Decadence... on a plate

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MOTHER WARNED US about girls like Salome, and mother was hardly the first; at least as far back as the gospel of Saint Mark, Salome was a literary touchstone for heedless sexual allure. The gospel does not actually identify her, but suggests that the stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas - like the royal stepfather she wantonly manipulates - embodies the moral decay that Christ was sent to redeem.

Bad girls just don't get any badder, and we know it long before the curtain goes up. Any lingering doubts are dispelled with the opera's opening bars, as the notes of a solo clarinet slither up the staff against a backdrop of shimmeringly iridescent chords. The music tells us what's coming. So how does Salome manage to shock us every time she takes the stage?

After many previous settings, Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salome - the basis of Strauss' libretto - finally brought together, in 1894, the dramatic elements that make Salome as irresistibly evil as cherry cheesecake to modern audiences. There's her kittenish sensuality; her obsessive sexual curiosity and inexperience (yes, she is a virgin as the opera opens); a dance that has all the archetypal elements of a strip tease; and a bout of lovemaking with John the Baptist's severed head. After witnessing Salome's necrophilic kiss, Strauss' Herod calls her "Weib," a wife. It's all he can do to choke out the order to kill her.

Wilde was already notorious when his witty, decadent Salome was published, first in French and then in an English edition. Promptly barred from performance in England, it was produced in Paris in 1896 when its author was in jail.

Strauss, by contrast, was utterly respectable and composed with the professional regularity of a dentist; biographers suggest he was unhappy with the critical yawns that greeted his first two operas and was itching to provoke.

And provoke he did - commissioning a German libretto based closely on Wilde's Salome and fashioning a superlatively crafted, harmonically daring opera. German critics condemned the score as cacophonous and undisciplined, with unhinged post-romantic harmonies to go with its irredeemable depravity. Audiences loved it.

Condensed for the operatic stage, Strauss' Salome gains intensity and a shift in emphasis from Herod to his stepdaughter. In addition to her soaring declamations of longing and fulfillment, Salome performs a nine-minute dance that resolves the opera's motifs in an intoxicating symphony of sex as she disrobes. "I won't do it," insisted soprano Marie Wittich while rehearsing in the first Dresden cast. "I'm a decent woman." And thus began a sometime tradition of doubling the role of Salome with a ballerina to perform her dance.

Salome quickly made its way across the Atlantic for the Metropolitan Opera's 1906-07 season. After a single performance with Olive Fremstad in the title role, The New York Times ran an article under the headline "Take Off 'Salome,' Say Opera House Directors." The Times reported that "this action...was directly due to a daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan," a director of the house, who was outraged by the work.

Withdrawn from the Met repertoire, Salome did not return until Eisenhower's second term in the White House. But the sensation was seized upon by management of Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House, which hired the charismatic diva Mary Garden for its own production. An ecstatic preview from Paris appeared in the Times on October 25, 1908. "Nothing more thrilling than Miss Garden's rendition of the dance has been seen recently on the lyric stage," says the breathless, unnamed writer.

Mary Garden was early in a long line of sopranos who have triumphed in projecting Salome's delicious decadence to the back of the house, and now on screen. The interpretations vary in every respect but sheer strenuousness: Birgit Nilsson, neither dancer nor sex kitten, combined supreme vocal authority with smoldering intensity; Ljuba Welitsch and Grace Bumbry were sultry seducers.

Recently, some Salomes raised the emotional stakes by shunning the traditional body stocking and emerging nude from the dance - among them the feline, adolescent version of Maria Ewing and the precociously womanly Salome of Karita Mattila.

Mattila's Salome uses her body to keep Herod enthralled. But it is her remarkably nuanced characterization that rivets screen viewers, as we watch her watching the world through the filter of her sex-obsessed monomania.

Pictures courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera