"Antony and Cleopatra" and "Salome" at the Met
“It is hard to imagine a more risk-prone art form than opera.” - John Adams
Of all of New York's musical treasures, none shines brighter than the Metropolitan Opera. This spring, two new productions have garnered significant attention for their gripping contemporary music, lurid subject matter, and seductive female leads. I saw both operas on consecutive days last week, and while each is musically brilliant, one production is clear and faithful to its story while the other is plagued by opaque heavy-handedness. If you've read the reviews of Richard Strauss' Salome and John Adams' Antony and Cleopatra, you can probably guess which is which.
Not so fast.
First, Antony and Cleopatra. Adams, 78, has long established himself as one of this country's preeminent composers, with a particularly outsized impact in the world of opera. His modern-day masterpieces Nixon in China, Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic, and Girls of the Golden West each exhibit a vibrant sound palette that blends the romantic grandeur of Wagner with the minimalism of Glass and Reich. One key to Adams' stage success has been the influence of director Peter Sellars, who either conceived of or wrote the text to each of those expressionistic operas, basing them on real-life events. (The poet Alice Goodman wrote the librettos to Nixon and Klinghoffer, based on Sellars' concepts.) Whether it was Nixon's 1972 visit to China, the 1985 murder of Leon Klinghoffer, or J. Robert Oppenheimer's 1940's Manhattan Project, these were familiar stories told in plain English.
In a departure, Adams chose to craft his own libretto for Antony and Cleopatra using the text from Shakespeare's tragedy, along with source material by Plutarch and Virgil. (For those unfamiliar with the story, you can read the synopsis here.) In his essay "Love Bites", reprinted in the Met's program book, Adams discusses the difficulties of setting Shakespeare's songlike verse to his own idiosyncratic music.
“Every operatic adaption of a famous text is fraught with difficult, often painful decisions," Adams writes. "Composers set out with the intention of absolute fidelity to the original, but both musical and dramatic concerns immediately get in the way. It’s messy business.”
Adams isn't the first composer to adapt Shakespeare's drama for the Met stage. In 1966, the Met commissioned Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra to open the new Metropolitan Opera House. What should have been a triumph turned into a notorious fiasco thanks mostly to Franco Zeffirelli's over-the-top production. No doubt aware of that history, Adams took pains to streamline this version of Antony before bringing it to the Met, cutting some 20 minutes from the score since its San Francisco premiere in 2022.
I was skeptical when I had heard that director Elkhanah Pulitzer and set designer Mimi Lien had updated the setting from Ancient Rome and Egypt to a loosely sketched version of 1930's Hollywood. But, it proved to be an effective staging on a number of levels: in addition to that period's obsession with all things Egyptian, it allowed for a transposition of several scenes to fascist Italy - and by extension our own present. This was particularly evident in Act II, when Caesar delivers a speech in military uniform and civic crown while a closed circuit camera projects his enlarged face in multiple. (The projections are the design of veteran filmmaker Bill Morrison, making his long-overdue Met debut.)
With Adams himself on the podium, the Met Orchestra blazed through the scintillating score, filled with John's familiar propulsive and lyrical music. The superb cast included several Adams veterans, including Gerald Finley (Doctor Atomic) as the rakish Antony, Julia Bullock (El Niño, Girls of the Golden West) as the tempestuous queen Cleopatra, and Paul Appleby (Girls of the Golden West) as the precociously power hungry Octavian, later to be known as Caesar Augustus.
As for the text, many have complained that Adams' insistence on using Shakespeare's Elizabethan verse has rendered the opera unintelligible for a modern audience: that the rush of action, enhanced by Adams' driving music, doesn't allow us to decipher such dense material. To which I would say: is this really all that different from the experience of seeing the play? Are we to believe that Antony and Cleopatra is any more difficult for an American audience to follow than an opera written in Italian, German, or Russian - just to name three of the languages currently heard on the Met stage? Sure, Antony could probably be a bit tighter, but at 2 1/2 hours, it could hardly be called overlong.
All of which overshadows the fact that Adams has written what may be his greatest stage achievement to date: a bold extension of his brilliant musical innovation that not only mirrors Shakespeare's external drama, but illuminates the characters' internal conflict and emotion. Perhaps part of the reason Antony and Cleopatra hasn't been more immediately embraced is that it deliberately eschews traditional arias and set pieces for a more naturalistic approach that adheres to Shakespeare's fast-moving narrative, with the music itself playing a central role.
"Music," Adams writes, "being the most psychologically precise of all the arts, has the unique power to replace event with feeling, and a single change in the harmony can convey more emotional and psychological meaning than dozens of lines of text."
Speaking of German, the following night I returned to the Met to catch one of the final performances of Strauss' Salome, which the Met has performed regularly since its 1905 premiere. (Synopsis here.) Judging by the size of the audience and their screaming ovations during curtain calls, most were there to witness the intensely dramatic performance of South African soprano Elza van den Heever as the title character, alongside equally excellent performances from baritone Peter Mattei (Jochanaan), Gerhard Siegel (Herod), and Michelle DeYoung (Herodias). Conducted by the Met's music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the huge Met Orchestra delivered a rip-roaring performance that mixed haunting exotica with terrifying explosions of brass and percussion.
But, in the words of my old friend Kit, this was the sort of production I would have preferred to watch with my eyes closed.
To its credit, the Met has largely avoided the sort of overwrought deconstructionist productions that have plagued European opera houses for decades. But this new production by German director Claus Guth pushes layers of subtext and psychodrama that never appear in either Strauss' libretto or the original play by Oscar Wilde. Among the inexplicable inclusions: characters wearing animal heads, a woman prancing about in dominatrix lingerie, a headless Jochanaan seated upright (not sure how that happens?)
Most conspicuous of all were Salome's doppelgängers: six younger versions of herself who appear randomly throughout the one-act opera. Meant to represent her purported different stages of abuse by Herod, they lounge around onstage, doing little. They do feature prominently in the pivotal Dance of the Seven Veils, where the adult Salome removes a head covering from each of them, meant to represent, "a dance of the fragmented mind." (No Karita Mattila-style disrobing here.) Again, there is nothing in either the play or libretto that indicates Herod has ever acted on his desire for his stepdaughter: this is all director-driven narrative (a.k.a. Regieoper.)
After Salome kisses the decapitated head, the libretto indicates that Herod orders her to be killed, and that his soldiers "rush forward and crush her under their shields." But, in Guth's production, Salome simply wanders aimlessly upstage, as if in a trance, while Herod falls lifeless on the floor. What this is meant to signify is anyone's guess, but by avoiding this final depravity, it robs Strauss' opera of its raw, devastating power. At least the glorious music he wrote to accompany this final scene was left untouched.
While Salome has closed, three more performances of Antony and Cleopatra remain. According to the Met, Antony is the fifth of Adams' works to reach the Met stage, the most by any living composer since...well, Strauss. But, only one of these composers is still around - and leading these performances himself. If that doesn't qualify as must-see opera, I don't know what does. (Anecdotally, Strauss was offered the principal conductor job at the Met in 1898, but turned it down.)
More pics of both Antony and Cleopatra and Salome on Instagram. Video clips and info on Antony here; Salome here.