Teenage kicks
Robin Holloway
Curious to see how the old whore (103 this year) is faring, I tuned in eagerly to Radio Three’s broadcast of a concert performance of Salome (13 February) — the live event already reviewed appreciatively here by my opera colleague.
Utterly besotted in early teens with this ultimate product of French/Anglo–Irish/ Bavarian decadence, I have over the decades ‘put away’ pubescent thrills, not out of puritanism so much as in pursuit of more solid joys and lasting pleasures. The glamour wears thin, the precious transmutes to base; and the shock value sharply diminishes. The erotic attraction/repulsion, the provocative striptease, the necrophiliac climax, all sumptuously served up with pomegranates and sequins, no longer have the primal allure they exerted in 1905, or when one was 14. The shock nowadays (pace the jejune remarks in the prebroadcast introduction) is the cheap vulgarity of music that purports to deal with such flammable subject matter; till one perceives that this too, as treated thus, is just as cheap and vulgar, making a perfect match.
True of much — indeed, most — of the music, fiction and poetry, painting so supercharged to the teenager, this sad, inevitable journey into indifference, boredom, dislike, even detestation. Will one ever again rise to The Planets, Belshazzar’s Feast, Turangalîla — works of once-ravishing overkill that now induce little more than a groan? D.H. Lawrence, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler! To value and enjoy such work after one has ‘become a man’ is to reject dross, rant, bombast, excess, spiritual showmanship and conspicuous waste, to locate and concentrate what remains living, intrinsic, essential — Lawrence’s stories, Mahler’s songs, the oases of authentic genius amid the slag of the full-length novels and symphonies. Chez Klimt and Munch I fear that nothing survives beyond a scattering of mosaic across a bilious neurotic cloudscape.
Will the same be true for Salome? What is left when the fabulous surface is exploded?
First and last, the orchestra. Even Klimt pales in proximity to the effortless virtuosity, unstinting lavishness, prodigality of colour, in this tour de force of art-nouveau decoration. In the theatre confined to the pit, the sound is liberated on the concert stage to expand in all its powerful, proliferating detail. I’ve never before heard so much that the eye sees, following the score — the glare and dazzle Fauré, reviewing an early Paris production, found as exhausting to the visual as to the aural sense. Under Gianandrea Noseda the BBC Phil gave its all: whether minimal — like the celebrated passage for solo double-bass pinching on a single excruciating repeated high note while the heroine, and all Herod’s court, await the executioner’s bloody upshot — or, more frequent, maximal, as in the score’s greatest passage, the exclamatory ecstasy shortly after, when the Baptist’s severed head is at last in her possession.
It’s difficult for such moments to fail. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a different matter. Here the balance of inspiration and routine, charged ardour and weary kitsch, is perilous. The Dance’s reputation has been dubious from the start, since it became known that Strauss left its composition till last, and threw it off in haste. Even the most convinced admirers of Salome’s body often dismiss her Dance with regretful contempt. I’ve always seen/heard it to be exactly the right thing: doing a specific job with high precision; and providing moreover in its broad phrasing and explicit tunefulness a welcome respite from the breathlessness of its surroundings, which till the equally needed slowing-down for the closing scene rush past, hallucinatory and telegrammatic, as hard to catch as to espy a moving tiger amid its natural camouflage. Under Noseda there was no problem: he ensured the Dance’s consistency with its total context, paced the entirety around its crucial wordless action, and threw taste to the winds by sheer musicianship.
Singing was variable. The heroine of my schoolboy LP was so unmemorable that I’ve forgotten her name: the Salome of the broadcast, though she can be named (Nicola Beller Carbone), was just as colourless (and suffered a longish stretch of misalignment in the final scene). I missed the ‘16-yearold’ quality — the girlish vocal caresses, the light gliding touch, the minx, the coquette, the paradoxical innocence of this wholly knowing creature — equally with ‘the Isolde voice’ able to surmount the surging tumescence of the huge climactic moments (these stipulations for the role are Strauss’s own). But the Herod of Peter Bronder was magnificent, fully a match for unforgotten/ unforgettable Julius Patzak of yore: praise can go no higher.
Other singers, all cameo-parts save for the Baptist himself, were OK. But, last as first, the glory was in the orchestra. Here Salome survives, and quells reservation. Her shock value is passé, her pretensions to spiritual and psychological depth risible: but one will never get to the bottom of this amazing tissue of animally-living sonority. It is so paramount and overwhelming as to drown out shallowness of content in every other parameter. It is itself the content, redeeming threadbare patchwork into rich cloth of purple and scarlet; transmuting paste into emerald and sapphire; forging base lead into real silver and gold.
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