A Dark Operatic Triumph

A film version of a great opera that realises its creators’ intentions better than any staging has ever done, even in the composer’s lifetime? Ridiculous! Inconceivable! Yes, Franco Zeffirelli’s Otello is great film-making, but the director left out Desdemona’s great aria before the murder because it held up the action; that’s film for you. These objections to the great Franco are worth discussing in the light of the extensive film records that now exist of his stage productions.

In this case the opera is Richard Strauss’s Salome, and the film is the 1974 German television production directed by Götz Friedrich. What is more, the opinion that Strauss’s vision had been realised was that of Karl Böhm, who knew the composer well, and was in the form of a compliment to Teresa Stratas, who played Salome. The legend of this opera film has been around since it was first made and transmitted. It was highly praised by the German critics and some American writers, but for years the film was impossible to see in the medium for which it was intended—television. Now at last Unitel and Deutsche Grammophon have released Salome on DVD with the sound enhanced beyond anything that could be transmitted in the 1970s. This is an extraordinary enrichment because the orchestra used for the film was the Vienna Philharmonic at the time Leonard Bernstein was cajoling them into creating his great Mahler interpretations; and of course the conductor was Karl Böhm.

Salome began life as an intense play in French by Oscar Wilde. It was originally to be included in Sarah Bernhardt’s 1892 season in London, but was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain because at the time it was illegal to depict biblical characters on stage. It was first produced in Paris by Bernhardt in 1896 when Wilde was in jail. The play was translated into German by Hedwig Lachmann and produced by Max Reinhardt. Richard Strauss saw it in 1902 at Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater in Berlin and decided not to go back to the original French but to use the Lachmann translation as the basis for his libretto. Reading the play, it is easy to see why Strauss believed it would make such good material. As Wilde observed, the play’s structure is musical, containing “refrains whose recurring motifs bind it together like a ballad”.

From the outset there were performance problems. The first Salome, Marie Wittich, refused to perform the “Dance of the Seven Veils” and a dancer was substituted. Given the vocal demands of the role and the statuesque physique of the singers of the era this was often the most tactful solution. Reportedly Dame Joan Hammond reduced an audience in New Zealand to suppressed laughter when she courageously tried to both sing the role and perform the dance. Knowing Dame Joan—one of the great singing actresses—there is little doubt she would have been electrifying in the rest of the performance. And then there were the censors. Not even Gustav Mahler could get the Vienna censor to allow the opera to be performed, and to Sir Thomas Beecham’s annoyance the 1910 Covent Garden performance was “modified”.

Salome is of course intensely erotic—how could it not be? A virgin, Salome, lusted after by her stepfather, Herod, who is incestuously married to her mother, Herodias, desires John the Baptist (named Jochanaan in the opera). Rejected by the prophet, she dances before Herod so she can demand the head of Jochanaan. Strauss’s music is some of the most refinedly sexual ever written.

On stage the opera, lasting for little more than ninety minutes, can have an overwhelming impact. But its extraordinarily difficult demands on performers can result in ignominious failure. Clearly the 1974 television production was intended to avoid the staging problems and to be definitive. They had Karl Böhm, but what about Salome? So often the singers who could do justice to the score had to use all their acting ability to create an illusion of youth and beauty. Birgit Nilsson, Marjorie Lawrence and Joan Hammond were handsome women who could dominate a stage with ease, but physically they had difficulty impersonating a virginal seductress. In 1974 Teresa Stratas—the baby Callas (she is only five feet tall)—was at the peak of her beauty, in good voice and a superb actress. Her high lyric soprano might not work on stage in Salome, but was very effective in a recording studio supported by artists such as Hans Beirer, a wonderfully effete Herod, Astrid Varnay, splendidly decayed as Herodias, and Bernd Weikl, an imposing Jochanaan.

Even though in 1974 Friedrich was a famous opera director noted for his Marxist (but emphatically not communist) interpretations of Wagner, there is not a trace of a stage grouping in sight. Performers, especially Stratas, are isolated in the frame. There are beautifully timed reaction shots; the mobile camera follows Salome’s serpentine movements as she crawls around the set. Two- and three-shots are tightly framed; an over-shoulder set-up lets us see the moon. The singing is not lip-synched but sung again to the playback, restoring some of the immediacy of live performance. As a result the viewer is virtually compelled to concentrate on the drama, the words and, above all, the music. For those needing subtitles, as I did, there is a bonus. Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas translated the French of the original into English and it is this version that seems to have been employed for the titles.

The dance is easier to execute on film than in the theatre, but Stratas had considerable grace and in choreographer Robert Cohan’s hands all the sinister eroticism of the music is visualised. There is a hint of a bare shoulder, then a face beneath the veils, culminating in a close-up as Salome unpins her hair. Up until then Stratas has worn a jewelled cap, giving her a petulantly childlike appearance. Now Salome has become a terrible woman. As the film was made for television she does not lie naked at Herod’s feet, but the implied sexuality is still very disturbing. For the appalling final aria, only at times it seems does Friedrich have Stratas sing to a model of Jochanaan’s head; mostly on screen it is an ambiguously photographed Bernd Weikl. Together with Stratas’s superlative vocal acting, this brings alive all the shifts in Wilde’s text and Strauss’s score—the anger, the passion and the remorse.

The great strength of Friedrich’s film is that it is supremely an interpretation—an achievement that is even more important now, given the excesses of so many modern directors.