“I’m ready,” Salome sings. And then she dances.
Her predatory stepfather has promised her anything she wants if she performs for him. She obliges with the alternately wild and delicate Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the most famous numbers in all opera.
The Dance of the Seven Veils
Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Fritz Reiner, conductor (Sony)
A highlight of Strauss’s “Salome,” which the Metropolitan Opera will broadcast live to movie theaters on Saturday, it is also one of the art form’s greatest challenges. Few sopranos capable of singing the daunting role have much experience with dance, let alone with carrying a sensual nine-minute solo.
Is it a seduction? A striptease? A cry for help? Performers have taken this intense, lurid scene in many different directions, bringing out undercurrents of sexual awakening and violence. The Met’s new production inverts the traditional portrayal, uncovering the wounded girl beneath the stereotypical femme fatale.
Here are (yes) seven memorable versions from the long history of opera’s boldest dance.
Silent Salome
Alla Nazimova.CreditCredit…Nazimova Productions
Not quite 20 years after the opera’s 1905 premiere, a silent film version of “Salome” — really an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play on which the opera is based — embraced the material’s perfumed, verging-on-surreal Orientalism. The actress Alla Nazimova’s Salome is a spoiled, petulant teenager.
