Salome, a tale of perverse desire, still provokes, just as it did 120 years ago when it premiered in Dresden. At the explicit wish of its Music Director, James Gaffigan, Komische Oper Berlin presented a new Salome with a sharply etched, unsentimental reading of Strauss’ lush score under his baton.
Stage director Evgeny Titov has the young princess Salome appear faceless throughout the entire opera – she wears a white helmet, akin to a fencing mask, completely covering her head. As Titov comments in the programme book, she is the projection of male fantasies – Herodes can imagine her any way he wants. But Salome is also someone searching for her own identity and finds it in her obsession with Jochanaan, who is so steadfast in his faith, paying for it with his life. Titov shows us not a head severed and served on a silver platter. Instead, he presents this scene through the lens of Catholic martyr iconography – Jochanaan appears with his torso slit open, sacklike, reminiscent of the purported self-portrait of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel – a shocking image that recasts him as a quasi-saintly figure, a prophet whose martyrdom is inscribed directly onto his flesh.
Titov’s dramaturgy leans toward stark symbolism, sometimes to the point of austerity, yet his conceptual sharpness gives the production a compelling internal logic. Still, his focus on ritualised hedonism – the sado-macho actions of the chorus, for example – occasionally risks flattening the opera’s dangerous erotic charge, where it is this tension between sacred and profane that Strauss and Wilde so meticulously cultivated. Underlining this atmosphere was Rufus Didwiszus’ set design, which reinforces the production’s hermetic unease: a windowless, burnished gold-toned chamber with metallic surfaces that seem to absorb and dull every ray of imagined light. The broken floor, ruptured by the cistern that emerges from below, suggests a palace built quite literally on instability; a world in perpetual danger of collapse.
The Dance of the Seven Veils becomes a sardonic commentary on seduction. Choreographer Martina Borroni places Salome amid a dozen of her own lookalikes, a semi-erotic chorus of fractured identities. What might be a moment of voyeuristic spectacle instead turns self-referential and unsettling, Salome as both object and echo, multiplied until desire becomes meaningless repetition. This commentary is carried a step further when Salome asks for the prophet’s head and – just for a brief moment, as if to mock her – severed heads are shown on the walls.
Costume designer Esther Bialas anchors this vision in a mid-20th-century aesthetic. Her 1950s-inspired silhouettes offer a tactile counterpoint to the production’s abstraction. Salome’s high-necked, metallic silvery dress, layered over a flurry of petticoats, gleams with a retro-futurist irony: innocence overstated, femininity constructed. Herodias’ golden, serpentine gown atop a body suit fully exaggerating her curves adds a touch of camp decadence to an otherwise pared-down visual world. As a counterpoint, Herodes’ shiny green silk suit brings to mind a sinewy, sinister snake.
The true stars of the evening are the singers. The way soprano Nicole Chevalier brilliantly mastered the murderous title role beneath her helmet commanded respect; indeed, she managed to give the faceless princess a strong profile and personality. As Jochanaan, Günter Papendell gave an arrestingly physical performance, his baritone ringing with prophetic authority even as his body bore the marks of Titov’s martyrdom concept. His was a Jochanaan of dramatic force and interpretative intensity: a powerful, self-assured, and enlightened being, immune to all earthly temptations. No wonder that Salome, herself at a loss to find her own identity, is instantly attracted to him.
Karoline Gumos brought vocal assurance and steely theatrical command to Herodias, embodying a woman whose fury has calcified into a kind of grotesque glamour. Matthias Wohlbrecht’s Herodes was a wonderfully slithery presence, vocally nimble, dramatically sharp, his voice drooling desire, endlessly self-gratifying. Augustin Gomez's Narraboth pined touchingly for Salome with a beautiful tenorial timbre, while Susan Zarrabis' page warned urgently of the impending disaster with her clear mezzo.
In the pit, Gaffigan favoured transparency and rhythmic precision over the voluptuous sweep often associated with this opera. The orchestra responded with clean, chiselled lines. At times, one wished for a touch more hedonistic abandon – the shimmering excess Strauss builds into every bar – but Gaffigan’s disciplined approach revealed unusual layers of structural clarity and psychological detail.
This Salome is not an exercise in decadent luxuriance but in controlled provocation. Gaffigan’s restraint and Titov’s iconographic severity made for an evening that is as psychologically incisive as it is visually unflinching. The production’s intellectual boldness and its ensemble of finely honed performances ensure that the images linger long after the final chords fade.
