Back in Willa Cather’s day, when Olive Fremstad gave the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome (a role she never performed there again), all it took to scandalize the audience in the Dance of the Seven Veils was a flash of the body stocking worn by Fremstad’s double. Decades later—blink, and you missed it—international divas like Maria Ewing and Karita Mattila made headlines when they went all the way. Nowadays, heavy-hitting directors pursue shock by other means. Cue gang rape, with Salome’s gung-ho participation (Lydia Steier’s horror show in Paris, built around Elza van den Heever), or Buñuelesque encounters between seven tiny-to-full-grown Salomes and a colossal Minotaur (Claus Guth’s fantasy in New York, likewise built around van den Heever). For our money, David McVicar’s now 20-year-old production for London’s Royal Opera House remains the touchstone. McVicar took his cue from the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a brothel-meets-slaughterhouse Mussolini-era reboot of what may be the most objectionable of the novels by the Marquis de Sade (the competition is keen). Rather than dance, Salome passes with her predatory stepfather Herod through a succession of seven cheerless cells. What happens exactly? Who knows? Yet a rag doll, a scarf, a mirror, and a waltz step or two emanate powers to crush a soul. In the production’s Chicago premiere, Elena Stikhina assumes the superhuman title role. Cast wildly against type, the likable linebacker manqué Brandon Jovanovich—lately heart-wrenching as Wagner’s eponymous Holy Fool in a San Francisco Parsifal—makes his role debut as Herod, who walks straight into his stepdaughter’s trap. Nicholas Brownlee, lately in high demand as Wotan, chieftain of the gods in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, sermonizes, shudders, and loses his head as John the Baptist. Tomáš Netopil, who like Stikhina and Brownlee is a new face to Lyric audiences, conducts. The intricately engineered double-decker architecture is the work of the set designer Es Devlin, a genius. —Matthew Gurewitsch
