Southern opera festival marred by massacre of Strauss
Charleston is a whizz of a town. This is my third visit for the annual Spoleto Festival. I stay in the old French Quarter, a delightful mishmash of narrow, rickety streets with uneven sidewalks. At night gas lamps flicker. Each crowding house is different, many with stories to tell, dating back to the city’s founding in 1679.
It played a pivotal part in the Revolutionary War. South Carolina was the first state to secede in December 1860, provoking the Civil War. The attack on Union-held Fort Sumter in the Bay was the first military clash. There are churches of all denominations spattered about, reflecting the complex social system of the South.
Slavery is not swept under the carpet. The former slave market has not been airbrushed from history. Nor has the support for the Confederacy. The Daughters of the Confederacy can still be found in their City Market HQ.
Along The Battery looking out over Fort Sumter is a pell-mell of elegant southern homes, as understated as Manhattan 19th century mansions are brash. Their breeze-through architecture with balconies facing windward may have helped counter the southern climate. I’m not sure. It topped 100 F during my visit and a searing sun beat into the face, reflected from sidewalk flagstones.
The Spoleto Festival was originally twinned with the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) in Spoleto, Italy in 1977. American/Italian Composer Gian Carlo Menotti, a native of Spoleto, was the founder. It hosts around 150 events spanning opera, classical music, dance, theatre and jazz. Outdoor gatherings and picnics add to the festival atmosphere.
I was hooked after my first visit in 2017. I stay in a boutique “Art” hotel in the French Quarter, The Vendue. On my first trip in the airport cab I asked to be taken to the Vongdu. After a puzzled exchange I pointed to the booking on the Booking.com app. “Oh, the Vendoooooo. Why didn’t you say so?” Welcome to the South.
A regular feature is Bank of America Chamber Music, housed in The Dock Street Theater. Which isn’t in Dock Street. It’s in Church Street. Dock Street is now Queen Street. But, as it was the first theatre built in America (1738) they have hung onto the name for dear life. It was rebuilt after fire and earthquake, moved and eventually landed in the abandoned Planters’ Hotel in 1935.
The mid morning concert is presided over by Geoff Nuttall, an anarchic musical life force. A rangy six foot five inches, he engages the audience with a mix of traditional and cutting edge repertoire. Imagine Russ Abbott (those of you who can) at his most demented, pacing the stage, engaging players and recounting anecdotes. That’s Geoff.
There are eleven different programmes and, if I could, I would stay for them all. Mr. Nuttall is a Baroque big cheese and calls in favours from new and established talent, composers and performers, from across the US. My highlight was Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy played by Japanese/Canadian violinist virtuoso Karen Gomyo. The piece was written by Sarasate to show off his own virtuosity.
It seemed that Ms. Gomyo was playing three instruments as one, as she mastered the fast-running Carmen arrangements. Showpieces can sometimes sound like… showpieces. Ms. Gomya’s effortless execution – well, it seemed effortless, which is the trick – transformed it into a spell binding work of art in its own right.
Charleston is a great walking city – and where better to walk than to Santiago de Compostela? Via The Path of Miracles, music by British composer Joby Talbot, best known for his acappella works.
Path of Miracles was written in 2005 and tells the story of the pilgrims who make the trek to northern Spain to venerate the bones of St James in the 11th century cathedral. Or, for agnostics, to lose a few pounds.
The work is most commonly performed in oratorio form, as apart from telling the story of St James, there’s not a lot going on, except… walking.
This staged version was simple, moving and mesmerising. The singers entered down both aisles from the rear of the auditorium and the audience was immediately immersed in haunting incantations. Each told a different story to explain their journey. The different melodic strands woven together were hypnotic as the singers threaded back and forth onstage on their individual pilgrimages.
The objective is to illustrate how heaven and earth can be brought into proximity – drawing on the old Celtic myth that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in “thin places” even closer. I felt I had been in a thin place.
Good news! The Santiago pilgrimage was on my bucket list. Now I’ve done it! Those pristine Brasher Country Master Walking boots, bought years ago, can be dusted down – and sold on ebay. Hooray! I’ve been already. And in 100F.
Spoleto USA bubbles with innovation. The people who run it are informative and courteous. The festival organisers make a huge effort to transform the town for the influx. There is much to see and listen to that is top notch. So, I shall be as charitable as possible about their centre-piece opera this season, Richard Strauss’ Salome.
It was an abomination. Mangled beyond recognition by directors, Belgian Moshe Leiser and French Patrice Caurier. They are a couple who have worked long and internationally on their passion, bastardising perfectly good operas, since 1983. Regietheater terrorists.
Their previous form at Spoleto is a version of Salome mounted in 1987, set in Nazi Germany. This time they headed to a rooftop in Herod’s place; place – palace. It’s a funny play on words. Oh, forget it.
They always specialise in knowing better than the original composer and librettist, turning acknowledged works of genius into puzzling allegories that indulge their own rather predictable prejudices.
Mr. Leiser; “It’s very strange that Jokanaan (John the Baptist) condemns the women”. No it’s not. Herodias is a scheming harpie who divorced her husband to marry his brother and Salome is a sex-crazed bimbette who demands unwilling suitors’ heads on plates. Kindly advice. If you can’t stomach staging operas about evil women, best leave Salome well alone.
Mr. Leiser again: “The 2019 production is set in the present moment. We had no interest in depicting the ancient world of Rome and Palestine”. It was set on a rooftop bar as a ghastly loadsamoney party, complete with pounding music downstairs and velvet roped entrance barriers, behind which Jokanaan was being inexplicably detained by a couple of bald headed bouncers in DJ’s wearing shades. Perhaps he was in a broom cupboard?
Unfortunately for Messrs. Leisher and Caurier, Richard Strauss and his librettist Hedwig Lachmann’s consuming interest was the Roman – Palestinian setting. That was the whole point. Their attention was drawn by Oscar Wilde’s French play, Salomé. The setting was chosen as it portrays the tensions of the region in Biblical times (plus ça change) and reflects them in Salome’s unquenchable lust for Jokanaan. This story has no place outside its Biblical context.
As we all recall, it ended badly, Salome dancing the Seven Veils for her randy Tetrarch stepfather and demanding fulfillment of her wish, that Jokanaan’s severed head be brought to her on a silver salver so she might, at last, implant a kiss upon his lips. That’ll teach him.
Why was the production so ridiculous? Here’s a few petty gripes. The curtain rose to the Queen anthem, Another One Bites the Dust – only they couldn’t afford the Queen version and used a crappy cover instead. This music is terrific, but hardly a Strauss overture. First fluffed joke.
Salome appeared as an Olivia Newton John lookalike, wearing a spangly, long, white Prom dress. She didn’t perform The Dance of the Seven Veils, more a World Wrestling Federation Dance of the Seven Gropes, no holds barred. She tangled awkwardly with Herod, eventually having thrusting sex against a pillar as the Tetrarch pulled his pants down. Very alluring.
For all the modern setting, Jokanaan’s lair, which descended as a sort of Yotel capsule hotel room from the flies, boasted a crucifix and a Renaissance print of Christ and his disciples on the wall. So much for the secular production.
In the climactic final scene Salome was presented with a bloodstained clootie dumpling (Scottish version of a suet pudding boiled in an old cloth. Delicious. Insist on the version with syrup and sultanas) on a trencher. Not a head at all.
Or, was it? Perhaps the head was in the cloot? Why? Good taste? Hardly. Earlier, Salome had been obliged to bare her bosom in the Jokanaan failed seduction scene on the Yotel bed.
Suddenly squeamish? No, it was because it wasn’t Jokanaan’s head at all! Geddit? It was a clever metaphor for Jokanaan’s head. Surprise! In the final moments he popped out from the broom cupboard and loomed awkwardly – and inexplicably. This twist was not even hinted at in the programme notes.
An understandably shocked Salome removed the cloot from the dumpling. The head whose lips she had kissed is revealed. It’s that of her spurned suitor Narraboth, (commits suicide earlier, having failed to win over Salome), and it bounces gracelessly across the stage.
This was a plot-mangler beyond belief, totally undermining the driving narrative of the opera. A Salome without Jokanaan’s head is like a Donald Trump flight to London without a Sadiq Khan tweet. Unthinkable.
Pause for an impromptu Scottish aria, “Ne’er cast a cloot ‘til Jokanaan’s oot”. Well, nothing would have surprised me now. The party of five ladies in the row in front – on a Daughters of the Confederacy night out from Savannah – who had visibly winced at the eyeful of Salome’s pert bosom in the Jokanaan seduction attempt – spontaneously combusted into giggles as his head veered towards the orchestra pit. The Salome story ain’t about provoking giggles.
I’ve seen many productions of Salome. That moment is marked by a notorious, sickening, polytonal chord – the most spine tingling in all opera, some say – spanning low A7 (a dominant seventh chord) merged with a higher F-sharp major chord. “It forms part of a cadence in the key of C-sharp major and is approached and resolved from C–sharp major chords,” advises the programme. To you and me it sounds like nothing on earth and should leave audiences dumbstruck. Not in the hands of Messrs Leiser and Caurier. Reduced to unforgiveable farce.
What else? The singing was vapid. Salome, soprano Melanie Henley Heyn, proved way out of her depth, her voice failing to make an impact. The Prom outfit didn’t help either. Final ignominy, she was not dramatically crushed to death by disgusted Herod’s guards, but unceremoniously tipped off the roof.
Paul Groves, Herod, had a fine tenor voice and did his best in the circumstances. Jokanaan, Erik Van Heyningen, an excellent bass baritone, persevered in his Yotel bedroom. But, as he sang of wasting away to skin and bone in his cruel cell we were confronted with the reality of his muscular, bared torso revealing him to be built like a brick ***t-house.
Steven Sloane is an American conductor with wide experience, but was incapable of making Strauss’ edgy score keep the audience on tenterhooks. That’s what this music is meant to do, clashing harmonics, mighty chords, slicing rhythms. Occasional lyrical leitmotifs give away suddenly to jarring chords. Instead, it sounded characterless. Not what Strauss intended at all.
Message to Spoleto mission control. Don’t reach beyond your capabilities – and, puleeese, chase these fakirs Leiser and Caurier off the reservation. They, at least, achieved their objective for Salome. They destroyed it.