Salome
by Jason Haswell
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Joseph Kaiser, Michael Volle, Michaela Schuster, Nadja Michael, Thomas MoserDirector: Jason Haswell
Conductor: Philippe Jordan
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: German (Original Language), DTS 5.1; English (Unknown); German (Unknown), DTS 5.1; French (Unknown); Italian (Unknown); Spanish (Unknown); Dutch (Subtitled); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Italian (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Classical, Color, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.77:1
Running Time: 169 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-10-28
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: BBC / Opus Arte
Movie Reviews of Salome
Movie Review: Incestuous Salome
Summary: 5 Stars
Strauss's Salome is a purified vision of Wilde's. Strauss in 1915 reduced the depicting of the Jews to maybe appear less antisemite than the original and close that episode on a positive vision of Jesus. But Strauss also eliminated in the first scene the discussion of the soldiers about the cistern and the fate of Salome's mother's first husband, Herod's brother and though unmentioned Salome's father. By doing so Strauss moves to a purer structure more contained in itself and owes less to Salome's past. We all know about the relationship between Herod and Salome and it becomes an ellipse here. But Wilde deemed it necessary to specify these details and particularly the horror of that death, Salome's father kept twelve years in this cistern and strangled at the end. Wilde was thus differentiating Salome from Hamlet, which Strauss does not need to do since he speaks to a German audience. Apart from that Strauss is faithful to the play. His music is a tremendous enriching medium added to the text and Strauss systematically uses all his art to multiply the rhythm of the text and the symbolism of that rhythm basically constructed by Wilde around a ternary structure that could sound Christian, but is extended to four (the crucifixion), to five (some diabolic vision), to six (Salomon's number) and to nine (the very symbol of the devilish beast). The famous kissing scene at the very end is entirely built on such rhythms in the text directly borrowed from Wilde and amplified by the music that adds some extra similar variations. For Wilde it meant they are all the same, put all the moralists in one bag and drown them. They are the devil, including John the Baptist. In Strauss we can be divided as for interpreting that heavy reference to the devil as the step beyond Solomon's number, beyond the Jewish reference and the Christian presence. That's where David McVicar, the stage director of the Covent Garden 2008 production, is essential. He explains in the DVD's bonuses he visually referred to Pasolini's adaptation of de Sade's Salo and that it meant he placed his production of Salome in 1938 and the very core of the tale was the problem of alliances with the worst criminals to save one's privileges. McVicar alludes there to Munich. First we may find it anachronistic for both Wilde and Strauss who lived and produced their play and opera a long time before 1938. But it may be justified since we can see in Wilde's play a metaphor of what he thinks the world is leading to: a severe catastrophe because of the total inhumanity of its ethics. But yet it is anachronistic. But why have anything against it after all? Does it bring anything new or a supplementary layer of meaning? Some elements do, some don't. His vertical vision with the banquet upstairs and the turning of the terrace into a cellar with the servants and the guards, and deeper still underground the cistern or prison with John the Baptist is a good idea because the voice of the prophet comes from deep under and travels even higher, to the higher strata of society his prediction menaces directly: they are Babylon. It thus reinforces the discourse about this apocalypse that will come after the Son of Man has been sacrificed. On the other hand the presence of two nude women down in the cellar adds nothing though to the meaning and is a purely gratuitous allusion to Pasolini's Salo. On the other hand the fact that the executioner will go down into the cistern to behead John the Baptist in complete nudity is justified by the fact he comes back covered with blood and the fact that he will kill Salome at the end in a sexual embrace that reminds us of the sexual embrace Salome gratified him when he came with the head. For Salome her sexual appeal to John is in fact a sexual appeal to death. To die is to have sex with life in a way. Yet it reduces Wilde's discourse slightly for whom having John killed is the utter unbalancing vengeance human society is based on and leads to insanity and the apocalypse. Here the death of John is nothing else but the satisfaction of sexual lust, though it is partly that in Wilde, and it must be admitted the soprano Nadja Michael is absolutely superb in that rendering. But then her insanity comes from her mixing up death and life, and there, in spite of Strauss erasing it, the insanity can be seen as the mixing up of her dead father and John the Baptist, hence her desire for John the Baptist becomes incestuous, hence she has to have the object of her incestuous desire killed to purify herself, and her father her desire has soiled, but then it tricks her into loving a dead object, a dead mouth, and we come back to the kiss that is both to love and to death. That nudity adds something that would have been in phase with Wilde's original play (though the reference to Salome's father's fate is done without Salome being present, but we may think it makes the opera more complex than Strauss may have thought it. Strauss got something out of the play by the main door of cutting it off and McVicar brings it back in through the skylight of his stage direction. This version of the opera is superb but the meaning is made slightly too rich for the text: after all she is in love with, at first eyes, a body and a voice, and then with a body, hair and a mouth. From a rather abstract trinity to a deeply sensual trinity. There is no real mention of any incestuous dimension, in the opera, though McVicar brings it in with beauty and great art.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
Summary of Salome
Even though Strauss's operatic setting of the tale of Salome is over a century old, it still has the power to shock as well as enthrall. On stage the story has provoked scandal - violence and nudity are inevitably part of its nature. Inspired by the potent combination of themes, David McVicar returns to explore the psychology of its hypnotically degenerate central character. Nadja Michael performs the demanding role of Salome, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under the baton of Philippe Jordan bring their dazzling orchestral virtuosity to the sutnning showipece score.Art House & International DVD Video
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