Lise Lindstrom as Salome in Opera Australia's 2019 production of Salome at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton)

It was Max Reinhardt’s highly successful German production of Wilde’s play in Berlin in 1902 that inspired Strauss to contemplate an opera on the subject. Reinhardt played down the jewelled, linguistically florid symbolism of Wilde’s French play for a sense of extreme realism in its German transformation. Strauss’s Salome and its successor, Elektra (Dresden, 1909), reflect the theories of the psyche that Freud was exploring at the time. These mythical characters and settings allowed Strauss to probe the archetypes that underpin Western civilisation and its art, and it called for a musical response that radically changed the course of Western art music. Strauss would later retreat from the musical and psychological abyss he peered into in these two operas, but opera was irrevocably changed; Strauss developed a musical language of such brutality and violence that was as shocking and confronting to contemporary audiences as was the subject matter of the opera.

Any production of the opera emerges from a performance history of widely varying approaches, and Gale Edwards’s version for Opera Australia (first seen in 2012) steers a middle course between those that tread carefully around the most confronting aspects of the story, and those that revel in every aspect of its perversity. Central, of course, is the role of Salome, which makes almost impossible demands on the singer, vocally and physically; Strauss described her as ‘sixteen-year-old Princess with the voice of Isolde’. Lise Lindstrom delighted audiences in Australia with her Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Ring (Melbourne, 2016); and the American soprano brings all the requisite attributes to this role. Hers is a voice with a steely core at the centre of a full, burnished tone and remarkable clarity of diction. The variety of colours in the voice allows the mercurial nature of the character to emerge fully, rising to Wagnerian proportions in the stupendous final twenty minutes. She also has a striking, lithe physical presence, and her extended scene with Jokanaan revealed her remarkable histrionic abilities – the complete singing actor.

Jokanaan is in many ways a difficult role to characterise – some of his music is sung off stage – and his scene with Salome is predominantly pitched on one emotional level. Russian baritone Alexander Krasnov possesses a dark voice of great power with the heft and metal to ride the orchestra, but he lacked some of the lyrical quality and sheer vocal beauty necessary for his pronouncements on the coming of the Messiah. Herodias, Salome’s mother, is something of a caricature, but Jacqueline Dark, in an over-the-top costume with tottering heels, commanded the stage in her scenes with a sumptuous voice, frequently in conflict with her husband, Herod, sung with great vocal incisiveness and remarkable textual articulation by German tenor Andreas Conrad. Their scenes were full of the requisite spite and antagonism – two vocally and histrionically outstanding performances. In smaller roles, Paul O’Neill as Narraboth and Sian Pendry as the Page were both excellent, while David Parkin’s sonorous Nazarene was impressively moving.

Jacqueline Dark as Herodias in Opera Australia's 2019 production of Salome at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Conductor Johannes Fritzsch is completely at home in this music and in command of the large forces, allowing the voices to emerge through the frequently dense web of sound that Strauss demands from the orchestra, while Fritzsch foregrounds the many subtleties of instrumental phrasing in this most evocative music. He is a genuine singers’ conductor, alive to all the dramatic nuance on stage. But one does lament the fact that the size of the Opera House pit prevents some of the sonorous lushness of the score to emerge.

Salome is essentially about power: Herod’s as King; Jokanaan’s inflexible and absolute conviction; and Salome’s self-consciously flaunted sexuality, successfully employed to manipulate Herod, but spectacularly failing with Jokanaan. Gale Edwards places the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ as the central symbol of many aspects of these power relationships. This scene often causes embarrassment in terms of the inadequacy of the performance, or a moment of confronting sexuality, but this production finds an ingenious ‘solution’. Edwards stages seven images presented by a pair of dancers, imaginatively choreographed by Kelley Abbey, to suggest aspects of male – and female – fantasy and mutual manipulation, including some spectacular acrobatics on a pole and dangling rope, culminating in the iconic image of Marilyn in billowing white dress astride the entrance to Jokanaan’s cistern.

Alexander Krasnov as Jokanaan in Opera Australia's 2019 production of Salome at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton)

However, there are some major inconsistencies, particularly in the representation of the ‘relationship’ between Jokanaan and Salome. Essentially, there can be no physical contact between them, thus thwarting Salome’s desires and pushing her over the edge into the moral abyss. Likewise, Jokanaan will not look at her – denying her the male gaze that she craves, and through which she manipulates Herod. Her final utterances regret the fact that he did not look at her. The dynamics of their relationship are muddied earlier in the performance with a Parsifal–Kundry moment where Salome cradles Jokanaan’s head – it just does not work in this opera.

Visually though, it’s a treat – Brian Thomson’s stark yet opulent, predominantly red-and-black set, with its disturbing backdrop of animal carcasses, provides a striking frame for Julie Lynch’s vivid mélange of often deliberately anachronistic costumes, all expertly lit by John Rayment. Despite the visual updating, the stage pictures leave a classic, timeless impression. 

Salome continues to be a confronting opera. With her ‘sister’, Berg’s Lulu, the depiction of the feminine has seldom been equalled and surely never surpassed in later opera. The unfathomable mystery at the heart of Salome fascinates, challenges, and often repels us, yet the allure of the opera remains. Salome has certainly not performed her last dance.

Salome is being performed by Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House from 6 to 26 March 2019; it will be repeated in Melbourne in November. Performance attended: March 6.