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?

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

Sure, literally speaking Guntram (with, we might note, a libretto by the composer, Wagner-style, something Strauss would attempt again only once more, still perhaps problematically but, I think, a lot more successfully, with the sort-of-autobiographical Intermezzo) was the start of something, but could anyone have guessed "of what"? (We can also note at the very top that Strauss's first opera was "Dedicated to my dear parents.")

by Ken

To recap, our subject is still Salome, Richard Strauss's third opera, focusing here on the powerful anecdotal evidence from these snatches of the operas that preceded and followed Salome of the startling transformation that took place, all at once, in Strauss's ability to make the operatic medium work for him. In the main portion of this week's post, "Strauss's operatic beginnings: We don't need an excuse to listen to Till Eulenspiegel -- but the Symphonia domestica, maybe so?" we heard these same operatic clips, in this same order, with no identification of either the operas or the performers. In this concluding portion of the post we have all those identifications available, as well as English texts for most of the sung portions of these excerpts.

As I'm sure you guessed, Operas X and Y were Strauss's pre-Salome operatic endeavors, the turgid late Romantic stinker Guntram (first performed in 1894) and its "satirical" successor, Feuersnot (first performed in 1901). Perhaps surprisingly, given how adept Strauss would become at devising operatic openings that plunge us directly into the action, he began his operatic career with a full-fledged overture. Oy, is it full-fledged; it just fledges on and on -- and on. (Note that it's not entirely free-standing, as we might expect an "overture" to be in one frequently proposed distinction between an "overture" and a "prelude," which not only tends to be shorter but normally flows directly into the opening scene. The Guntram whatever-you-want-to-call-it flows directly into the equally nondescript music of the opening scene.

[AFTERTHOUGHT: I have to say that rather unexpectedly the Guntram Overture has started to grow on me -- hey, this is not some no-talented musical hack we're dealing with. But it still seems to meander hopelessly, stretching this thin material many long, long minutes beyond the breaking point. -- Ken]

[X] R. STRAUSS: Guntram, Op. 25: Overture


BBC Symphony Orchestra, John Pritchard, cond. Gala, broadcast performance, 1981

Hungarian State Orchestra, Eve Queler, cond. CBS-Hungaroton, recorded 1984


MOVING ON TO "OPERA Y": FEUERSNOT

Strauss's operatic beginnings: We don't need an excuse to listen to Till Eulenspiegel -- but the Symphonia domestica, maybe so?

MONDAY NIGHT UPDATE: I think we've finally gotten this post to where it wanted to go. Thanks for your patience. [OK, maybe not "finally" -- ]
TUESDAY-THURSDAY UPDATES: I've added another performance of Till Eulenspiegel, fiddled a fair amount with the opera clips (and added English texts), and as explained below finally spun off the section of fully identified Strauss-opera audio clips into a separate follow-up post. -- Ken


In Munich's Herkulessaal, Lorin Maazel leads the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in a beautifully relaxed performance of Till Eulenspiegel.

by Ken

In listening to and thinking about Richard Strauss's Salome, as we've been doing for a number of weeks ("Some out-of-this-world sounds from a singer who proves mistress of a surprising role" [11/18], "After all, the Page in Salome does warn that horrible things are going to happen" [11/25], and "Word is that "Today we are not shocked by Salome." Really?" [12/2]), it's hard not to be aware that when the first performance of the composer's unmistakable breakthrough opera took place, on December 9, 1905, he was already 41½. With regard to Salome's "breakthrough" standing, as Wikipedia notes, "Within two years, it had been given in 50 other opera houses."

It's not that Strauss was a "late starter." After all, by the time of Salome, his Op. 54, he was already world-famous, as the composer of a stream of music that quickly joined and remains firmly ensconced in the standard repertory -- the likes of Aus Italien (From Italy, Op. 16, 1886), Don Juan (Op. 20, 1888), Macbeth (Op. 23, 1886-88), Death and Transfiguration (Op. 24, 1889), Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Op. 28, 1894-95), Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra, Op. 30), Don Quixote (Op. 35, 1896-97), Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, Op. 40, 1898), and the Symphonia domestica (Op. 53, 1902-03). There were also assortments of chamber music and solo-piano works, concertos for piano (the Burleske, 1886), violin (Op. 8, 1881-82), and horn (Op. 11, 1882-83; there would be another horn concerto, but not till 1942) -- and, oh yes, nearly 150 songs.


AND THERE'D BEEN TWO OPERAS BEFORE SALOME
(AND WE'RE GOING TO HEAR SNATCHES OF BOTH!)

Word is that "Today we are not shocked by Salome." Really?

LATE SUNDAY UPDATE: Those who've visited earlier know that this post has been a construction zone. Now, though, apart from incidental fixes (if I find the courage to look at the thing), we've got our four performances of the "Dance for me, Salome" excerpt (with performance notes) and this week's four performances of the Final Scene. -- Ken

Salomé by Gustave Moreau (1876)

Salome's Dance (aka "Dance of the Seven Veils"): The musicians begin to play a wild dance. SALOME, at first motionless, reaches up high and gives the musicians a sign. At once the wild rhythm is succeeded by a gentle, rocking melody. SALOME then dances the Dance of the Seven Veils. After a moment of apparent exhaustion she leaps up, as if newly elated. For a moment she lingers in a trance-like state by the cistern in which JOCHANAAN is held prisoner; then she rushes forward and lands at HEROD's feet.

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Heinz Rögner, cond. Berlin Classics, recorded Feb.-Mar. 1977

Vienna Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. DG, recorded October 1992

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded Oct. 12, 1965

Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. Decca, recorded 1960

by Ken

I see that I didn't actually identify the music we heard above. As I'm pretty sure you figured out, it's "Salome's Dance" (aka the "Dance of the Seven Veils") from Richard Strauss's Salome. Actually, we've already heard an assortment of performances of the "Dance" -- two weeks ago, as "a Salome bonus" to the post "Some out-of-this-world sounds from a singer who proves mistress of a surprising role," part of our still-ongoing remembrance of Montserrat Caballé, whom we were encountering as a (to me) surprisingly remarkable exponent of the title role, at least in the RCA recording conducted pretty remarkably by Erich Leinsdorf.

(I've been listening to two other Caballé Salome performances, one earlier and one later than the recoding, as well as the still-later recording of the Final Scene, and while some of the qualities I find so remarkable in the RCA performance can be glimpsed in other performances, none of them seem really in the same class.)

In the course of playing with some of my Salome materials I happened to glance, apparently for the first time, at the background essay on the opera which Michael Kennedy wrote for the booklet of the 1985 CD issue of the classic 1961 Nilsson-Solti-Decca recording, which looks to be quite an interesting piece, but in which my eyes lit on a string of words that kind of made my blood run cold. After writing at length about the shock that the opera had caused in its early years, he writes:

"Today we are not shocked by Salome . . ."

Huh??? We're not shocked by Salome??? Huh???


"DANCE FOR ME, SALOME"

After all, the Page in Salome does warn that horrible things are going to happen

Salome (Angela Denoke at Covent Garden, 2010) finally gets to kiss the mouth of the prophet Jochanaan, who may have wished he'd let her do it when his head was still attached to him.

by Ken

It was as part of our Caballé-remembrance series that, last week, we ventured into Salome ("Some out-of-this-world sounds from a singer who proves mistress of a surprising role"). Now, having ventured there, I don't see how we can leave without some further exploring, and for this week's installment we're not even going to have Caballé at the center -- though I think you'll notice, if you compare her with the (very fine) other Salomes we'll be hearing, that she's plugged into the role in a way that is very much her own.

Just to recap, the opera is set on a terrace of the palace of Herod, the tetrarch of Judea, inside which a great feast is taking place. For a while the audience is invited to observe the wild infatuation of a handsome young captain, Narraboth, with the princess Salome, daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter (as well as niece) of the tetrarch (her father, Herodias's first husband, was Herod's half-brother), and we've been introduced to some of the many palace functionaries and guests who populate the terrace (and the opera), including a page of Herodias (presumably male) who appears as fixated on Narraboth as the latter is on Salome. We've also heard briefly from a still-invisible character: Safely locked away in a heavily guarded cistern is the prophet Jochanaan, aka John the Baptist, who despite his unfortunate incaraceration voices a soaring brand of religious ecstasy, for which Strauss found an appropriately ecstatic musical format, even as the prophet details the sea of human corruption all around.

Last week we heard Salome make her escape from the banquet to the terrace, and this week we're going to overlap a clip we heard last week, so we can immediately hear Salome switching on a dime from pouting rage to angelically youthful sweetness. One point to note: As far as I know we're not given an age for Salome, but the implication seems fairly clear that she's still a teenager, and again I would call attention to the young-girlishness that comes out so strongly in Strauss's musical setting, at least if the singer can make it come out, which it seems to me Caballé did, at least in the RCA recording of the opera conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, better than any other Salome I've heard. Again, the sound that's made by a big-voiced singer capable of scaling the voice down has an intensity and excitement that a smaller-voiced singer can't match -- as a matter of fact, as I think I've already mentioned, Birgit Nilsson, the greatest of the post-Welitsch Salomes, who pretty much obliterated the competition in the flaming outbursts, did some of her most memorable work in Salome's quiet moments.


LET'S HEAR SOME MUSIC ALREADY!

Some out-of-this-world sounds from a singer who proves mistress of a surprising role

How good it is to see in the moon.
It is like a silver flower, cool and chaste.
Yes, like the beauty of a virgin,
who has remained pure.

How sweet is the air here.
Here I can breathe.

by Ken

Yes, yes, something happens at the end of the first clip, something I couldn't edit out, which is actually kind of the point. In Richard Strauss's Salome things just kind of happen, one thing after another, and one of the miracles of Strauss's breakthrough opera -- here we might bear in mind that his operatic breakthrough didn't come till he was 40 -- is that he had music, utterly extraordinary music, for all those things that happen.

As many of you will know, the two audio clips we've already heard are reversed -- for visual effect, the visual effect being the illustration of the full moon, which clearly favors our moon-clip. In the opera, though, the "How sweet is the air" clip comes first; it's almost the first thing we hear from Salome after she makes her entrance -- fleeing from the banquet inside to the terrace of the palace of the Tetrarch Herod, her stepfather (and also her uncle, which is even worse than it sounds, but that's another sordid story for another time). We'll be hearing these musical bits in context shortly, with all participants properly identified.


OH YES, THE SINGER, OF COURSE, IS . . .

Gluck confronts the basic life principle that when you're dead, you're dead

And one last time: We hear Marilyn Horne sing "Divinités du Styx" from Gluck's Alceste again, in a performance I'd guess is about 20 years later than the early recording we heard in our Friday and Saturday previews. Some YouTube commenters natter about the downward transposition, apparently unaware that in Gluck's time it would have been done without hesitation. (The conductor, by the way, is Horne's longtime accompanist Martin Katz.)

"It would be frightful if the dead came back."

-- King Herod, in Richard Strauss's Salome
(text adapted from Oscar Wilde's play)

by Ken

We left Alceste last night more or less knocking at the gates of Hell, bound to trade her life for that of her husband, Admète, king of Thessaly.

Is it just a coincidence that two of Christoph Willibald von Gluck's three Vienna "reform" operas, Alceste and Orfeo ed Euridice, chronicled the two most famous breeches in Greek legend of the basic principle that once you're dead, you're dead? As noted, this principle was especially dear to King Herod, no doubt because he had personally moved so many people from the "not dead" to "dead" column.

from Richard Strauss's Salome:

JOCHANAAN (JOHN THE BAPTIST) [from the cistern in which he is imprisoned]: See, the day is at hand, the day of the Lord, and I hear in the mountains the footsteps of Him who will be the Redeemer of the World.
HEROD: What is that supposed to mean, the Redeemer of the World?
1st NAZARENE: The Messiah has come.
1st JEW [of Herod's five court Jews]: The Messiah has not come.
1st NAZARENE: He has come, and everywhere he is working miracles. At a wedding in Galilee he changed water into wine. He healed two lepers of Capernaum . . .
2nd NAZARENE: By simply touching them.
1st NAZARENE: He has also cured the blind. He has been seen on a mountain in conversation with angels.
HERODIAS: Oho! I don't believe in miracles. I have seen too many.
1st NAZARENE: The daughter of Jairus -- he awakened her from the dead.
HEROD: What? He awakens the dead?
1st and 2nd NAZARENES: Yes indeed, he awakens the dead.
HEROD: I forbid him to do that! It would be frightful if the dead came back. Where is the man at the moment?
1st NAZARENE: Sir, he is everywhere, but it's hard to find him.
HEROD: The man must be found.
2nd NAZARENE: It's said that he's in Samaria.
1st NAZARENE: He left Samaria a couple of days ago. I believe he's in the neighborhood of Jerusalem.
HEROD: Just listen: I forbid him to awaken the dead. It would be frightful if the dead came back.
VOICE OF JOCHANAAN: O, about this wanton woman, the daughter of Babylon, thus says the Lord our God . . .
HERODIAS: Order him to be quiet.


Bryn Terfel (b), Jochanaan (John the Baptist); Kenneth Riegel (t), Herod; Peter Rose (bs), 1st Nazarene; Uwe Peper (t), 1st Jew; Hanna Schwarz (ms), Herodias; Martin Gantner (b), 2nd Nazarene; Vienna Philharmonic, Christoph von Dohnányi, cond. Decca, recorded Apr. 11-18, 1994

I never knew I had any special relationship with the opening chorus of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice until I saw it trashed. A friend had invited me to the last New York City Opera production, in which the chorus was banished to the orchestra pit, leaving the job of trying to console Orfeo on the unimaginable and inconsolable loss of his adored wife Euridice to a bunch of dancers flitting mutely around the stage.

I think maybe it sneaked up on me, because one of life's inevitabilities is that you grow older, you more often find yourself in this position -- trying to provide some sort of consolation to people close to you who are grieving, when you have no consolation to offer, only sympathy and the knowledge that you're there for them. None of that helps, of course, at least with the grief, but the psyche has a separate chamber where those expressions of sympathy and communality are stored up for the time when they can be drawn on for the necessary psychical reconstruction project.

And here in this infuriatingly pretentious and misbegotten production, listening to the hidden-away chorus do the heavy lifting in this scene, I suddenly grasped the Gluck had been through this territory, charting a path for those of us destined to follow. The scene, I suddenly understood, is about two impossibilities: the impossibility of Orfeo dealing with his grief, and the impossibility of his friends, feeling the loss of Eurdice intensely personally themselves, and feeling so much of Orfeo's pain, to reach across that barrier of loss.

Well, this hack director had certainly made it literally impossible for the chorus to reach out to Orfeo. Unfortunately, because he apparently doesn't know much about human beings, he had cut Orfeo's friends off in the one way they're not separated from him: physical closeness. Anyway, here are some distinctly different-sounding versions of the opening of the scene:

GLUCK: Orphée et Eurydice: Act I, "Ah! Dans ce bois tranquille"

The translation is of the French version. (The Italian is similar.)

ORPHÉE periodically punctuates the chorus with cries of "Eurydice!"

NYMPHS AND SHEPHERDS: Ah, in this tranquil and somber wood,
Eurydice, if your spirit hears us,
be moved by our alarms,
See our sufferings, see our tears
That are shed for you.
Ah, take pity on the unhappy Orphée!
He sighs, he moans, he laments his fate.
The loving turtledove,
always tender, always faithful,
thus sighs and dies of sorrow.

In Italian: Risë Stevens, mezzo-soprano; Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded June 15-26, 1957

In French: Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano; Monteverdi Choir, Orchestra of the Opéra du Lyon, John Eliot Gardiner, cond. EMI, recorded Jan. 29-Feb. 2, 1989

In French: Richard Croft, tenor; Chorus of Les Musiciens du Louvre, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski, cond. [pitch: A = 403] Archiv, recorded June 2002

The gods having heard Orpheus's pleas, in Act II he descends into the Underworld to retrieve Euridice. There he encounters first the Furies and then the gathering of Blessed Spirits, for both of which Gluck added appropriate dance music in the expanded Paris version of Orfeo.

GLUCK: Orphée et Eurydice: Act II, Dance of the Furies


Rome Opera Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded June 15-26, 1957

Orchestra of the Opéra du Lyon, John Eliot Gardiner, cond. EMI, recorded Jan. 29-Feb. 2, 1989

GLUCK: Orphée et Eurydice: Act II, Dance of the Blessed Spirits


Rome Opera Orchestra, Pierre Monteux, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded June 15-26, 1957

Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski, cond. [pitch: A = 403] Archiv, recorded live June 2002

Orfeo finally finds Euridice but has strict instructions not to look back at her until he has led her safely out of Hades, or else! Of course he also can't explain why he won't look at her, and she assumes he has abandoned her. Finally he is unable to resist glancing back, and promptly she dies -- again. Horrified by what he has done, he sings the aria that is probably the best-known music Gluck wrote: "Che farò senza Euridice?" ("What will I do without Euridice?") in the original Italian, "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice" ("I have lost my Eurydice") in the French translation.

We hear first the original Italian version, sung by a female (rather than castrated male) alto, then the revised French version for tenor, and finally -- I couldn't resist -- the young Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sailing through (basically) the Italian version taken down an octave, though the German translation he sings ("Ach, ich habe sie verloren") appears based on the French text.

GLUCK: Orfeo ed Euridice: Act III, "Che farò senza Euridice?"

The translation is of the French text. (The Italian is similar.)

ORPHEUS: I have lost my Eurydice.
Nothing equals my unhappiness.
Cruel fate! What severity!
Nothing equals my unhappiness.
I succumb to my sorrow.

Eurydice! Eurydice!
Answer! What torture!
Answer me. It's your faithful spouse.
Hear my voice that's calling you.

I have lost my Eurydice. etc.

Eurydice! Eurydice!

Fatal silence!
Vain hope!
What suffering!
What torments tear at my heart!

I have lost my Eurydice. etc.

In Italian: Vesselina Kasarova, mezzo-soprano; Munich Radio Orchestra, Friedrich Haider, cond. BMG, recorded Sept. 11-16, 1996

In French: Richard Croft, tenor; Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski, cond. [pitch: A = 403] Archiv, recorded live June 2002

In German: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ferenc Fricsay, cond. DG, recorded Sept. 8-12, 1956


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