From time to time over the past few months I’ve posted a few screeds lambasting opera as naught but foolishness, second-rate entertainment aimed at the lowest common denominator, musical twaddle, and the like.
I take it all back. I retract the whole enchilada. I disavow my former ramblings, mutterings, and fulminations.
The reason: Strauss’s “Salome” at the SF Opera. Thrilling, gripping, sexy, musically evocative, passionate. Performed to a ‘T’ and played to the max. Sheesh, what a show — and what a stunning demonstration of opera’s potential. Certainly “Salome” began its existence as a scandal-piece designed explicitly to titillate Belle Epoque continentals. By now, it has come to carry all the horrendous integrity of a Greek tragedy, shining a searchlight into those nasty little corners of the human psyche and laying bare the sickening consequences of giving our worst instincts full rein.
But doing so with such control, meticulous structure, and exquisitely balanced emotional temperatures — that’s something you don’t encounter every day. Ditto the performance itself, which removed any lingering vestiges of fin du siècle vaporings and gave the thing just precisely the gritty splendor it needs. I don’t usually care for modernist resettings, but in this case, they frigging nailed it.
Wow, wow, and double-wow.