The longest three and one half hours I ever spent was sitting through the one hundred minute production of Salome beamed by the Metropolitan Opera to movie houses world-wide on Saturday morning.

I had never seen this opera before but I am a Richard Strauss fan and have listened to the music once or maybe twice.  I was excited by the prospect of seeing a world-class production with a soprano, Karita Mattila, who has garnered rave reviews for her appearance in the title role. The first hint I got that maybe this wasn't going to be everything I hoped for was when on Thursday I read that Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Met had decided that there would be no total nudity shown in the transmission.  In previous performances of this production Ms. Mattila has finished the Dance of the Seven Veils wholly in the buff.  Apparently Mr. Gelb decided that we outlanders who are watching from far afield are not to be trusted to see a naked woman on stage without going on an uncontrolled sexual rampage not seen in cinemas since the days of Bill Haley in Rock Around The Clock.  I was pretty livid at this news.  It seemed to me (and still does) that his decision to discreetly cut away to a close-up of Ms. Mattila's face at the final moment of the dance was a disservice to the production, was a cheapening of Ms. Mattila's performance and was condescending to the movie audience.  This is Salome for goodness sake, not a family production of Hansel and Gretel!  I would have had no problem if the director of the original production had decided there would be no total nudity - that is an artistic and aesthetic decision he is entitled to make.  I would have supported Ms. Mattila if she had declined to let me see her naked (over the course of my life, other women have similarly declined to reveal all to me and I don't hold it against them).  But for Mr. Gelb to make that decision I find offensive.

As it turned out, the issue of nudity/non-nudity was a relatively minor, though irritating, issue in a production which had lots of other stuff wrong with it - as in, it was a mess!  Let me say right away that the musical side of things was spectacular.  The orchestra shimmered appropriately, the singers were uniformly breath-taking and fully committed to what has to be one of the most exhausting operas in the entire canon.  Before the curtain rose, Deborah Voigt in introducing us to the performance knocked on Ms. Mattila's dressing room door and finally managed to induce her to come out.  "Do you have anything you would like to say to the audience before you begin?" asked La Voigt.  "What I always say - " was the reply - "Let's go kick some ass!"  And she did.  Strauss said that the name role calls for "a sixteen-year old princess with the voice of Isolde.”  No amount of suspension of disbelief is going to help you imagine Karita Mattila to be sixteen years old but she sure has the voice thing down.  Vocally the entire cast was very strong and did a tremendous service to the horrendously difficult challenges the composer presented.

But the production.  Oh, dear.  For some reason the producer, Jürgen Flimm, decided that the age-old story about King Herod, John the Baptist and Salome, daughter to Herod's wife, should be set in the 1930's.  So, with the exception of Jochanaan (John the Baptist) who was appropriately dressed in rags, the rest of the cast flounced around in designer outfits. Well, except for the palace guard who appeared to have secured their uniforms from the supplier to an eccentric 19th century Scottish regiment, complete with tams and kilts.  The action was set in the Herod's palace courtyard.  Now apparently this palace was modern enough to be lit by incandescent electric lights but if Herod wished to have a prisoner brought up from the underground cistern for inspection the poor chap had to be winched up by hand in a contraption which looked like one of  those cage-type elevators one still sometimes finds in old hotels in Paris.  I hope you are beginning to get a picture of what an anachronistic mess this whole thing was.  I'm afraid the 'acting' wasn't much better.  Ms. Mattila did her best to be seductive but just seemed to become increasingly insane.  Ildiko Komlosi in the role of Herodias, Salome's mother was made to play the role as though she were channeling Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  

And the dance?  It turned out to be The Dance of The Ringmaster's Outfit With Thigh-High Stockings And A Bustier.  At one stage Ms. Mattila embraced a metal upright in a pitch-perfect representation of a pole dancer at work in a 'gentleman's club'.

Fortunately the whole thing was over, without intermission, in about 100 minutes.  It just seemed so much longer.  My mood which by that time was on the angry side of gloomy was lifted enormously when the elderly lady sitting next to me said, as the lights in the theater went up - "Strauss must have been suffering from Alzheimer's when he wrote that.  There wasn't a waltz in the whole damed thing, start to finish!"  I managed not to laugh until I got outside.  I am still giggling at the memory.

This whole thing was not, in my view, one of the Met's finest moments.

In other news, the principals for Portland Opera's Fidelio are in town and I shall be having breakfast with them in the usual Meet 'n Greet on Wednesday.  I shall report.

Have a fine week.