Spoiler alert: For anyone expecting a dance — nude or otherwise — in Salome, there isn’t one. At least, not in Gerald Barry’s humorous opera based on Oscar Wilde’s tragic play.
Indeed, when Thomas Adès leads the LA Phil New Music Group in the work’s U.S. premiere on Mar. 24 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, audiences will instead be treated to what Opera Now’s Hugo Shirley calls “tantalizing language and imagery.”
And did we mention that Barry’s non-dancing Salome, sung by soprano Alison Scherzer, is a typist?
That’s just one outré aspect of the 60-minute work that premiered in Magdeburg, Germany, last year. While the libretto (also by Barry) is adapted from Wilde’s 1891 French drama about the biblical princess who has the prophet John the Baptist executed so she can kiss his mouth, this version might best be described as a, well, Dada-esque mash-up.
“I’ve always loved Wilde,” Barry, 73, exclaimed. “He’s a wonderful fellow Irishman. Decades ago, I thought of [adapting his] Salome. But his prose is very purple, it’s over-rich in a way, [and] I couldn’t find my way around it. All these decades later, by cutting 50 percent of it, I found my way. When you cut, there are enough bones — you have an X-ray, a skeleton.”
Barry composed the comic opera The Importance of Being Earnest, based on Wilde’s 1895 play of the same name, which the LA Philharmonic premiered in 2011. He pointed out that Salome is “almost written on top of that. Wilde’s great humor and perversity in his language appeals to me. He originally wrote Salome as a stage play, but when it was premiered, he was in jail in England at the time. I don’t think he ever saw it.
“I didn’t want her to dance,” Barry added, “so I decided what was another one syllable word – type. Herod dictates to Salome a letter that Wilde wrote from prison.”
In addition, Salome belongs to the fantastical world of Barry’s opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which was performed by the LA Phil New Music Group in 2016 — both operas share elements of madness, ecstasy, humor and murder.
“It is humorous,” Barry opined, “but not completely. I do take [Salome] seriously. It’s a story of sexual obsession, perversity. Because I can’t stop myself, I turned it into some kind of black comedy. Humor can also be very moving. There’s a fine line between laughing and crying, these are stages on a spectrum of emotions. Tragedy and humor, they’re pretty much the same thing.”
And who better to lead this cavalcade of musical emotions than Adès, who has worked with Barry for decades and conducted the LA Phil New Music Group in the U.S. premiere of The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit in 2006. “He has intuitive understanding for my work and simply gets it without it having to be explained to him. When he’s conducting, he has a tremendous passion and brings a kind of energy to the music. We’ve always been on the same page, the same wavelength,” Barry said.
Also repeating their Salome roles are soprano Scherzer, baritone Vincent Casagrande as The Prisoner, and tenor Timur as the King.
“It’s a cross between a stage play and an opera. [Since] there’s a lot of speaking, they have to be good actors, too,” Barry pointed out. “There’s a way of standing and singing, [but] some people do it in a detached, not very interesting way. Others, the way they hold themselves and the energy in their bodies, [gives] them a higher level of dramatic ability.”
The orchestration also lends a virtuosic sheen to the proceedings. According to Barry, “it’s almost the size for an early Beethoven symphony. [The LA Phil] more or less told me the size they could manage. It’s quite a classical orchestra and would be suitable for Haydn or Mozart. They [gave] me free rein and left me to my own devices.”
As for the music itself, Barry described it as “very tuneful, in a sort of surreal kind of way. There’s a kind of hallucinatory quality to the opera. It’s almost — though I’ve never taken LSD — very LSD-like. I was saying to a friend, ‘I’d like to try LSD,’ and he said, ‘I don’t think you need it. You’re in the altered state already.’”
