Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 1)

Part 1: The Opera in the House

Sit in the 1100-seat Zürich opera house, ganz oben im zweiten Rang, for 35 or maybe 95 Franks, and bend your neck towards the stage, so that you can see more than just the front. No matter how far you lean in, your view of the orchestra is always better, which, depending on the opera and the production, might be an advantage. If the woman on your left is leaning farther forward than you care to, blocking your view of anything, or if the scene is set too far upstage, then your neck will after a while naturally revert to perpendicular to the opera, you’ll lean back into your seat, and you’ll look up to the ceiling of the house. It is mere meters away.

Gounod is there, next to protruding angels lifting the names Goethe and Schiller (the opera house was built to be a theatre as well). There are three large frescos: one in the centre, with two rose-laden lovers in a cloudy garden. One is of a lad with lyre, thighs the sort you need for riding, courting a group of fawning, rosy-cheeked maidens. The third, if I recall, is a scene of clouds, or roses, or columns holding up roses and clouds. Swiss taste, neoclassical, or is it neo-Baroque, or perhaps just neo-Riche. Pastel pastoral. You can taste the intermission’s petit fours just looking at the plaster.

Photo credit: Rafael Neff

                Imagine then what it is like to look up at this scene from the opera, and that opera is Salome. The Strauss orchestra has enveloped you, the ceiling is low, you are up high. It is not very dark. Salome is singing to a decorpotated head. The words you hear, though you hear them more as silk than as words:

            Du wolltest mich nicht deinen Mund

küssen lassen, Jochanaan!

Wohl, ich werde ihn jetzt küssen!

Ich will mit meinen Zähnen

hineinbeissen,

wie man in eine reife Frucht

beissen mag.

Ja, ich will ihn jetzt küssen

deinen Mund, Jochanaan.

Ich hab' es gesagt.

Hab' ich's nicht gesagt?

Ah! ah! Ich will ihn jetzt küssen.

Aber warum siehst du mich nicht an,

Jochanaan?

Or, as the source text by Oscar Wilde would have it, 

Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy 

mouth, Jokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will 

bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. 

Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. I said it; 

did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it 

now. ... But, wherefore dost thou not look 

at me, Jokanaan?

The pastoral Sinnlichkeit is now pornographic. This house, host of lucid Mozart tenderness, lurid Wagner purification rituals, and all the bel canto/Russo-French sentiment you could ever wedge in between, has for a matinee yielded to mezzo forte necrophilia. The applause at the end of Salome is as polite as it is at any opera, but who else present is wondering why an opera like this even exists, or, now that it does, why is it the only one?

Part 2: The Violent Boredom of Possession