oper Frankfurt.
“I was 100% in love from the very first moment we worked together. I think we’re a match made in heaven,” she said. “I just remember it being eye-opening, this world of regietheatre. I was scared of it because at the time everybody’s always talking about, quote ‘Eurotrash’ and that scares you because you think, oh my God, what am I going to encounter? And it wasn’t like that at all.”
Salome debut three years ago
Van den Heever made her Salome role debut in the 2022 Paris Opéra staging by Lydia Steier that transformed the dance into a gang rape.
“The first couple of weeks I was really struggling,” she said. “It was hard for me to find my voice within her concept, but once I did, I was 100% and I think the performance speaks for itself. That’s not me being forced to do things that I don’t want to do. That was me 100% in the concept and in the role as she envisioned it and doing it with full confidence and conviction. It was difficult to get there, but once I got there I was extremely proud of the work we did.”
Differences are clear to her.
“They’re both equally dark and disturbing,” van den Heever said, “except Lydia’s was definitely more a visceral experience, whereas Claus’ is more a psychological experience.”
Symbolic sculpture
During a climactic scene, Salome pushes over a 250-pound, 7-foot statue that shatters on the stage, creating a dust cloud.
Gloria Sun, head of prop at the Met’s construction shop, led four people creating 16 plaster statues filled with burlap -- one gets destroyed during each stage rehearsal and performance. The crew has given each a name, starting with Adam, Benjamin, Cain and Daniel. For opening night, Hamilton gets shattered.
“This is a moment that maybe shocks everybody,” Sun said
At the final dress rehearsal last week, van den Heever was so overcome that her eyes teared when the audience applauded her during the curtain call.
“It’s pretty clear that we’re dealing with a very, very messed up situation,” she said. “And it is perverse and it is cruel and it is psychologically very twisted. I think if we leave people comfortable at the end of the show, that means we didn’t do our job very well.”
Ronald Blum, The Associated Press
