Brief Comment On Jürgen Flimm's Production Of Strauss's Salome

[Note: This post has been edited extensively as of 1:53 PM Eastern on 12 Jun to add missing detail, and to make more temperate our initial too-extreme expression of contempt in calling the production "imbecile".]

We for the first time saw via PBS the Met's HD film of this Met production, and, Konzept-wise, everything about it was pointless, predictable, and lame. Salome is a work about private and perverse obsessions pervaded by a mystic, brooding miasma of spiritual decadence and evil, but the stage was so cluttered by a pointless, modern-day, detailed set (apparently an outdoor, man-made oasis adjacent to or part of the desert mansion of a decadent, 20th-century super-rich) — a set that seemed designed expressly to cause maiming bodily injury to any singer who made the slightest misstep — and peopled by an equally pointless drinks-in-hand gaggle of decadent, modern-day tuxedoed and gowned supernumeraries milling about seemingly in search of something to do, that the pervasive, brooding, mystic context that informs and conditions the work was all but lost entirely right from the get-go.

Something needs to be done about this sort of ham-fistedly metaphorical Eurotrash. It really, truly does. It needs doing away with — permanently and forever.

(Oh, in case you were wondering, Mattila was superb as always, the pointless Konzept notwithstanding.)