Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century art and thought are suffused with tortured and corrupted women. Freud's investigations into hysteria, and of Klimt's murals for the various departments of Vienna university are just two examples of such interests, much of which was either explicitly or implicity concerned with women's sexuality.
      It was in this late nineteenth-century world of psychological probing that Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé , in French. In 1891 it was banned in London, but was very successfully performed in Paris in 1894. In 1901 it was performed in Breslau where the thirty-six year old Strauss saw it. Between 1901 and the premiere of the opera he based on the Wilde play in 1905, Strauss encountered a number of difficulties not least some singers who refused to sing it on moral grounds.
      Both Strauss's opera and Wilde's play share their intensity and sense of the action being concentrated in a single sweep. Neither play nor opera has a break (though I have attended a performance which inserted an interval after Narraboth's death).
      Wilde's play is like a dramatized poem, Strauss's opera is like a visually realized symphonic poem. Wilde's play is illumined by references to the moon. Everything is seen through the light on the moon, and attitudes to the moon become a kind of metaphor for different states of mind. The Page, for instance, in innocence says;

      She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. You would fancy she was dancing.

Salomé says:

     The moon is cold and chaste. I am sure she is a virgin, she has a virgin's beauty. Yes, she is a virgin. She has never defiled herself. She has never abandoned herself to men, like the other goddesses.

Herod remarks:

     The moon has a strange look tonight. Has she not a strange look? She is like a madwoman, a madwoman who is seeking everywhere for lovers. She is naked too. She is quite naked. The clouds are seeking to clothe her nakedness, but she will not let them. She shows herself naked in the sky. She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman. She is like a madwoman is she not?

On the other hand, with almost brutal realism, unreceptive to the metaphorical perceptions of others Herodias, Herod's wife and in the Bible the one who demands John the Baptist's head on a platter, says:

     No, the moon is like the moon, that is all.

The moon becomes the light through which all the action is seen. The play is set on a hot and sultry evening. Things are not seen as they would be daylight. Fuelled by wine, the characters see the world through the prism of the moon, and reality, and by implication quotidian morality, is suspended. This is a dream-world rushing towards a nightmare.
      It was this concentration that Strauss had to turn into an opera. Wilde's words are what re-iterate the real and symbolic significance of the moon. This was not translatable into the music of the opera, so Strauss abandoned it, and instead gave the work a symphonic development and concentration. The characteristic sound of the music he composed did service for the moon. He used a massive orchestra and a small array of obsessively repeated musical themes, such as the one attached to John the Baptist and, above all, the sequence of falling fourths whose third appearance is distorted by augmentation. What makes John the Baptist's first physical appearance on the stage (as opposed to his voice from the dungeon) so compelling is its glorious and, by contrast, uncomplicated major tonality. In contrast, Salome's music is complex, dissonant, angular and highly chromatic. They are sonically worlds apart, and the contrast between the two musical worlds runs through the whole of the first part of the opera.
      Some critics have condemned Strauss for trivializing the complex psychology of the story with merely dazzling compositional virtuosity. One even suggested that the triple time in the final exultation of Salome over Jokanaan was so lush that the Baptist's head might be made of marzipan. Time has left such comments high and dry, and repeated exposure to this exploration of female psyche has proved perennially compelling to audiences, even if some are only concerned with the vocal acrobatics and physical appearance of the woman singing Salome.
      On every front Cheryl Barker's performance is a triumph. Vocally she conveyed Salome's increasing lunacy, her gradual divorce from reality. Physically it was a pity that her movements in the removing of her seven veils was only rather tamely erotic. Some years again Josephine Barstow was able to strip to a body-stocking and fill the stage with erotic movement. That production was right not to underplay this scene, and in the current ENO production it is, but only somewhat. This is a pity, because Cheryl Barker in BohËme showed herself more than able to cavort seductively; and in the early scenes with John the Baptist, and in the final one with his severed head in her hands, she performed with such masterful gusto both physically and vocally that the relative tameness of the Dance of the Seven Veils seemed to timid by comparison. Overall, however, hers is a performance to admire and relish, if the latter is quite the word for so horrific a dénouement.
      Other singers matched Barker's excellence in their roles. Sally Burgess, using the edge her voice has, made Herodias the manipulating queen the play and the opera require. Hers was a terrifying and electric performance. Equally compelling, but very different, was John Graham Hall who with great aplomb conveyed the lustful, decadent, vacillating Herod superbly. His particular tenor-timbre seemed to suit exactly the ruler, in turn driven by lust to request Salome's dance, by guilt to try to make her change her mind, and by disgust to order her eventual execution by being crushed to death by soldiers' shields (something which this production omitted).
      Robert Hayward as Jokanaan was also magnificent. His voice and presence commanded and overwhelmed. Jokanaan is a role that needs volume and grandeur, and this Hayward had in full. His first emergence from the underground cell is one of the most compelling moments in the production.
       Another character is stands outside the decadent triangle of Herod, Herodias and Salome is the Syrian captain of the guard, Narraboth. On the night I saw this production Geraint Hylton replaced Andrew Rees. Hylton's performance was vocally rather strained and his performance tentative in comparison to the others members of the cast, so the opera took a while to gain momentum.
      Maybe the tentativeness of the opening was due to substitution nerves, so at first Kwamé Ryan's control of the score seemed to lack direction and power. But within only a few minutes he had found just what the opera needs, and he directed with terrific power and conviction. The success of the performance is as much due to his handling of the orchestra and the intelligent pacing of the drama as anything else.
      Leah Hausman's revival of David Levaux's original direction drove the action forward and enabled the singers to explore, with the audience, the several aspects of their roles. The well-conceived stage-design mixed symbolic decadence (the crumbling building, the detritus of a feast) with touches of suggestive realism. It works well, though the moon is red not white.
       ENO's Salome is a powerful evening. Acting and singing are first-rate, and the production does more than justice to Strauss's overwhelming score. Oscar Wilde has Herod say, "Put out the torches. I will not look at things. I will not suffer things to look at me". After such a performance the audience might well echo his utterances.
Roderick Swanston