United States Richard Strauss, Salome: Soloists, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra / Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor). Metropolitan Opera, New York, 29.4.2025. (ES-S)
Ever since its scandalous 1905 premiere in Dresden, Salome has occupied a singular place in the operatic canon – a work both notorious and irresistible for its volatile blend of biblical drama, Symbolist poetry and modernist musical innovation. Drawing on Oscar Wilde’s lurid 1891 play, Richard Strauss fashioned a one-act opera whose shocking themes and incandescent score pushed the boundaries of theatrical and musical convention, securing both controversy and acclaim.
After a two-decade wait, the Metropolitan Opera finally unveiled a new Salome, originally slated for the 2021-22 season before pandemic delays. The production marks the belated Met debut of Claus Guth, a leading figure in contemporary Regietheater, known for psychologically probing reinterpretations of canonical works and a preference for minimalist environments. Originally developed as a co-production with Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, the Met now presents it independently, following a decision to sever ties with Russian state institutions after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The creative team – set designer Etienne Pluss, costume designer Ursula Kudrna, lighting designer Olaf Freese and movement director Sommer Ulrickson – made its Met debut as originally planned.
Guth’s Salome begins not with Strauss’s slithering clarinet but with delicate, music-box chimes, hinting at the later ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, that accompany a projected short film. In it, a little girl plays with a toy before abruptly destroying it: a visual metaphor for trauma and the collapse of innocence. From there, the opera unfolds within a Victorian-era world saturated with repression, memory and unhealed violence. Despite the secondary characters – whether Jews, soldiers or courtiers – appearing as black-clad servants in a fin-de-siècle bourgeois residence, the setting evokes something far more ominous. The drama takes place in a cavernous black interior, less palace than crypt, with towering walls and recessed niches that suggest the sepulchral architecture of a pharaonic underworld. Presiding over this space is a colossal statue with the head of a ram, evoking the Egyptian potter god Khnum, shaper of bodies and destinies, and transformed here into a sinister emblem of control and power.
It is within this architecture of trauma that Guth offers the most potent image of his entire artistic vision: a transformed ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’. The dance is stripped of its traditional eroticism and recast as a ritual of psychological unmaking, performed by Salome and six younger versions of herself, all dressed identically. One by one, each girl steps forward, removes a black veil and begins to move like a wind-up doll, as if reenacting a memory her body cannot fully contain. Herod, seated in cold fascination, puts on a ram’s mask that echoes the statue and reveals him as its living double – the source of the trauma Salome is condemned to relive. As the orchestral delirium peaks, Salome brings the statue crashing down, an act of iconoclasm and revolt that replaces spectacle with a searing exorcism of memory.
If the dance was largely devoid of explicit sexual connotations, such imagery surfaced elsewhere in the mise en scène, sometimes heightening the opera’s psychological tension, sometimes feeling gratuitous. Guth does not shy away from displaying bodies or staging desire, but these moments are unevenly integrated: at times they deepen the dramatic texture, but at others they seem to compensate for the restraint shown during the dance. Herod’s fixation is rendered in grotesque physical terms – he circles Salome with a leering hunger, his reaching for her stripped of all pretense. Narraboth, the Syrian soldier who later takes his own life, is also drawn into abrupt physical contact that undercuts the calculated tension of Salome’s promise – ‘Tomorrow I will throw you a flower’ – a line meant to manipulate, not to invite closeness. Repeated appearances of a naked woman, pacing on an upper level or carried aloft by mask-wearing men, are presumably meant to underscore the depravity of Herod’s world. Detached from the dramatic arc, they register instead as ornamental afterthoughts.
If physicality is essential to any relationship in Salome, it is to the one between the unhinged Salome and Jochanaan. Unlike the decorative eroticism found elsewhere in Guth’s staging, these moments carry genuine dramatic and psychological weight. Both encounters unfold in the cistern, a stark, all-white space that stands in radical contrast to the black, upper-world interior. It is a place defined by ambiguity: the prophet’s prison but also, with its scattered toys and a younger Salome perched silently on a ledge, a repository of memory and arrested childhood.
In their first encounter, Salome descends into the cistern with a volatile mix of fascination and hunger. She circles her prey, drawn to something she cannot fully comprehend, her gestures growing erratic and increasingly intimate. As she strains to touch, smell and finally kiss him, a palpable unease builds until Jochanaan recoils, retreating into prophecy and condemnation.
The second tableau, after his death, is even more disturbing in its stillness and gore. Salome mounts Jochanaan’s headless, blood-smeared body, as if possessed by memory or compulsion. In a gesture that is both delusional and ceremonial, she caresses and kisses the severed head – ‘Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst’ – enacting not transgression but the final collapse of a fantasy she could no longer contain.
As Salome cradles the severed head, her six younger selves slowly encircle her, no longer scattered but drawn together in a silent vigil. Upstage, Herod recoils in horror. His final command, ‘Man töte dieses Weib!’, is delivered not with authority but with desperation, as if the order were too little, too late. Yet there is no violent resolution, no closure. Instead of being seized or struck down, Salome simply walks away, disappearing into a haze of mist and white light, as if retreating into the inner world that has shaped her all along.
If Guth’s vision gave the opera its conceptual spine, the performers gave it flesh. However abstract or symbol-laden the staging, Salome ultimately depends on the intensity, vocal power and psychological range of its protagonist. In this production, Elza van den Heever met the challenge with unflinching commitment.
Physically, she brought a striking mix of restraint and volatility to the role. Her movements shifted from ceremonial stillness to sudden, impulsive gestures, and she responded with psychological acuity to every character around her: mocking Herod, manipulating Narraboth, defying her mother and registering a haunted, inward collapse in the presence of her younger selves. She inhabited Guth’s psychological world with conviction, tracing Salome’s descent not just through solo expression but through a web of fractured relationships.
Vocally, she shaped that unraveling with remarkable control. Her soprano shone most impressively in the upper register of her considerable range, where the voice carried easily and retained brilliance even against Strauss’s densest orchestration. Van den Heever favored expressive color over sheer volume, using slides, sighs and breath-inflected phrasing to suggest ecstasy, grief and delusion at once. Nowhere was this more evident than in the final monologue, ‘Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst’, where her voice shifted from eerie intimacy – floated at times just above a whisper – to moments of desperate urgency.
As Jochanaan, Peter Mattei brought vocal authority and physical restraint to the role. His easily recognizable baritone, firm and resonant, initially seemed amplified while he remained out of view, lending his voice an otherworldly presence. Once on the stage, he maintained a commanding stillness, portraying a prophet who was unwavering but never fanatical. His rejection of Salome came not in fury but in deliberate, clearly phrased denunciations, shaped with sculptural control. And yet, there were moments of humanizing hesitation in his acting – a glance, a pause – that suggested Jochanaan was not entirely immune to the intensity of what he was resisting. Mattei’s portrayal balanced spiritual authority with a flicker of internal conflict, deepening the character without softening his resolve.
Gerhard Siegel brought something of Wagner’s cunning and angst-ridden Mime (a signature role for him) to his portrayal of Herod: not a grotesque caricature, but a man weighted by desire, fear and futility, his composure steadily eroding. His tenor remained incisive and alert, with phrasing that veered from oily charm to frantic repetition as Salome’s refusals piled up. There was something almost compulsive in his vocal pacing, a sense of control slipping measure by measure.
In Etienne Pluss’s largely monochrome world, Michelle DeYoung’s Herodias stood out in vivid defiance, her blood-orange dress cutting through the black-and-white environment like a provocation. DeYoung’s mezzo-soprano, initially a touch diffuse, gained focus as the evening progressed, finding a firm edge in moments of scorn and frustration. Rather than playing Herodias purely as a bitter wife or comic foil, she projected an air of calculated detachment – drinking, watching, commenting from the sidelines – until the final scene, when her approval of Salome’s actions suggested something colder and more complicit than maternal pride.
Piotr Buszewski sang Narraboth with a clear, youthful tenor and an arc of growing desperation. The smaller roles were all well cast, the singers delivering their lines with crisp precision and avoiding excess.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Met Orchestra with clarity, control and a strong sense of pacing. While the visual drama on the stage often commanded attention, the orchestra remained essential in shaping the opera’s emotional and psychological intensity. There were moments when voices were briefly overwhelmed, but such issues will likely settle over the course of the run. Strauss’s dense textures were handled with assurance, and the tension never slackened.
In an era when opera must constantly renegotiate its relevance, productions like Guth’s Salome – by lifting other veils that we haven’t thought about – reminds us why directorial imagination matters. The Met’s continued commitment to such bold artistic perspectives, anchored by strong musical leadership and strong casts, is essential, not only to honor the repertory but to ensure its future.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: [front l-r] Piotr Buszewski (Narraboth), Peter Mattei (Jochanaan) and Elza van den Heever (Salome) © Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera
Production:
Director – Claus Guth
Sets – Etienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Production designer – rocafilm / Roland Horvath
Choreographer – Sommer Ulrickson
Dramaturg – Yvonne Gebauer
Cast:
Salome – Elza van den Heever
Herodias – Michelle DeYoung
Herod – Gerhard Siegel
Narraboth – Piotr Buszewski
Jochanaan – Peter Mattei
Page – Tamara Mumford
An insightful review. The excerpts on YouTube offer a tantalizing glimpse…and one cannot wait to see it in its entirety when the production becomes available on ‘Met Opera on Demand’!