In Richard Strauss’s 90-minute opera, Salome bursts onstage straight from the pages of Psychopathia Sexualis, causes no end of mischief, and goes out in necrophiliac ecstasies over the severed head of John the Baptist. It’s a killer role, but as Elza van den Heever established two seasons ago in a brutalist production by Lydia Steier for the Paris Opéra, neither the music nor the drama holds any terrors for her. As pandemonium raged in the orchestra, Van den Heever’s fresh, clear soprano soared up to the top high B like an eagle on thermals. And though she says she wept buckets when the director presented all the kink she had in mind for the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils, in the end she threw herself into the orgiastic violence with a Fury’s abandon, unfazed by bluenoses in the audience who fled for the doors. (Dad got a trigger warning.)
Next Tuesday, Van den Heever, 45, takes her Salome to the Metropolitan Opera, this time under the direction of Claus Guth, a newcomer to the house whose work, the singer vouches, “is always extremely poetic in the way he tells his stories and always beautiful to look at.”
A prime draw at the world’s top opera houses, Van den Heever has been setting New York on fire in Handel, Mozart, and Wagner season after season since her 2012 Met debut, as a skinhead Queen Elizabeth in Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. In December, when we connected on Zoom, local cognoscenti were swooning over her Empress in a blue-moon revival of Strauss’s Jungian fairy tale, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Who Cast No Shadow).
Yes, yes, but what’s with the cake? As pictured above, the neo-Mannerist rendering of John’s head on a platter seems carved in Parian marble. Actually, the sculptural “skin” consists of white modeling chocolate, applied to a core of lemon-scented Madeira cake, with blue American buttercream spread between the layers. And it’s from Van den Heever’s own kitchen!
“It all started in the pandemic, when I lost my emotional way,” Van den Heever explains, sounding all but Dantean. She had always loved cooking—so much so that as a teen in her native South Africa she nearly enrolled in cooking school. But a music teacher persuaded her mother that Elza’s moment to train as a professional musician was now or never.
Food, though, was forever. “My entire world revolves around food,” Van den Heever says today. “I wake up in the morning, I think about food. I go to bed at night, I think about food.” When rehearsing, she packs lunch. On her way home afterward, she shops for dinner. “Cooking is a way to share with people,” she says. “It’s my love language.”
Not until the lockdown of 2020 did she develop any serious interest in baking, mainly because, before, she’d always preferred to “sort of invent” rather than follow a recipe. Then she saw a friend’s photo of a thousand-layer crêpe cake and thought, “I can do that.” Next up: the cone-shaped tower of cream puffs drizzled in caramel known as croquembouche. That’s Olympic. Soon she was making beautiful food every day and posting it on Instagram. An enthusiastic executive at the Dallas Opera commissioned a series of weekly Van den Heever food videos, which helped support her developing habit. “Baking,” she points out, “is not cheap.”
Adventures in edible sculpting began with a princess cake inspired by her colleague Pretty Yende’s showstopper frock for Rossini’s sparkling comedy Le Comte Ory. For such projects, Van den Heever added to her knife set the kind of skinny, snaky blade used in Spain for carving paper-thin slices off a classic jamón ibérico. And for the dress, she had to master working with sugar paste.
“I took to it like a moth to the flame,” she says. In the business, Van den Heever’s double life as diva and crazy hyper-realistic baker has only added to her éclat. Her facsimile of Maurizio Cattelan’s $6 million banana taped to a wall won a company prize at the Met. “Just one thing I think I should tell you,” she says as we wrap up. “I’m not really a baker. Better to say I’m a caker.”
Salome will be on at the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, from April 29 to May 24
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
