Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis Among the more shattering denouements du jour this week, the Pakistani tribal judges’ sentencing of the physician who helped us find Osama bin Laden really stood out. The dichotomy in Pakistan is costly: the traditionalist military who maintain power by nurturing the enmity with India (remember there are more Urdu speakers in Pakistan than in India), while holding down the more modern civilian rulers has persuaded us to pay them billions of dollars, meanwhile hiding al Qaida and Taliban terrorists, our enemies. Also, the vote in Egypt heavily favoring the Muslim Brotherhood was a defeat for the democratic people of the Mideast. It was paid for by bribe dollars supplied by Saudi aristocracy, according to news in the Coptic community here in NYC, a sad outcome after the US supported the popular Arab Spring. For escape, we went to Carnegie Hall to hear the Cleveland Orchestra concert performance of Salome, Richard Straus’s opera, which also brought up a topic of current political significance, severe punishment for homosexuality exacted a bit more than a century ago. Strauss used the text of Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play, originally written in French, as its libretto, as translated into German by Hedwig Lachman, because it Wilde’s words were more stark and impressive than a doctored opera-ready libretto. Oscar Wilde the brilliant Anglo-Irish playwright/novelist/poet lit up the scene in London’s art and literary world in the last decade of the 1800s, with four plays of caustic social criticism, particularly The Importance of Being Earnest, and a novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey. Salome, translated into English by his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, was banned from the British stage, and by the time of its eventual acceptance Wilde was in jail, sentenced to two years of hard labor, on the charge of immorality. When Richard Strauss started his composition, in 1903, Wilde had died, his health supposedly shattered by the imprisonment. The opera, directed by Franz Welser-Most, had four major singers. Slim Swedish soprano Nina Stemme, a Wagnerian singer of world-wide repute, was outstandingly strong-voiced Salome, while Austrian tenor Rudolf Schasching gave us a gentle Tetrarch Herod of Judea. As the modern world knows from the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, a beautiful young princesse’s dancing so charmed the Tetrarch that he offered her anything she wished, as a reward. Much to the rulers’ shock, the princess, identified as named Salome by the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, asked for the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter Despite much pleading on part of Herod, offering her gold, silver and beautiful pheasants, the 16-year old insisted on her bloody reward, pressing on Herod’s honor, until she succeeded, with her mother Herodias’s (American mezzo-soprano Jane Henschel) support. When the bloody gift was finally presented (figuratively, to the tense audience’s great relief), it became apparent, from a long solo wail, that the prophet (American bass-baritone Eric Owens) had gravely insulted the passionate girl by refusing to kiss her, and injured her mother, by accusing the latter with repeated adultery. When Salome won, she congratulated herself for being finally able to kiss the dead Prophet’s lips. A gruesome ending, but very effective drama. Wilde was an extraordinarily powerful poet and dramatist, who could drain the last drop of emotion from a scene, and Straus’s monotonous but tension–laden music provided a threat-filled crescendo base for the emotions. The climactic release at the end was received by the audience with thunderous applause. When we arrived home from Carnegie Hall, the first news on the radio was the slaughter of dozens of Syrian Sunni families by army soldiers and Alavite volunteers. The only sweetness of the evening came from the Ricola candies freely supplied by the Hall, to suppress coughs, and I give you an inside-NYC secret – the best Ricolas are the red ones.