Making the pit smoulder with sensuality: Simon Hewett on conducting Salome

Cheryl Barker as Salome

Simon Hewett, conductor of Salome at Arts Centre
Melbourne until 15 December

Allerta!: Salome is often considered the real beginning of Strauss’ career as an opera composer. Could you tell us a little more about that?

Simon Hewett: Salome marks a distinctive break in his style as an operatic composer, and it is in Salome that he first manages to find a way beyond Wagner’s supreme achievements. Here, Strauss’ gifts as an orchestrator are combined with a provocative treatment of the familiar bible story. Rather than superseding Wagner on his own terms, he explodes and collapses the high-blown rhetoric and idealism of Wagnerian music drama. If Wagner’s colossal operas are the red giant suns of the operatic galaxy, Strauss’ Salome, and his next opera, Elektra, are the white dwarf stars: both are under two hours long and played without an interval, and they burn with an almost intolerable intensity. Perhaps even Strauss felt the heat – after Elektra he turned to the gentler genre of comedy for Der Rosenkavalier, and he never returned to the harmonic experimentation of his two one-act operas.

A: Salome is an opera about sexual degradation. How does the music illustrate this theme?

SH: By pitting a precocious hedonist (Salome) against an idealistic zealot (John the Baptist), the story shows us what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object! The extreme personalities of Salome and John the Baptist obliterate each other, leaving the voyeur Herod, and by extension the audience, excited, aroused and revolted by the entire spectacle. Schoenberg famously wrote that the opening bars of Salome defy harmonic analysis, yet the ambience of sensuality is unmistakeable. Salome’s harmonic universe is by turns whimsical and coquettish – even as a child she has the full armoury of a gifted seductress at her disposal. John the Baptist’s music is emphatically tonal, but repetitiveness undermines its apparent strength.

John Wegner as John the Baptist

A: With Salome, Strauss departs from the “number-opera” form to create a through-composed work. Do you have any advice for audience members who might wonder how to enjoy an opera that has no great arias? 

SH: Listen to the orchestral interludes. Not just the Dance of the Seven Veils, but the interlude preceding John the Baptist’s entrance, and the great interlude following Salome’s first confrontation with John the Baptist. Exciting stuff! And read a translation of the libretto, after which you will be astonished at the inventiveness of Strauss’ orchestration. When Salome says that John the Baptist’s long black hair reminds her of a nest of vipers, the huge orchestra roils and writhes in poisonous dissonance. Every bar of Salome bursts with similar examples.

A: What are the other ways in which Strauss’ music speaks to 21^st-century audiences?

SH: Strauss’ sound world is very familiar to us, even if we do not realise it. His imagination created the musical language for many Disney and Warner Bros cartoons: Till Eulenspiegel sounds like cartoon music because the musical style has been so completely and successfully appropriated by the immigrant composers working in America in the 1930s and 40s. Beyond this superficial familiarity, Strauss’ operas speak to us today because he very rarely composed idealistic or heroic music. He often puts human beings who are weak, or trapped by the deeds of an earlier generation (think Elektra) on stage. And he never composed large roles for tenors, typically the heroic voice type. His tenors are weak, vacillating and complicit: Herod and Aegisth. His female protagonists are almost always strong women.

"The extreme personalities of Salome and John the
Baptist obliterate each other"

A: The title role is a big sing. What are the ways in which a conductor supports a singer – Cheryl Barker in this case – in such a role?

SH: By observing the markings in the score as scrupulously as possible, as well as reducing the dynamics of the woodwind and brass at critical moments. And of course by listening closely to Cheryl, supporting her and helping her where she needs it by finding tempi that suit the characteristics and volume of her voice.

A: What are the pitfalls of conducting this work?

SH: It is tempting to conduct the whole work as if it were a great symphonic poem, a form that Strauss had mastered before he turned to opera. But of course the voices are essential to Salome, and while the orchestra must occasionally be “let off the leash” it is essential not to overwhelm the singers, especially in the scenes where the key confrontations occur: Salome vs. Jochanaan, Salome vs. Herod, and the final monologue.

A: What else is in store for you this year?

SH: I take up a new position as Principal Conductor of the Stuttgart Opera, where I will conduct Fledermaus and Tosca this season, then Onegin and Nabucco next year. I will also return to Paris for Mahler’s Third Symphony and I will continue to conduct some ballet in Hamburg with the incomparable John Neumeier.


Salome is showing at Arts Centre Melbourne from 1 December to 5 December. Click here for more information and tickets.