The genre-bending IN Series starts their new season with a production of Alessandro Stradella's 17th-century oratorio, St. John the Baptist, marking the first time the work is brought to life on the stage. In this guest blog, Aristic Director Timothy Nelson explores the story of Salome which has fascinated composers and audiences alike for centuries.
Shocking. A central task when approaching any retelling of Salome other than that “Salome”, is to hold two opposite truths in tension simultaneously. The first is that every retelling of a story, and especially one written 200 years prior to that of Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss fame, is its own unique artistic enterprise: with its own shaping, message, theme, concentration. Secondly, and at the same time, any audience witnessing Stradella’s 1675 take on the same story, San Giovanni Battista, will find it impossible to shed the shared cultural weight of all that a “Salome” has become through the prism of ironies of fin de siècle theater, German proto-expressionist opera, and a healthy dose of the shadow of Sigmund Freud. San Giovanni Battista is, and is not, its own beast.
Again, shocking. What we know primarily about that Salome story is that it is shocking. This is absolutely true biblically, though perhaps that fact gets lost in a book that contains the speaking of unspeakable horror after horror with dizzying regularity. And it is certainly true for the play that faced nearly 30 years of British censorship, and the controversial opera that is spurned, which is still known most iconically for the terrifying portrait of youthful lust and necromania that it draws. But, it is equally true for the seicento masterpiece of Alessandro Stradella and poet Ansaldo Ansaldi, musically and dramatically, whether in the context of the un-staged Roman oratorio that it was, or even the Venetian opera that it longs to be. It flaunts all musical and dramatic conventions of the day in ways that are wild and fascinating, which is central to its bold iconoclastic success. How, though, can such a “Salome” still have this dominant mechanism of surprise, after the deluge of shock seared upon our collective cultural memory post-Wilde and post-Strauss? How then, can the work still be made to speak with its particular revolutionary quality, and not get swallowed up in the cliches to be borne two centuries after its creation?
Stradella lived his life and approached his art in ways that were anti-establishment, that questioned all norms, and all artistic and moral conventions. He was, in all ways, at odds with the times in which he lived, and forever turning the status quo on its head. Beyond the gruesome and disturbing line of its narrative, Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista also explores the very nature of sin as something that is in antipathy to God’s will for each of us. Just as Stradella’s life and art pushed against what was morally- and sexually-normative, this production finds its solution to the proposed challenges in setting itself in a world of oppressive social- and hetero-norms, as well as the hypocrisies that are inevitably born of such times, and then pushing against those norms, those things that society presupposes to be “good” or “right”, with counter-ideas – what would now be called academically “queernesses” – that society may consider subversive and “wrong”, but which seem somehow more natural and beautiful in the light of actual observation.
While doing this, the production also acknowledges openly the present conversation inevitably happening between itself and the Salome story as told so iconically by Wilde and Strauss. It seeks to be turning societal norms and ideas of “goodness” on their head (that pun being intentional and seeming now inevitable), but also to be doing the same visually with the images that are so dominant from those later theatrical and operatic retellings. Ultimately, it does this quite literally in its final moments, in an unhinged nod to those other shabby-little-shockers before and hence.
About Stradella
Alessandro Stradella was born around 1639 in the town of Nepi, near Rome, into a family of Tuscan nobility. Though not as widely known today as some of his contemporaries, Stradella occupies a significant place in the development of Baroque music. A prolific sacred and secular composer across genres, he was instrumental in shaping the early form of the oratorio and in blending expressive vocal writing with richly textured instrumental accompaniment.
Educated and active in Rome, Stradella quickly gained recognition for his musical versatility and eloquence. He composed operas, cantatas, serenatas, and instrumental works, but it is in the realm of sacred music—particularly oratorio—that his most lasting contributions are found. His oratorios, such as San Giovanni Battista (1675), combine dramatic narrative with theological reflection, anticipating the structural and emotional innovations, a foretaste of the mature prowess of composers like Handel and Bach. This isn’t to say that Stradella’s musical language would at all be considered a primitive version of the music to come later in the high baroque. Rather, Stradella's brilliance and personal approach are wholly their own and within a style of his own making to which later composers owe some of their own personal voices. Stradella’s music is notable for its lyrical intensity, harmonic inventiveness, and dramatic pacing; qualities that made his sacred works deeply engaging to listeners both inside and outside the church.
Stradella led a notoriously tumultuous life, marked by scandal, intrigue, and periods of exile from various Italian courts. His personal affairs, particularly his romantic entanglements, often overshadowed his musical achievements in his own lifetime – fleeing Rome for embezzling Vatican funds, engaging in a sordid affair with his music pupil on Venice, who wealthy father ordered hit-men to kill him, surviving this attempt on his life only to fall until the blade of difference assassins in Genoa. His untimely and mysterious death at the age of 38 (reportedly by assassination) has fueled centuries of mythologizing, as well as serving as the source of multiple operatic treatments, including one by Flotow in which his soul is saved by a chorus of angels because of the beauty of the music he wrote. Yet, beyond the lore, his music reveals a composer of profound sensitivity, spiritual depth, and artistic originality.
“The love that dares not speak its name” - Turning “Salome” on its Head
This “Salome” is just a little different - both Stradella’s musical telling, including Ansaldo Ansaldi’s poetic libretto which it sets, and this current first staging of that work. One of the fascinating things about the original work is how it adopts a contemporaneous innovation of the visual arts wherein action is implied as taking place outside of the frame of the painting. In the case of San Giovanni Battista, clearly important events or deeper psychological states are implied, but not explored in the confines of the two acts its audience gets to experience directly.
This production uses the ambiguity this creates to transform the work into something unexpected, familiar yet outrageous. At the heart of that transformation is the critical scene in Act 1 where St John arrives in Herod’s home, unannounced, to condemn the King and preach a sermon of repentance. Early in that scene, when Herod claims not to recognize John, John replies “ben mi ravvisi…”: “I know that you recognize me, and there was a time when my presence was not un-welcomed by you”. We know nothing of the history between the two men that this line of text implies, nor do we as the audience ever discover more from the libretto text.
What comes next is a quirk of the text that allows the entire piece to be transformed in this production. In the Biblical narrative Herod has taken his deceased brother’s wife as his own (alla Hamlet). It is this incestuous relationship to which St John is referring in Stradella’s oratorio when he continues speaking to Herod and says “It is forbidden for any man to lay with his brother’s wife. What God has joined together let no man put asunder”. In their version, however, Ansaldi and Stradella have created a character referred to only as the Counselor. In this production, that character is turned into Herod’s brother himself, thereby allowing John to speak the first sentence of this line to Herod’s brother and not to Herod. It is Herod’s brother who is having the relations John condemns with Herodias. This is the first “turning on its head” (the pun very much intended) of this production. Here, John then turns back and continues speaking to Herod in one of the most beautiful lines of recitative in the oratorio: “what God has joined together let no man put asunder”, referring to the relationship between these two men now instead, the central characters in the opera, Herod and John.
Seeing Herod and John as lovers would only work if Stradella’s music and Ansaldi’s text, however, supported it. Throughout, the relationship between these two men seems more pure and well-intentioned than the motivations of the other characters, which always seem less empathetic and more depraved. Unlike the more familiar Wilde/Strauss telling, here it is Herod who is the center of the piece, it is Herod whose character arc we are meant to follow, and it is Herod who struggles and has dimensionality. Herod, from the beginning, acts with emotional rage, but ultimately pines for John. He struggles with the decision to kill John, trying everything to save the man when everyone else would like him dead. His music of remorse is aching and earnest. At the same time, John will never say an unkind word against Herod, who seems to be his only concern in this treatment of the bible tale. We continue to expect a rage aria somewhere, but are given only plaintive and yearning slow arias. John’s only moment of rage is directed towards Salome herself. Just as the Strauss/Wilde explores the complex nature of Salome’s desire, even love in some sense, for John, so here does the work seem to center on a love that is complex, unfulfilled and unfulfillable, one which, we might say, dares not speak its name. Wilde’s long shadow is present even here.
To create the tension needed to understand this central relationship as seen but not permitted, and most importantly, as dangerous in a way that can explode in violence, this production sets the events in the American suburbs of the 1970s. There is in this landscape the necessary tension between the perfect all-American family portrait in a Madison Avenue race to keep up appearances, and the sexual- and social-revolutions allowing things unsaid to finally be said. Using elements of Annie Proulx’s beloved, heartbreaking, and revolutionary 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” as a source of inspiration, as well as the acclaimed Ang Lee movie based upon it, this production leverages the tension in this time and place to ask the same essential question as the original work does about the nature of sin. God is love. These two men love each other. Is not this divine? Is not living a life that is a charade the actual sin against God? Is it not a sin to deny that we are made in God’s image, just the way that we were imagined at the beginning of time?
From this journey - unpacking John’s mysterious line, reversing the incestuous relationship, revealing the romantic nature of the text and music of John and Herod apart and together, and finding a setting where hetero-normative mores are enough at odds with emerging queer expressions as to provoke familiar violence - then opens up many of the characters in this work. Though their eventual actions are extreme, cartoonish even, we can see the motivations of Heriodias, the wounded wife of Herod struggling for his affection; and we can understand her strong hatred for John which seems so outsized in a traditional reading of Ansaldi’s text. She poisons the mind of her daughter Salome, and we get both why she weaponizes the only thing in this home that belongs to her, and why Salome is able to so easily be wielded against a father we can also see she loves. We understand the drunken antics of the counselor as he is transformed into the black-sheep brother of Herod. And, particularly, we understand the tragic and introspective nature of the work’s two central male characters.
Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss’s dramatic retellings of this ancient story focused on a desire that is spoiled, unclean, sick to its core. This desire destroys all the characters in the play and opera. It is a world rotting from the inside by its own decadence and depravity. All this is turned on its head in this production, which I believe is firmly faithful to the tone and deeper meaning, if not the narrative intention, of Stradella’s oratorio. It is the love itself, a love we, even now, are being told is sinful and wrong, which is actually the purest and most unspoiled element of the world; and it is the world that surrounds it that is violent, destructive, and ill-intended. This world crushes that love, the direction of the drama is reversed and made opposite from that of its grandly opulent successors. In this production, as Herod moves towards the cold lips of his beloved, it is a depth of sorrow and remorse, rather than Wilde’s Salome’s disgusting ecstasy, which is the final expression offered.
About Timothy Nelson
Timothy Nelson was named Artistic Director of IN Series in the Spring of 2018. Having founded and led American Opera Theater, he went on to maintain a career as director, designer, and conductor in Europe and North America, serving as Artistic Director for the Netherlands Opera Studio and the Nieuwe Stemmen program of the Rotterdam Operadagen, and creating productions for London’s Barbican, English Touring Opera, the Nationale Reisopera, Academy of Ancient Music, Iford Arts Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and others. He has been called by the New York Times “The Future of Opera.” Most recently he directed an acclaimed 2021 production of Cosi fan tutte with San Diego Opera.
With IN Series he has created pioneering work that has propelled the company to regularly lead Best of... lists in media outlets of the nation’s capital. Over the course of the 2020-2021 season Nelson developed INvision, a virtual multi-venue performing arts center housing digital content created by numerous innovative opera and theater companies across America. His own work in this platform has included films of Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice, Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, and the recently released King Harald’s Saga by Judith Weir.
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