\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m ready,\u201d Salome sings. And then she dances.<\/p>\n
Her predatory stepfather has promised her anything she wants if she performs for him. She obliges with the alternately wild and delicate Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the most famous numbers in all opera.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
A highlight of Strauss\u2019s \u201cSalome,\u201d which the Metropolitan Opera will broadcast live to movie theaters on Saturday, it is also one of the art form\u2019s greatest challenges. Few sopranos capable of singing the daunting role have much experience with dance, let alone with carrying a sensual nine-minute solo.<\/p>\n
Is it a seduction? A striptease? A cry for help? Performers have taken this intense, lurid scene in many different directions, bringing out undercurrents of sexual awakening and violence. The Met\u2019s new production<\/a> inverts the traditional portrayal, uncovering the wounded girl beneath the stereotypical femme fatale.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Here are (yes) seven memorable versions from the long history of opera\u2019s boldest dance.<\/p>\n Not quite 20 years after the opera\u2019s 1905 premiere, a silent film version of \u201cSalome\u201d \u2014 really an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play on which the opera is based \u2014 embraced the material\u2019s perfumed, verging-on-surreal Orientalism. The actress Alla Nazimova\u2019s Salome is a spoiled, petulant teenager.<\/p>\n At first surrounded by handmaidens, this Salome dances barefoot in a white minidress as her clownish stepfather leers at her. Tiptoeing and twirling under a diaphanous veil, she is a dreamlike vision of fragile innocence \u2014 eventually coming into her own snarling power.<\/p>\n Involving veils makes it seem inevitable that Salome will at some point be un<\/em>veiled. Strauss, though, said he wanted the scene to be \u201cthoroughly decent, as though it were being done on a prayer mat.\u201d<\/p>\n Ljuba Welitsch, the reigning Salome in the years after World War II, embraced undress \u2014 or at least the illusion of it \u2014 convincingly enough that George Petty, the renowned pinup artist, placed her first on his list of America\u2019s \u201cbest undressed women.\u201d<\/a> But the statuesque Birgit Nilsson, who sang the part with rare force and clarity in the 1960s and \u201970s, \u201cwound up as fully dressed as she started,\u201d according to a 1965 review in The New Yorker.<\/p>\n At the other extreme from singers like Nilsson, some sopranos have ended the dance with a degree of nakedness. Few, though, have prolonged a disrobing more daringly than Maria Ewing, who in the Royal Opera\u2019s production excerpted in this clip, stands, stark and unflinching, for some 25 seconds before collapsing to the ground.<\/p>\n By then, nudity had become far more prevalent in mainstream culture, including on opera stages. This was a long way from early Salomes \u2014 who tended to sit the scene out entirely, ceding it to a double \u2014 and even from Mary Garden, who achieved notoriety appearing in flesh-colored silk back when the opera was still a shocker, frequently subject to censors\u2019 bans.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Part of the allure of the Dance of the Seven Veils over the past 120 years has been voyeuristic, sometimes fostered by the singers themselves. Grace Bumbry, ahead of an appearance at the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 1970, promised that at the end of the dance she would be left in only \u201cjewels and perfume.\u201d<\/p>\n Actually, she got down to a kind of spangled bikini. \u201cCovent Garden had never before rented so many opera glasses,\u201d Bumbry said later, with a bit of braggadocio. \u201cWhen I started dancing, everything else onstage stopped and I could see the glasses going up en masse.\u201d<\/p>\n The Met\u2019s last production, directed by J\u00fcrgen Flimm, premiered in 2004 during the Iraq War, and was set in the contemporary Middle East, with some Art Deco touches.<\/p>\n Those Deco elements included a throwback to Marlene Dietrich-style masculine-feminine costuming in the Dance of the Seven Veils. The dance began with Salome (played by the renowned stage animal Karita Mattila) dressed in a version of a man\u2019s tuxedo jacket with tails, which she removed to reveal a black halter top. This bit of play with gender, the scene implied, was a key part of her strategy in seducing her stepfather.<\/p>\n The Dance of the Seven Veils is, in its most literal form, Salome performing for her stepfather \u2014 and, by extension, for the audience. The emphasis is usually on how she uses her attractiveness as she seeks to manipulate others.<\/p>\n But this 2011 staging from Belgium focuses on a darker subtext: the way Salome has been shaped by the gaze and demands of others. Marguerite Borie\u2019s production gives the dance some of the unsettling atmosphere of a gang rape, as Salome (June Anderson) is circled and pursued by a group of men. Part of her unveiling, in this case, is those men ripping off layers of her clothes. A recent staging<\/a> by the small New York company Heartbeat Opera, too, flipped the mood from a jokey start into something far more ominous, as her stepfather and others surrounded and molested her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Claus Guth\u2019s new production at the Metropolitan Opera, which runs through May 24, is updated from the ancient world to a dour mansion at the turn of the 20th century. Starring Elza van den Heever as a capricious princess in a black frock with frills at the cuffs, the staging suggests that its title character is coming to terms with a dark past.<\/p>\n The seven veils have become a somberly formal, defiantly unsexy parade of seven versions of Salome, progressing from girlhood to adolescence and enacting, through a series of ballet lessons, a history of abuse at her stepfather\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n It is the latest twist in a dance that keeps evolving.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nSilent Salome<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nNaked Salome<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nDietrich-Style Salome<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nSalome Under Attack<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n