Semele/Salome

Semele/Salome

Which young female heroine asks a powerful male figure to grant her whatever she wishes? The granting of this favour then leads to her destruction. By a curious juxtaposition we had tickets for two operas on consecutive nights which provided two answers to this question. Handel’s Semele asks Jupiter to appear to her as a god, and Richard Strauss’s Salome asks Herod to give her whatever she wants in return for performing a dance before him. Semele as a mortal cannot withstand the sight of Jupiter and is burnt up, while Salome wants John the Baptist’s head on a silver charger, which Herod egged on by his wife Herodias, Salome’s mother, gives her. Herod is so repulsed by her favour that he orders her death. Handel is comic and amusing where Strauss is violent and shocking. (What would it be like to have Handel’s Salome and Strauss’s Semele? Could Handel be as striking and could Strauss be as light?) This was my second Semele of the year, with the same conductor and orchestra (Christophe Rousset and the Talens Lyriques) but was a very different affair to the earlier Chinese production in Brussels (see earlier post in September 2009). The singing here was much stronger with Danielle De Niese and Vivica Genaux in the roles of Semele and Ino/Juno, but without the theatrical production by David McVicar from Paris in the concert version I saw at the Barbican in London. Here the comedy was more apparent with Ovid’s rather ditzy heroine causing her own downfall by her vanity (De Niese making the most of her mirror aria “If I persist in gazing”). David McVicar was also responsible for the production of Salome at the Royal Opera Covent Garden. Here the strength of his vision made the lack of it at the Barbican all the more apparent. Set in the grim kitchen area of a swanky restaurant the violence and raw emotion was always there just under the surface and even in the bloody final scene was never overdone or indulgent. The figure of the naked executioner emerging covered in blood from the cistern with John the Baptist’s head is one of the strongest stage images I have seen. With Angela Denoke’s soprano soaring over the orchestra this scene packs a shocking punch, with Salome cradling the severed head in her lap like Agave with Pentheus’s head in Euripides’ Bacchae. It is not often that a biblical story can rival the mythical power of a Greek myth, but Oscar Wilde in his original play saw the potential of this episode to produce a new kind of Greek tragedy. Both pieces are based on strong literary texts: Congreve’s Semele and Wilde’s Salome. The surtitles projected to clarify the sung texts carried their own richness unusual in the librettos of operas. The highly contrasting treatments of two broadly similar stories show how classical myth can supply the raw ingredients for art which can be served up in different ways according to taste.