"It is impossible to stage this work," director Barrie Kosky writes of Salome in his autobiography "Und Vorhang auf, Hallo !" For works that he considers unstageable, he has a recipe : throw out all sets and props, make tabula rasa with all ballast and focus on the essence through actor direction; trusting only the action of light and the effect of optical illusions. He already did it with Duke Bluebeard (Frankfurt), with Pelléas et Mélisande (Strasbourg), with Macbeth (Zurich). They are all among his better productions. So is this not entirely successful Salome. It was intendant Bernd Loebe who persuaded him in 2020 to try anyway. The secret weapon he offered him to do so was called Ambur Braid.
Such radical handling of Salome is not new. Herbert Fritsch already did it in Basel. "It is always good when in the theater there is no place to hide on the stage. That's where I see the most," Fritsch said back then. But while Fritsch placed his characters in a lush Wilsonian light, Kosky hides the superfluous in pitch darkness. The concealment begins even before the performance begins because the fire screen is down, the orchestra invisible. Is the rustling of wings we hear through the loudspeakers, even before conductor Leo Hussain introduces the familiar clarinet motif, a reference to the wings of the angel of death that terrify the tetrach ? Salome is left unmoved. Confidently she stands in the light of the moon : statuesque with her silver-white dress and a feathered headgear like an eccentric fantasy bird from around 1900. Beyond that, there is only darkness. Katrin Lea Tag's simple black box plunges the entire scene into darkness. Only a cone of light that moves with the movements of the soloists draws our attention and sculpts the characters. Kosky keeps that up all evening, and the nice part about it is that it doesn't get boring for a second because it forces the director to indulge in very detailed actor direction.
Productions of Salome are “either dusty period dramas that were aesthetically oriented towards the Hollywood Bible films of the 1950s, or modern productions with a reductionist approach” Kosky writes. “The most popular interpretation here is that Herod abused Salome and the entire play revolves around her trauma. For me, this interpretation has nothing to do with either Oscar Wilde's text or Richard Strauss' music. It's a dead end. Because if you attribute all her actions to what men have done to her, you take away all her power, all her desire and all her will. You domesticate her, you turn her into a victim. And that's exactly what she is not. She is the opposite.” In this he is quite right but with his own reductionist approach some things are also lost. Herod and Herodias are a bourgeois couple, she in a Chanel-like robe, he in a double breasted men's suit. Kosky shows nothing of the seductive skills that were the backbone of Herodias' sinful past. He also shows nothing of the guilty landscape surrounding Herod that other directors such as Castellucci, Van Hove, Steier have seized upon to make her monstrous features somewhat comprehensible in the finale.
Salome is almost constantly on stage. Throughout the evening she remains the focus of our attention. Occasionally she will disappear only briefly to put on another dress. She is a self-reliant, sassy girl with a lively facial expression. We can see Heather Engebretson, Salome in Basel, reenacting it that way, perhaps even more convincingly than Ambur Braid. The prophet initially barks his admonitions from out of the darkness. Naked, with only a sleazy pair of khaki-colored pants around his loins, he enters the zone of light. Nicholas Brownlee infuses his Jochanaan with an astonishing calm and tenderness, somewhat renouncing his missionary role as a religious scarecrow. When Salome introduces herself to him, she does so with a handshake. Both are in constant physical contact. Kosky takes Salome's love very seriously.
There is also some bad-girl humor to be seen: in her mother's appreciation and during the endless bickering of Jews and Nazarenes. These are wearing a hood over their heads as if the director wants to say : let this pass as quickly as possible. "It is an unbearable, anti-Semitic cacophony that you can hardly sing or listen to," Kosky believes. Bartok actually liked the Jewish Quintet very much, as we learn from the program booklet. The composer did intend this cacophonous scherzo in d minor as a caricature as we know from a letter to Stefan Zweig.
Kosky's reductionism also makes you listen to the music more intensely, such as to the grandiose second interlude after Jochanan's return to the cistern. Or the dance of the seven veils, the moment when the performance comes to a complete stop. Kosky has Salome sit wide-legged on the floor while she spends 10 minutes pulling a 200-meter strand of hair out of her vagina, an erotically-traumatic gimmick that, of course, doesn't work at all. Isn't it more interesting to see Salome's dance as a 16-year-old's crucial step toward adulthood. It's music that sounds a bit like a soundtrack for Hollywood. Mahler thought it was trivial, Proust vulgar, Fauré mediocre. But Strauss knew well what he was doing, and the scene only works when the main performer engages herself in the dance.
A meat hook and the prophet's head are the only props in this staging. To have the head hanging from a meat hook adds to the agility of the final scene: an orgasm with a dead body that is far better than an orgasm with a living body could be. It is "the same love as that of opera lovers: necrophilia," Kosky writes quite defiantly in his book.
Ambur Braid tries to be a 16-year-old princess with the voice of Isolde, as Strauss desired. Her voice type is like Elsa van den Heever's, has an attractive Straussian timbre with warm high notes and radiant long notes. Her playing is marked by a certain joy at experimentation and a healthy curiosity towards portraying unconventional women, similar to Ausrine Stundyte. Nicholas Brownlee's impressive Jochanaan, sung with a warmly resonant bass baritone, was also interpretively very strong. Matthias Wohlbrecht's tenor does not possess the most captivating timbre on the planet but his Herod too was excellently articulated. Katharina Magiera was a terrific Herodias. With the little she has to sing she made a great impression, even though she looked younger and more petite than her daughter. It's a role so often given to worn-out sopranos; here she sounded youthful and fresh as rarely heard. Why is this alto (or rather a mezzo ?) never heard in larger roles ? Michael Porter as Narraboth and Bianca Andrew as the Page also showed fresh, young voices.
Under the baton of Leo Hussain, the Frankfurt Opern- und Museumsorchester sounded a bit rough in the orchestral fortes of the second interlude but exciting in the macabre decapitation scene and with appropriate feminine charm in the dance of the seven veils.