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by Richard Strauss, directed by Atom Egoyan

Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto

January 18-February 5, 2002

“A Triumphant Return for Egoyan’s Salome”

The Canadian Opera Company’s revival of “Salome” confirms how incisive Atom Egoyan’s production is.  When the production had its première in 1996, most people, myself included, were preoccupied with wondering to what extent the addition of film and live video helped or hindered the production.  Now, having accepted Egoyan’s use of film as a definite asset, I found I could focus on Egoyan’s use of conventional stagecraft in bringing out an extraordinary wealth of detail from the text and music.

Anyone who has seen Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play on its own (which in Hedwig Lachman’s German adaptation becomes the opera’s libretto) will know how rich a text it is.  It is a Symbolist play, like Maeterlinck’s “Pelléas et Mélisande”, that moves forward through a concatenation of images--beauty, love, death, flight all linked to the moon that looms over the action.  Richard Strauss’s music adds an infinitely complex layer to the text by its Wagnerian use of leitmotivs which alter, clash and interact not just to illustrate the action but to comment on it.  Add to this Egoyan’s minutely detailed visual presentation with its contemporary references and we have an hour and 40 minutes so packed with verbal, musical and visual information the experience overloads the senses while it stimulates the intellect.

Egoyan, with great insight into Wilde’s text, presents the world of the opera as fragmented and distorted in which the only two characters infused with a vision--Jochanaan (John the Baptist) and, paradoxically, Salome--are destroyed.  Derek McLane’s set with floor and ceiling askew made more nightmarish by Michael Whitfield’s expressionist lighting, Egoyan’s film of Salome in a mud-bath broken up on multiple screens, Salome’s mother Herodias overturning a bowl of oranges all reflect a world that has lost moral unity and purpose ready to collapse.  Wilde world is riven by religious fragmentation.  Herod makes his binding oath to the “gods” showing the Tetrarch of Judea has adopted the paganism of his Roman masters.  The Five Jews fight over points of theology and Egoyan wisely has had Catherine Zuber costume the two Nazarenes as door-to-door proselytizers to show in their view a diminishment of Jochanaan’s vision.

Egoyan has the interaction of the female Page and the captain Narraboth parallel and comment on Salome’s first encounter with Jochanaan, the Page lusting after the captain just as Salome does after the prophet.  Music and text underscore the parallel between Narraboth’s suicide out of frustrated love for Salome and Salome’s desire for Jochanaan.  Egoyan adds a sexual dimension to this suicide which rightly identifies Salome’s ecstatic address to the severed head of the prophet as a perverted “Liebestod”.  The live video projected on the set’s back wall of singer playing Jochanaan singing gives the character more presence that in a conventional production where Jochanaan sings unseen for most of the opera.  The video presents a close-up of the singer’s lips keeping ever present the focus of Salome’s desire. 

Egoyan’s most important innovation is his staging of the Dance of the Seven Veils where home-movies of Salome as a girl are projected on her enormous dress/veil that becomes the screen.  Once the girl Salome reaches puberty Egoyan shifts to the shadow dance of dancer Carolyn Woods in Serge Bennathan’s unsettling choreography climaxing in her simulated gang rape by the Five Jews.  Egoyan has thus transformed this famous interlude from a strip-tease to a depiction of the stripping away of Salome’s innocence through abuse both in the past and in the present.  This view helps explain why both mother and daughter complain of the way Herod looks at Salome.  It also changes Salome’s gruesome request into a kind of revenge against her father as indeed Herodias sees it.  Salome binds her eyes with the dead Jochanaan’s blindfold for both have had a vision of life beyond corruption--he through a life to come, she through death.

Richard Bradshaw has assembled the finest cast ever for this production.  In British soprano Helen Field we have for once a Salome who actually seems like a teenager.  Her litheness and acting ability make the character all-too-believable and her soft-grained voice gives a sense of vulnerability unlike so many of the Valkyries one hears in recordings.  She delivers Salome’s long address to Jochanaan’s head in a kind of trance as if what she imagines him to be is more important that what he now is.  The moment when this trance wears off and the reality of her deed begins to dawn on her is chilling. 

Tom Fox is magnificent as Jochanaan, his rich, deep baritone providing the only sense of moral authority in the opera.  His intensity ensures that no whiff of cliché can cling to his portrayal.  With the great Robert Tear we finally have a tenor who brings out the music in this difficult role.  Tenors often bark it out to make Herod seem gruff and authoritative.  When sung as intended by Tear it becomes clear how weak in personality and power Herod really is.  As Herodias, the one of the ruling pair who has royal blood, Karan Armstrong  is suitable imperious of voice and presence.  Tear’s and Armstrong’s performances show us that the clash between male and female is the deepest division in fragmented world of the opera.    

There is no weak link among the minor roles.  Roger Honeywell as Narraboth and Krisztina Szabó as the Page both produce the clear heroic tone need to ride above the sound of Strauss’s massive orchestra.  Also effective are  Gregory J. Dahl and Olivier Laquerre as the two Soldiers, Thomas Goerz and Niculae Raiciu as the two Nazarenes and David Pomeroy, Robert Martin-Field, John Kriter, Peter Collins and Alain Coulombe in the complex interplay of the Five Jews.

As if an exciting production and a superb cast were not enough, we have at the podium British conductor David Atherton, famed for his interpretation of modern music.  By choosing tempi slightly faster than usual and never indulging in effect, Atherton makes the score shine like new in a beauty as sinewy as sensuous.  It is, in fact, the wedding such gorgeous music to so gruesome a story that makes the work so unsettling.  

Strauss meant “Salome” to provoke and thanks to a production like Atom Egoyan’s it still does.  I would despair of any opera company that attempted to blunt the opera’s impact as much as I would a society that did not find it disturbing.  Let’s hope for another such stimulating collaboration between Egoyan and the COC in the near future. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Helen Field as Salome. ©2002 Michael Cooper.