From Salome to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Listening to Shostakovich’s staggering Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in Bucharest, I could not help but recall that only a few days earlier, in the same hall, I had sat through Strauss’s Salome. When Katerina cried out with desperate insistence, “kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,” the echo in my head was unmistakable: “Ich will deinen Mund küssen, Jochanaan.”

Yes, all of it was there—the dust of centuries lodged in the folds of language—and out of that dust emerged Katerina with her unbearable “kiss, kiss,” while Salome slipped through the cracks of memory with the same fevered thirst for lips, the same metallic taste of blood. It felt as though two operas, separated by language and by epoch, had collided in a single burning throat.

Salome kept intruding into Katerina’s monologue, and I tried to banish her—but who can rid themselves of Salome? Not even Herod managed. And yet I wanted to listen first, only later to remember. To listen to the miraculous Kristine Opolais, Latvian soprano, Lady Macbeth both inwardly and outwardly, whose voice swelled beyond the orchestra in climaxes, her timbre carrying social paranoia, desperate escape, a raw nerve to which every instrument responded. And to remember Jennifer Holloway’s Salome—an American soprano releasing her demons with every bar, her voice flaring with clarinets and flutes bending like tongues of flame, and harps glittering like drops of wine spilled on marble. And, of course, blood, always blood—spilling across video screens, since in both cases we were offered semi-staged productions thick with video art. (And yes, in the Dance of the Seven Veils, it was only scraps of fabric dancing on the screens—but somehow that was enough.)

                         Salome, conductor Cristian Măcelaru
                                   Photo by Andrei Gindac

               Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, conductor Giancarlo Guerrero
                                       Photo by Alex Damian

Cristian Măcelaru with Strauss, Giancarlo Guerrero with Shostakovich—two conductors turning the score into a living psychiatric chart, where music itself became body, time, emotion. Shostakovich’s Katerina Izmailova is at once volcano and wasteland: her voice pulses with the orchestra, every note a scream from a soul clamped shut. Strauss’s Salome is hysteria and desire incarnate, a hypertrophic storm that both intoxicates and irritates. I could not help myself—I pitied Katerina desperately. Perhaps it was Opolais, perhaps my incurable love of Shostakovich. And yet, no—I love Strauss as well, but Salome I do not pity in the least.

In Bucharest, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was presented in its original 1932 version—a kind of acoustic tomography of the Russian provinces, where every window, every sigh turns into a melody of unease. When it premiered in Leningrad in 1934, Pravda dismissed it as “muddle”—an inadvertent admission that the music had expressed more than the age itself could bear. In Bucharest, the score came alive with rare sharpness under Giancarlo Guerrero, the Nicaraguan conductor (yes!), who confessed he had studied Shostakovich’s opera for four years in order to inhabit it fully. And inhabit it he did—passing it on to us with uncanny sensitivity to what Asafiev once remarked: in Lady Macbeth the orchestra is not accompaniment, but a nervous system with its own hair-trigger reflexes.

His Shostakovich was carnal, breathing, scandalously sensual—a monster one could not turn away from. Strings became the nervous system, clarinets and bassoons its inner dialogues, brass the collective consciousness of the crowd, percussion its convulsive seizures. At moments it seemed (what a fevered imagination!) that the strings chafed like shackles, that clarinets whispered lewd gossip, percussion slammed down like a judge’s gavel. Or perhaps the strings were a circulatory system, propelling a furious pulse only to collapse into heavy, viscous chords steeped in the syntax of 19th-century Russian prose.

Within this acoustic meat grinder, the singers thrived. German bass Andreas Bauer Kanabas—handsome, profound of voice—took on both Boris Timofeyevich and the old convict. As the father-in-law, his timbre was tar-black, a viscous resin of sarcasm, malice, inevitability. As the convict, it dulled to a weathered grey, like faded varnish on an icon. Tenor Sergey Polyakov as Sergei exuded the charm of a marriage swindler—anyone could have guessed even without knowing the plot. His melodic line was a tightrope, strung across the fates of all the characters: one note would melt like candy on the tongue, the next would slice the throat like a knife. Mezzo Maria Barakova’s lush voice lent Sonetka both youth and allure. Mariinsky tenor Andrei Popov gave the Shabby Peasant a grotesque, grotesquely funny life. But Opolais was the phenomenon: eyes riveted, ears stunned. Her costumes, too—the embroidered robe at the beginning and end, the black wedding gown—seemed to sing with her. One even suspects Shostakovich, in writing, foresaw exactly this kind of voice: metallic yet pliant, lyrical when needed, and always magnetic. Even the orchestra seemed to breathe with her.

Yes, all of it was there—the dust of time in the creases of speech—
but in that dust new patterns emerged:
Shostakovich’s biting, nerve-racking orchestral fabric, taut as the veins in Katerina’s neck,
and Strauss’s expressionist texture, each note a shard of glass.
They mirrored each other like twin insanities sounding at once—
Russian and Austrian, rustic and decadent,
each about the same fatal kiss.

And Salome? She is hysteria and desire incarnate, a psyche built from inner convulsions rather than the weight of circumstance. Both women are, of course, hysterics, both unhinged—but Salome most of all. She repels, disgusts, irritates: her world is built on sadistic pleasure in her own power. Katerina, on the other hand, is driven by paranoia, the tightening vise of reality, her only escape through violence—not cruelty for its own sake, but a grim form of self-preservation. Strauss’s Salome lives in the logic of desire: fragmentary, spasmodic, her voice shrieking then drowning in orchestral ecstasy, as though the score itself suffers mood swings. Shostakovich’s Katerina lives in the logic of oppression: mud, walls, suffocation, violence as oxygen. Two women, two case histories, sisters in pathology.

Which is more terrifying—the dance of Salome, or Katerina’s arioso “In the forest, deep in the woods there is a lake”? Strauss’s heroine dies in the shimmer of decadence. Shostakovich’s vanishes into murky waters, dragging her rival down. One dances for a prophet’s head, the other sings for an exit from her cage. One is priestess of the forbidden kiss, the other of the doomed one. Both step toward death. Salome remains in myth; Katerina returns to our world. Salome is a stained-glass window; Katerina, a photograph.

                    Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Photo by Alex Damian

                              Salome. Photo by Andrei Gindac

Yes, all of it was there—the dust of centuries in the creases of speech—
and through that dust the silhouettes of two operas loomed:
Katerina, gasping her “kiss, kiss, kiss me,”
and Salome, demanding the prophet’s lips—“Ich will deinen Mund küssen, Jochanaan”—
two women whose passions refuse the boundaries of flesh.
The torn Russian orchestral fabric echoed Strauss’s expressionist blaze,
each note a shard of mirror,
two insanities—peasant and palace, brutal realism and decadent refinement—
joined in a single point:
the kiss that always leads to death.

Yes, I must not forget the orchestra and chorus of rare mastery: the Romanian Radio National Orchestra and Academic Choir, flesh and blood of Shostakovich’s vision. Strauss wrapped his heroine’s obsession in the gilded haze of fin de siècle: the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne under Cristian Măcelaru sounded like a mythical hydra, new heads sprouting where old were cut away—unlike poor Jochanaan. The snake tempted, then scorched; Salome’s hysteria reflected back from the orchestra like a many-sided mirror. Multimedia directors Nona Ciobanu and Peter Košir added yet another layer of delirium: screen projections split the stage into a kaleidoscope of live bodies and digital shadows, so that the audience found itself inside Salome’s own mind, where reality and hallucination are indistinguishable.

Strauss composed Salome as an act of musical voyeurism. The score bores into the listener like a searchlight: every brass flash a lightning strike, every jagged string line a convulsion of flesh. His music disintegrates and recombines like tissue under a microscope, oozing subterranean heat, spewing chromatic firebirds, volcanic lava. Măcelaru’s gesture was precise, delicate: amid avalanche-like eruptions, he let the music breathe. A biblical drama—and at the same time a secessionist mosaic of gold, blood, moonlight, and abyss.

And the singers, all of them steeped in Strauss–Wagner tradition. Jennifer Holloway’s Salome was a bacchante: madness reeking of wine and blood, every note a clinical fit sung with terrifying beauty. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, a German mezzo of unusual force and charisma, was Herodias carved from stone and fire, her visceral growl still vibrating in my ears. Gerhard Siegel, Herod incarnate—despot and victim of his own weakness—played like a grotesque tyrant, a farcical executioner whose tenor sweated and trembled with fear of his own decrepit flesh clinging to his stepdaughter. And Iain Paterson’s Jochanaan, the lone character untouched by hysteria, his baritone too direct, too straight—prophetic, doomed to silence, almost alien in this orgiastic chaos.

                           Salome. Photo by Andrei Gindac

              Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Photo by Alex Damian

Shostakovich gave us flesh of sound, heavy, viscous, an orchestra breathing like a furnace, every brass flare a hammer-blow of fate. Strauss gave us the erotics of decadence: fevered music gleaming like shards of glass, monstrous beauty, the demonic timbre of the heckelphone. One rooted in mud and iron, the other in marble and gold—yet both converging in a kiss that leads only to death.

Salome and Katerina: two priestesses. One of forbidden desire, the other of impossible freedom. Their kisses are two rites, one in a biblical desert, the other in Russian mire. The rite is the same: the kiss as passage into death. Passion demands blood; freedom insists on sacrifice. And Strauss and Shostakovich remain, in all this, the most contemporary composers alive—on the planet, and in my own private soul.