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Heads Up: The Met’s Salome Is Spectacular
“Bilious harmonies and seething rhythms in an unbroken two-hour spasm of excitement.”
At the end of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, the soprano Elza van den Heever stayed onstage to accept the uproarious ovations with a weepy smile and a grateful tap on her heart. Oscar Wilde’s play (which Strauss adapted for his libretto) compresses the action too much to allow for any real character development — the titular sociopath is just as sick at the beginning as she is at the end — so Guth fleshes it out with backstory. We get glimpses of moral decay in flashbacks: the girl sitting immobile on a high shelf, clutching the doomed doll and watching her future incarnation romance the prisoner; the older Salome instructing her younger self how to slice the air with a toy sword and a sense of lethal purpose.
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