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Richard Strauss\u2019s criteria for the ideal interpreter of his opera \u201cSalome\u201d have haunted the piece for the better part of a century: a \u201c16-year-old princess with the voice of Isolde.\u201d<\/p>\n
As oxymorons go, it\u2019s the operatic equivalent to Noam Chomsky\u2019s famous syntactic puzzle \u201cColorless green ideas sleep furiously.\u201d Clear, simple, impossible. And yet here is the 37-year-old Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, in the middle of her role debut as Salome<\/a> in Paris, launching her voice like a rocket that opens into a parachute in the cavern of the Op\u00e9ra Bastille.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n With a teenager\u2019s sly mockery of her parents and a blooming sexual awakening, Davidsen\u2019s young Judean princess, seen on Wednesday, gradually matured in color and volume. But when she reached the determined outburst of \u201cGib mir den Kopf des Jochanaan!\u201d (\u201cGive me the head of John the Baptist!\u201d), her top voice detonated with a force that sent shock waves of youthful, shimmery sound reverberating equally in all directions. She stepped into her 16-year-old Isolde, and held the audience rapt for 20 more minutes of epiphanic sumptuousness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I had never made the connection between Salome\u2019s final scene and Isolde\u2019s climactic Liebestod in Wagner\u2019s \u201cTristan und Isolde.\u201d Usually, they don\u2019t sound alike. Opera fans sometimes reach for Strauss\u2019s one-liner to describe a soprano with some mix of the role\u2019s beauty, lyricism, youth and power, but there is an implicit compromise, a sense that \u201cthis is as close as it gets.\u201d As Davidsen unleashed huge arcs of exalting tone, though, her voice was soft and heavy like thickly piled velvet; she reveled in Salome\u2019s obsessive love to music of apotheosizing grandeur and purified her desire of its murderous origins.<\/p>\n This revival of Lydia Steier\u2019s disturbingly powerful production gave Davidsen a profound context to explore her interpretation. Steier\u2019s militarized hellscape felt both primitive and postapocalyptic. Violent orgies, stripped of ritual, set the stage for gleeful sadism and recreational murder. King Herod (Gerhard Siegel, a seasoned Wagnerian with technical security and confident point) is styled as a depraved chieftain in black lace, soiled robes and a feathered headdress, and he presides over a ruling class that delights in bludgeoning and asphyxiating sex slaves. Their crimes are visible through a large glass window high above the stage. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a scene of rape. It would all be crass, it if weren\u2019t for the craft of the staging\u2019s detailed movement choreography.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The conductor, Mark Wigglesworth, committed unironically to the score\u2019s intense, rhapsodic beauty. But he also, intriguingly, held back. Rather than lurch into sensationalistic dynamics and noxious fragrances, he led with composure. The opening clarinet snaked curiously up its bitonal scale. Jochanaan\u2019s horns moved from wounded glory to defiant majesty. Romantic strings swooned as lurid woodwinds spread a penetrating perfume. Wigglesworth held these triangulated poles \u2014 dignity, romance, derangement \u2014 in an active balance that allowed them to coexist or overtake one another according to the drama.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Davidsen\u2019s sensitively realized Salome evolved both vocally and dramatically throughout the opera\u2019s uninterrupted hour and 45 minutes. Detached and dead behind the eyes, she quickly escaped Herod\u2019s debaucheries at the start. Initially, her encounter with Jochanaan had timbral innocence, even purity, as she furrowed her brow like a stymied yet peaceable child rather than a dangerously petulant one. The tunnel vision of her royal entitlement, though, showed in the bloom of her top voice as she gave Jochanaan her name, hinting at the raptures to be born from her single-minded longing. The exchange, aesthetic, sensual and finally sexual, ended with Salome pleasuring herself atop his cistern, while Wigglesworth tapped into orchestral surges of desire.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Critics have quibbled about Davidsen\u2019s underpowered low register, but you could hear her experimenting with different techniques, such as a pointed tone, chest voice and a guttural quality. A tiny, and entirely unnecessary, touch of effortfulness entered her voice in the final stretch.<\/p>\n Johan Reuter\u2019s Jochanaan was robust and earthy, with a touch of tonal sourness, in his taunting revulsion toward Salome. Ekaterina Gubanova had a ball as a voluptuously matronly Herodias. The tenor Pavol Breslik was a hopeful Narraboth, and the bass Luke Stoker was an unusually moving First Nazarene with a mellow, comforting timbre.<\/p>\n Hearing Davidsen\u2019s first attempt at Strauss\u2019s Judean princess, some audience members will renew their clamoring for her to sing Wagner\u2019s Irish one, Isolde. But they shouldn\u2019t overlook what is right in front of them: a Salome as Strauss intended.<\/p>\n Salome<\/strong><\/p>\n Through May 28 at the Op\u00e9ra Bastille, Paris; operadeparis.fr<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n