Artists on Stage
Salvador Dali,
Strauss’s Salomé
published in the June 2003 edition of the BBC Music Magazine
Talk about ‘over the top’...
Picture the occasion: it is 1949, there is still rationing in Great Britain and London seems to have more wasteland and rubble than architecture. The director of productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is a young man in only his early twenties, appointed the year before, one Peter Brook, astonishingly young for that post, if older than many Spitfire pilots. A mood of new energy is needed to haul us from the dark and he of all people was there to enflame it.
So, he asks Salvador Dali, notorious even then in little England for pretentiously creepy pictures, to imagine the setting for Salomé, a play banned till 1918, here in its operatic incarnation by a master of the insinuously creepy, Richard Strauss.
It was a brilliant instance of risky but judicious casting, blending two masters of obsession, Strauss with his perennial ironic fascination with fixation and Dali with his sense that painting could be a psychoanalytic tool, both working on the unsalubrious far side of the edge of taste, in the common context of sheer sexual relish.
And what unlikely characters, Strauss seemingly somewhat proper and tweedy, moved to lament war more by the destruction of opera houses than people, and Dali, now notorious for having found heterosexual sex ‘overrated’ and sex with Federico Garcia Lorca ‘very painful’, a man with a deep fear of being touched at all. Add to this the director, the son of a Latvian-born laxative inventor, now a fast-rising prodigy, by his own admission ‘determined to astonish’ — as he had done, aged seven, by staging Hamlet for his family, taking all the roles and billing it in the notes he kept at the time as being ‘by P Brook and W Shakespeare’... Strong meat. Incidentally, the late Michael Northern, credited with the earlist use of a model whereby to calculate lighting effects, was the lighting designer.
It is part of the salacious mischief of Dali’s conception that it consisted of what one writer described as ‘eccentric, Alice in Wonderland-like designs’. Alice in Wonderland, good heavens! These were said to upstage Strauss’s music - an unlikely charge, given that the Salome was Ljuba Welitsch, at the height of her power in the greatest role of her pitifully short, exhausted career. Commenting on why she never tackled Wagner, she had said, "I am not a German peasant, I’m a sexy Bulgarian" and this role — for which Strauss himself had coached her — allowed her to revel in an ideal opportunity to juxtapose eroticism and girlishness, depravity and charm. These were the vital qualities of what was an extraordinary voice coupled with that explicitness of sexuality first seen on the operatic stage with Maria Jeritza before the war. She recorded the final scene with Reiner in 1950 and, incidentally, can be glimpsed in scenes set in the Berlin Staatsoper during rehearsals for a production of this very opera, in a collector’s curio, the 1953 film The Man Between, directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason, Claire Bloom and Ernst Schroeder.
She had sung the role at Covent Garden two years earlier, but that was in a visit by the Vienna State Opera. Now was different. Even that odd daintiness of the Beardsley drawings is nowhere to be sensed in this sweeping, detailed setting. In the last scene for Dali and Brooke, she was slowly covered over by a sort of green ooze of bile that came from the head of John the Baptist, an effect of luxuriant disgust which we can imagine without too much difficulty, bearing in mind others of Dali’s images. Dali stories are plentiful and his well cultivated self-promotion was as skillful as his fastidious visual gifts — André Breton, a surrealist disappointed by the betrayal inherent in Dali’s descent into commercialism, coined from his name the anagram Avida Dollars — yet the man who had explained how Jesus Christ is a cheese (or to be more precise, a Camembert) and whose taste for sexual voyeurism had gone so far as to have a Hollywood legend undress and wriggle through a rubber tube for him, was surely the man for Salomé.
Peter Brook lost his job after this example of wickedly apt casting, which may say a lot about both Covent Garden and the way things were then. Not only then, I hear you say? This is a production still talked of in wonder and frustration by those who never saw it but we have some chance to decide for ourselves, albeit now that shock is yawn and Welitsch is gone, since for the Dali centenary next year the Festival Castell de Peralada hopes to restage this Salomé that made heads turn — and roll.