Salome: the poetry of horror

The contrast between baroque opulence and the bleak coldness of its characters is wonderfully displayed in this SALOME from Opera Ballet Vlaanderen.  In a staging by Ersan Mondtag in which costumes and makeup evoke the dystopian graphic novels of Enki Bilal.

© Annemie Augustijns

The Catharsis of Horror
It could be argued that horror can serve as a convenient outlet for the dark corners of the mind, a means by which the unspeakable is temporarily articulated and the repressed given a fleeting respite. At its best, horror interweaves the primal vibrations of fear with an aesthetic pleasure that both unsettles and compels, allowing one to shudder without really being in danger, to look into the abyss while standing safely at the edge. Horror can offer catharsis—not just the dispelling of fear, but a kind of exorcism, a purification of the unspeakable. It offers, if you dare say so, a refuge from the lurid, a stage on which the grotesque imagination can play without contaminating the waking world.

Horror as a Mirror of Reality
In an era when horror is not merely an artistic subterfuge but an everyday reality in which the world news is a catalogue of disasters from which a new page is turned every day—one could argue that the genre is becoming something more than mere distraction. It takes the form of a mirror that reflects the horrors of the times with a perverse and unflinching clarity. In this way, it offers a paradoxical respite: horror naturally creates order out of chaos and establishes a framework within which to engage with the incomprehensible. The worst is already imagined, shaped, contained in the story, and so one can entertain the fiction of control. It is, in short, a buffer—an emotional airbag, if you like—that softens the unrelenting impact of the atrocities of reality.

The Aesthetic Dimension of Horror
​The best examples of the genre achieve a peculiar alchemy, where the repulsive passes into the mesmerising, the monstrous into the sublime. This is the territory of the romantic: an intuitive recognition that reality, in its unadorned state, can be too grim to bear, that the world, stripped of mystery and metaphor, becomes intolerable. Horror, in this sense, offers not just an escape but a strengthening of the soul: the illusion of meaning grafted onto the meaningless.

“Romanticism is teaching the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”
- Novalis (1772 - 1801)

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
​- Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House, 1959)

Salome / Jean Benner (1899)

​The Grand Theatre of Horror: Opera as Its Natural Home
It is hardly surprising that horror should find a willing accomplice in opera. Both are genres of excess, realms where emotion, unbridled and unapologetic, reigns supreme. Opera, in its very nature, is a theatre of extremity where love and hate, ecstasy and despair, life and death, are all interwoven in a spectacle of poetic inevitability. For passionate self-ignition and that insatiable urge to find eternity in an ultimate and orgasmic moment, opera offers a perfect stage. Finding beauty in the hideous perhaps nowhere finds a more succinct setting than in Salome—Richard Strauss’s fevered, lurid opera in which this synthesis is perceived at its most intoxicating.

A First Encounter with Salome
There are those operas that, immediately on first encounter, leave a crushing impression. It was on a warm day in June, almost a decade ago, and I was on my way with a colleague to a park in Amsterdam to watch an opera on a big screen.

- “I have two CDs at home,” the colleague had said, “and one of them is a birthday present.”
- “It doesn't last longer than an average movie, and you can always leave in between,” was my reassuring reply.

The opera in question was Salome (Dutch National Opera, Ivo van Hove). The beautiful weather and Malin Byström did the rest. And the music by Richard Strauss, of course. Enthralled, my colleague, with his self-proclaimed insensitivity to music, sat through an opera that, after all, is not immediately considered an entry-level example of the genre.

The Apparition (Salome) / Gustave Moreau (1876)

Salome is a work that relishes contradiction, fusing the primal with the refined, the obscene with the sublime. In many ways, it is a music-theatrical rendering of Gustave Moreau's painting of Salome. Every director faces a particular challenge: how do you complement a score that is already brimming with the vividly cinematic?

© Annemie Augustijns

A Soviet Salome
In his production for Opera Vlaanderen, director Ersan Mondtag places the work in a socio-realistic Soviet aesthetic. In his version, Herod’s palace is transformed into a Soviet-Russian fortress—a place where the coldness and power hunger of a totalitarian regime converge. A site of doom, where the baroque yet raw décor evokes the graphic novels of Enki Bilal: a world of faded colors, expressive makeup, and a dystopian atmosphere that perfectly complements the dramatic intensity of Strauss’ score.

Mondtag is known for his radical reinterpretations of classical works, and in this Salome, he makes a striking change to the plot. While the original libretto ends with Salome’s brutal execution, Mondtag allows her to survive. Instead, a palace revolution unfolds, with a group of women rising against Herod’s tyranny. This results in a chilling final image: the dictator is overthrown, and Salome remains—not as a victim, but as a survivor.

Mondtag has not always made successful choices in previous productions for Opera Vlaanderen (He butchered Der Schmied von Gent and over-interpreted Der Silbersee), but this twist works surprisingly well. Herod as a dictator of Belarus, ultimately crushed by the very resistance he provoked. The contemporary political dimension Mondtag introduces does not hinder the story; his direction fully honors the dynamics of the music and text.

Herod (OperaVision)

Balancing Modernity and Theatricality
Mondtag’s vision is, crucially, one of balance. He eschews the minimalism of so many modern productions, does not clad his cast in the drab uniformity of corporate realism. Instead, his staging embraces theatricality without lapsing into the cabaretesque excesses that marred, for instance, his production of Der Silbersee. This staging cultivates an atmosphere that is both evocative and eerily dreamlike. Yet, for all its visual grandeur, it is in the orchestration of human interaction that the production finds its true power. The movement, the gesture, the glance—each is rendered with a precision that elevates the performance, endowing the characters with a striking immediacy.

Jochanaan and Salome (OperaVision)

A Visceral Salome
In this feast for the eyes and ears, Allison Cook’s Salome explodes off the stage, with Michael Kupfer-Radecky’s Jochanaan as her obsession (beyond life). The eroticism and frenzy that Strauss’ music so powerfully conveys are translated here into a physically charged performance that never loses its intensity. Thomas Blondelle both sings and acts a fantastic Herod—someone who, after issuing Salome’s death sentence, ultimately meets his own downfall.

The Dance of the Seven Veils unfolds as a a tango of power and desire between Salome and Herod. Soon, the women of the palace household and the men of the palace guard are drawn into its fevered rhythm. But in time, the balance shifts—Salome and the women cast the men aside, an omen of the reckoning to come. At last, Salome claims her 'reward': the severed head of Jochanaan. In this moment of grim triumph, the women seize control, toppling the old order. Salome stands victorious, with the prophet's head held high - a symbol of pride, of a woman who has shattered the patriarch's rule and emerged as a heroine of her own making.

With this Salome, Mondtag demonstrates that a director can honor the essence of a work while infusing it with a bold and singular vision. The result is a mesmerizing production that is a feast for the senses--rich in spectacle and subversion. And in its palace revolution, one can only hope to discern a prophecy: the inevitable downfall of tyrants, not only onstage but in the world beyond.

SALOME, Richard Strauss / Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (review based on stream of OperaVision)
​Salome: Allison Cook
Herodes: Thomas Blondelle
Herodias: Angela Denoke
Jochanaan: Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Narraboth: Denzil Delaere
Orchestra Opera Ballet Vlaanderen Symphonic Orchestra
Conductor: Alejo Pérez
Direction, scenography and costumes: Ersan Mondtag

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- Wouter de Moor