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.”
