Wanton's Return

One Sabbath morning 27 years ago the preachers of New York City looked over their congregations to find many of their most prominent parishioners absent. That same morning there was a dress rehearsal of Richard Strauss's Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House. To it had gone many a rich and respectable churchgoer to see how Olive Fremstad would exhibit her fanatical lust for the body of St. John the Baptist. The churchgoers were offended enough by the screaming dissonances and the way Fremstad brought the horrid head up to the footlights, caressed the matted black hair, kissed the cold lips. But no one was so outraged as Dr. William Stephen Rainsford when he went to breakfast on Monday with his spiritual client, the late John Pierpont Morgan. One public performance of Salome was given that night. Then the elder Morgan asked for a special Metropolitan directors' meeting and the wanton Salome was banished. Not until last week was Herod permitted another birthday at the Met.

King Herod's birthday starts all the trouble in the Strauss version of Oscar Wilde's play.' It is at his birthday banquet that Salome suddenly revolts against his slimy glances, goes on to the terrace where John the Baptist (in the Strauss text Jokanaan) is chanting his denunciations from a cistern prison. To see the saint Salome beguiles a young Syrian officer to let him out. John talks about Christ. Salome does not even notice when the Syrian stabs himself. But jittery old Herod steps in the Syrian's blood and Salome must dance to soothe him. She can have anything she asks.

The dance last week was a sorry affair. The Salome was big Goeta Ljungberg who created some illusion so long as she stayed in her blood-red wrapper. When she started nervously shedding veils, feebly wriggling her abdomen, the audience was as uncomfortable as she. But she got her reward. Into the cistern went the executioner. For a minute only the double-basses were heard, shuddering as if they could see the head fall, the blood gush. Then the executioner's black arm ap peared holding the platter and what seemed to be a wad of cheesecloth.

For critics the greatest part of Strauss's amazing score comes when the orchestra goes as wild as Salome, exults with her, subsides to an eery dissonance while she sings to the head. It was then that Soprano Ljungberg came nearest to realizing the music's grim intensity. She crouched on the floor, reproached the thing gently, sang to it ecstatically. Tenor Max Lorenz was a picture-book Herod instead of the crazy neurasthenic that Wilde and Strauss intended. Dorothee Manski (Herodias) had to pinchhit for Karin Branzell who was taken with gallstones (see col. i). Baritone Friedrich Schorr wore Jokanaan's haircloth shirt, sang resonantly. Tenor Hans Clemens (the Syrian) stabbed himself neatly.

The orchestra and Conductor Artur Bodanzky made the evening. Instead of the usual 80 players there were 104 in the pit. No music is more difficult. The strings in places are divided into 20 parts. 'Cellos must behave like violins. The tympanist does sleight of hand. Dis sonances pile on dissonances, savagely conflict and swirl away into new combinations. Stage honors went not to any performer but to Donald M. Oenslager, who made a highly effective setting out of castle walls, a great flight of steps and two cypress trees standing against an Oriental sky.

Because critics derided Soprano Ljungberg's dancing, she undertook next day to defend herself: ''Strauss showed me how he wanted the dance done. Salome isn't a character defined exactly in history. There is no description of how she danced. Strauss told me he didn't want it to be hoppy and jumpy. It was a thought dance in his conception. ... I am not a dancer. I have never studied dancing, but for the opera I do not think that is important. I am willing to do the dance in order to be allowed to sing Salome's music."

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