Operatic school for scandal

In Europe, filmmakers have been directing opera for years: Werner Herzog, Werner Schroeter, and Volker Schlöndorff in Germany; Patrice Chéreau in France—the list goes on and on. In the United States, the list is short and saccharine: Franco Zeffirelli is about as far as it goes. It’s less surprising than discouraging: opera in the United States is only rarely a forum for innovation or experimentation, let alone artistic cross-fertilization.

Not so in Toronto. A few years ago, the Canadian Opera Company raised eyebrows with a double bill of Béla Bart foru Bluebeard’s Castle and Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung directed by Robert Lepage. That production and the company have since accumulated accolades and frequent flyer mileage, traveling to the Brooklyn Academy in New York, the Edinburgh Festival, Melbourne, and Hong Kong. So it came as no big surprise when C.O.C. Artistic and Music Director Richard Bradshaw made the deft move of inviting renowned filmmaker Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Family Viewing, The Adjuster) to direct a new production of Richard Strauss’s Salome.

Egoyan does not immediately come to mind as a filmmaker whose work is operatic: while Rainer Werner Fassbinder or David Lynch share Egoyan’s interest in kinkified domestic sadism, their neo-Sirkean, melodramatic aesthetics are more recognizably operatic. Egoyan’s films, on the other hand, have reflected a recurring and far more sober interest in technologies of surveillance. And while those interests don’t make for films that are overtly and immediately operatic, they land Egoyan squarely in the thematic thick of Strauss’s ever-so-scandalous work.

Strauss’s Salome premiered in December 1905, a few years after Max Reinhardt’s famous Berlin staging of Oscar Wilde’s play upon which Strauss based his libretto. Egoyan’s production (co-produced by the C.O.C., Houston Grand Opera, and Vancouver Opera) premiered at the end of September 1996, with Bradshaw conducting. The cast was excellent, featuring the young Russian soprano Ljuba Kazarnovskaya, whose nimble, alternately cowering and glowering presence was complimented by a precise and lovely voice; Simon Estes, making his Canadian debut as Jochanaan (John the Baptist), a role that he has performed with great success in many other countries; David Rampy as an aggressively hysterical Herod; and Jane Gilbert, the excellent Judith in Lepage’s Bluebeard, equally impressive as Herodias. Among the supporting cast, Jon Villars was a menacing and musically ferocious Narraboth, captain of the security detail. Blessed with this young, game, and stellar ensemble of actor-singers, six weeks of rehearsal time, a grant from AT&T Canada to help finance a complex set of video and film projections (created by Phillip Barker), and a group of imaginative, intelligent collaborators (including Catherine Zuber, who designed the costumes, and Michael Whitfield, who did the lighting), Egoyan’s production at Toronto’s ungainly O’Keefe Center was provocative and smart.

The production commenced before the music, with a shadowy figure on a catwalk suspended above the cantilevered stage, shining a flashlight seeking, we might say, to illuminate the work. The gesture is not unfamiliar: Harry Kupfer used a similar opening for his post-Bayreuth production of Wagner’s Siegfried at the Berlin Staatsoper in November 1994. What was unfamiliar here was the sense that Salome needed to be found: for the work, over the course of its ninety-year performance history, has become eminently familiar, serving as a warhorse for a particular and by now particularly reified form of operatic modernism.

Salome, as we have come to know and loathe her, is most often and most predictably seen as a prototypical femme fatale—a spoiled, hysterical psycho. Productions of the work have—for reasons that are inexplicable but not unfamiliar in the world of opera production—sought to illuminate its lurid content with absurd, laughable acting. The nimble and imaginative Teresa Stratas, no slouch when it comes to deadly nymphets (she is perhaps best known for having brought Alban Berg’s Lulu back to life in...