Salome the opera has a built-in perv-o-meter for Salome the character -- his name is Herod

Cheryl Barker as Salome and John Pickering
as Herod in Opera Australia's new Salome

HEROD: Salome, come, drink wine with me!
An exquisite wine! Caesar himself sent it to me.
Moisten your red lips with it; then I will empty the cup.

Jon Vickers (t), Herod; Orchestre National de France, Rudolf Kempe, cond. Live performance from the Orange Festival, July 14, 1974

Karl Liebl (t), Herod; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Mar. 13, 1965

Kenneth Riegel (t), Herod; Hamburg State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded live, Nov. 4, 1970

Ramón Vinay (t), Herod; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Dimitri Mitropoulos, cond. Live performance, Jan. 8, 1955

Gerhard Stolze (t), Herod; Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded October 1961

Set Svanholm (t), Herod; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. Live performance, Jan. 19, 1952

by Ken

With last week's posts ("Strauss's operatic beginnings: We don't need an excuse to listen to Till Eulenspiegel -- but the Symphonia domestica, maybe so?" and "The start of something: Here's the promised follow-up to the post spotlighting Till Eulenspiegel and the Symphonia domestica -- focusing now on the already-heard openings of six Strauss operas") stretching on and on in both time and blogspace, we have not much of a post this week, though it involved a heap of audio editing, which is at least better than having to think.


OUR QUESTION: HOW DOES HEROD GET FROM THE
CLIP ABOVE TO THE ONE WE'RE GOING TO HEAR?

What follows is, I suppose, a value judgment, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to suggest that if we wanted a candidate who rates in the very highest tiers of ruthlessness, autocracy, unbridled lust and unrelenting pursuit of gratification of all his appetites, we might propose the Tetrarch Herod, as depicted by Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. Still, in our first clip, if we set aside the rampant perversion and incestuous indecency (the nasty thoughts he's doing such a bad job of concealing are directed, remember, at a presumably teenaged girl who is also both his niece and his stepdaughter), he seems -- especially in some of our performances -- at least a gregarious and possibly even gracious host, a jolly enough fellow as long as he isn't being crossed in any way.

Which is why I chose this group of Herods. I confess I was curious to listen with some attention to Set Svanholm's Herod, because this was after all a full-fledged Heldentenor, past his vocal very best but still far from washed up; he was still singing his big Wagner roles pretty credibly -- a solid effort but in the company of this group of Herods who work so hard to give full vocal value to Strauss's remarkable writing Svanholm is probably the least impressive of the group.

A special case is the famous Herod of Gerhard Stolze. Given the, er, particular quality of his tenor this is obviously going to be the "character-tenor" approach to the role, but it's sung so well (in its way), with such panache and dramatic understanding, that it's something different in kind from all the croaking and rasping and moaning and squeaking Herods we're likely to encounter. If we're going to go with the idea of Herod-as-total-perv, this is the way I'd like to hear it.

From our remaining Herods we get what I hear as genuinely accomplished vocalism -- of, you know, a Herod-ian sort. Ramón Vinay was at this time still a prime Siegmund and Tristan and Parsifal and Otello, and I love the stature he gives the music. Karl Liebl's Wagner roles were the lighter ones (I have a sentimental attachment, since he was my first live-performance Wagner tenor, as Walther von Stolzing in a Met Meistersinger), and I think he's quite wonderful here, as is, in a quite different way, Kenneth Riegel. Speaking of that "quite different way," note how different these two Böhm-conducted Salomes are, the 1965 Met one his more usual hand-to-hand-combat sort, the Hamburg one a deeper, more achingly songful one that I'm finding holds up quite well.

Then there's Jon Vickers. Again the voice is past its very best, but there's still plenty of it left, and he deploys it with such energy and intensity that he's kind of at the opposite pole from Stolze. That said, we're going to hear something startlingly different when his evening with Salome proves too repellent even for him.


TODAY'S SECOND CLIP KEPT CHANGING SHAPE

I've been planning for several weeks to take a closer listen to Herod's music, and I think we're still going to delve into it more. All I originally planned for our second clip here that final line of Herod's and before leading his wife away from the terrace gives his simple instruction regarding Salome. Of course I was always going to include the orchestral music that precedes the tetrarch's retreat, and by the time I made the first two clips for the first version of this post, I'd decided that we actually had to go back more, to hear the last things Herod himself is able to bear hearing from his stepdaughter. Even by that time I'd kept pushing back my planned "start" point, because the way the text and music build up, I kept feeling it necessary to go back a little further.

Those original clips picked up at the orchestral lead-in to what we usually think of as the final section of the "Final Scene" of Salome, at "Ach! Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan." I really hadn't wanted to dip back into the Final Scene, of which we've already heard a good deal in the Nov. 25 ("After all, the Page in Salome does warn that horrible things are going to happen") and Dec. 2 posts, and of which you've already been promised a good deal more -- when we're ready for it. We aren't ready yet, but if we're going to appreciate how badly Herod is shaken by what he witnesses, I didn't see any way around listening to some of it. Finally, during the enforced hours of my blogging hiatus today, as I thought about it, I realized that in fact we needed to go back another minute-plus, to the moment when Herod already grossed out to what he thinks is the limit, tells Herodias her daughter is a monster. So I redid the first two clips and edited the two "new" ones the same way.

And it came out this way --

HEROD [to HERODIAS]: She is a monster, your daughter.
I tell you, she is a monster!
HERODIAS: My daughter has done right.
I might now stay here.
HEROD [stands up]:
Ah! There speaks my brother's wife!
Come, I will no longer remain in this place.
Come, I say to you!
Surely something terrible will happen.
We will hide in the palace.
Herodias, I am beginning to tremble.
Manassah, Issachar, Ozias, put out the torches.
Hide the moon, hide the stars!
Something terrible will happen!
[The servants put out the torches. The stars disappear. A great cloud crosses over the moon and hides it completely. The stage becomes totally dark. The Tetrarch begins to climb the staircase.]
SALOME [faintly]: Ah! I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan.
Ah! I have kissed it, your mouth,
there was a bitter taste on your lips.
Did it taste of blood?
No! But it tasted perhaps of love.
They say that love tastes bitter.
But what of it? What of it?
I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan.
I have kissed it, your mouth.
[The moon breaks through again and illuminates SALOME.]
HEROD [turning around]: Someone kill this woman!
[The soldiers swoop down on SALOME and bury her under their shields. The curtain falls quickly.]

Gerhard Stolze (t), Herod; Grace Hoffman (ms), Herodias; Birgit Nilsson (s), Salome; Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded October 1961

Richard Lewis (t), Herod; Regina Resnik (ms), Herodias; Montserrat Caballé (s), Salome; London Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA, recorded June 1968

Kenneth Riegel (t), Herod; Mignon Dunn (ms), Herodias; Hamburg State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded live, Nov. 4, 1970

Jon Vickers (t), Herod; Ruth Hesse (ms), Herodias; Leonie Rysanek (s), Salome; Orchestre National de France, Rudolf Kempe, cond. Live performance from the Orange Festival, July 14, 1974

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