I went to see Salome at the Paris Opera on Thursday. It was a pretty good show. The production was adequate - the set was stark and beautiful, at once a modern interpretation with clean lines and still fully timeless, with a backlit set that could just as well have been 2000 years ago as today. The Dance of Seven Veils was, as usual, rather embarrassing to all involved. My companion points out, this lady is here because she has a great voice, not because she knows how to move. Why not put her amongst the ballet corps? She could sort of stand in place and wave her arms a bit while the dancers did what they’re good at. A good Bob Fosse-style number would work. Heck, you could probably insert the choreography directly from the video of Cold-Hearted Snake, complete with the scaffolding and it’d be perfect!

Anyway, the Paris Opera also has some weird defect by which they don’t seem to notice that some of their exceedingly strange characterizations border on offensive. I wrote about the midget-dance in Cardillac last year; this time it was the rabbis. There was something weird about the costuming to start with: the Romans guards were wandering around in period dress except the ones who had clearly wandered in from the set of Aida, Salome in a seventies-disco gown, and King Herod in, well, he looked just like Henry the Eighth. John the Baptist was dressed in period clothing, as were the couple of Jews (”The Nazarenes,” they are apparently called) who sing beatifically about Jesus. And then the rabbis, who looked like a group of Jews from the 13th century. There’s not much you can do about Strauss’s politics in casting in the rabbis as a bunch of squabblers - stereotypically Nietzschean Semites who toss about thinking rather than acting. But you can buy into physical stereotype a little bit less. You don’t have to give them all black, curly wigs. You don’t have to give them the wide-brimmed hats that medieval Christians made Jews wear. They probably ought to have been wearing priestly garb if they were priests, and if they weren’t they really shouldn’t have looked any different than the Nazarenes.

I would have also liked to see a bit more madness out of Salome. She played a timid teenager well, and a reasonable seductress, but the last scene, maybe the director could have given her a bit more to do? Something a little bit more deserving of King Herod’s devastating finale? I agree with the Le Monde review that Camilla Nylund was a little weak for the title role, but I actually thought that by the end, she was projecting perfectly well. Maybe she got fully warmed-up, or maybe she was saving herself for the rather serious work she has in the last few scenes, but in any event, first impressions are tough to break and we could barely hear her first few lines. But she also has her work cut for her, in fact everyone does - the orchestration is good and thick and rich, and hard to cut through. Really, the only leads I heard regularly were Herod’s wife Herodias, and Jokanaan (Saint John the Baptist). What I really want to write about is the scoring for Jokanaan. The review in Le Monde says Vincent Le Texier sang “pâteusement,” a good French-English dictionary word that means “mushily.” (The root is, now that I think about it, pâte - paste.) I didn’t find that particularly, but then, my ear was elsewhere, focusing on the extraordinary clarity of the orchestral writing beneath his lines. Strauss does this perfectly. He wants Jokanaan to be the musical center of an otherwise totally-nutso opera. Everyone is unstable or worse except Jokanaan, and their music swirls and swirls and gets muddy and foggy and all the other words you can use to describe messiness and lack of clarity. It gets in the way! It is their, can I say subconscious? Everything that’s wrong with them - a petty, directionless tyrant with an eye for pretty young things; his wife who was his brother’s wife; their precociously beautiful teenage daughter learning to use her beauty to get attention but at the same time freaked out by how dad totally wants to get with her; even Narraboth who’s so into Salome that he, as an aside, sees it fit to stab himself when she starts seducing Jokanaan… But Jokanaan has it all figured out. He’s nuts in his own way, he’s a prophet after all, but in Strauss’s opinion, he’s a prophet for the right guy. And he has the courage of his (possibly loony) convictions.

So Jokanaan’s music is clear. It’s mostly well-spaced brass chorales (one could say that the musical allusions to Jesus get a little over-the-top, but that’s basic scoring even when he’s not talking about Jesus) that leave the center completely clear for Jokanaan’s mellifluous baritone. One of the important things in writing for voice and orchestra - or solo instrument and orchestra - is to leave the soloist’s range relatively empty so that he or she can cut through the 100 people playing busily behind. The effect can be like bursting sunlight when done right. When done wrong, the soloist is lost and has to work terribly hard to be heard at all. Salome often has to contend with syrupy violins playing in exactly her prime register. Jokanaan never has such trouble. This is the sort of thing that made Salome, despite the numerous flaws, my best opera-going experience so far with the exception of Don Giovanni. Hoorah for Richard Strauss!

Let us now praise standing room tickets at the Bastille Opera House. For five bucks, you can get standing room tickets (if you get there in time, you do need to get to the box office a few hours early), but unlike at the Met, they are not desperate to make you feel like second class citizens. So if there are, and there always are this is the opera, scads of empty seats in orchestra seating, in go the standing-roomers. So you get two row 22 seats for 10 euros. Not bad, eh?!

Also, Meg Z (who wouldn’t want to be called the Z if given the chance?) describes a much more, umm, exciting production in 2006.