“Nothing more Satanic or artistic has been seen on the German stage,” wrote one critic of the premiere of Salome in Ganz, Austria in 1891. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross describes the unveiling of Richard Strauss’ opera—which climaxed, like Oscar Wilde’s source play and the New Testament chapter before it, with the bloody decapitation of John the Baptist—as a primal scene for 20th-century music: a Grand Guignol collision of ripe classicism and atonal modernity that left geniuses and punters alike stupefied. Among the attendees were Gustav Mahler, Giacomo Puccini, and according to legend, a young Adolf Hitler; one note of dissent was sounded by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who snidely predicted that the show would do its composer “a lot of damage.” “Thanks to that damage,” retorted Strauss years later, “I was able to buy my villa in Garmisch!”
A radical crowd-pleaser may sound like a contradiction in terms, but Salome has been packing ’em for in for over a hundred years—including in Toronto, where Atom Egoyan mounted a stylistically wild adaptation for the Canadian Opera Company in 1996. Working with the kind of carte blanche afforded a hometown hero who’d conquered Cannes (en route to the Oscars) with The Sweet Hereafter (1996), Egoyan turned the material on its (severed) head: his Salome was an Expressionist nightmare, all slanted angles and sinister symbolism, with a nightmarish, shadowplayed rape scene and surreal, insinuating video projections playing up an incestuous subtext. These choices went beyond provocations—they placed Egoyan’s adaptation in the sweet spot between fidelity and invention.
The image of Egoyan as the heavy hitter of Canadian popular culture was pervasive in the mid-’90s. Whether it was all enough to afford the director a villa in Muskoka is a matter for his accountant, but in retrospect, the one-two punch of Salome and The Sweet Hereafter represented an undeniable peak—a claim which would necessarily consign everything since to some level or other of a vast and interestingly stratified valley. Spelunking through latter-day Egoyan is, to say the least, an adventure, but even at his lower points—like, say, the miscalibrated West Memphis Three docudrama Devil’s Knot (2013)—the director has remained resolutely and recognizably himself, not least of all in his sustaining, almost religious faith in rickety, vertiginous narrative structures, edifices testifying to a loyal, endearingly unfashionable belief in dramaturgy itself.
This staunch constancy (as opposed to consistency) makes Egoyan’s return to Strauss’ opera, both on stage with COC earlier this year and onscreen via the new drama , feel less like a nostalgic victory lap around his glory days than an organic—and welcome—addition to his filmography. With apologies to 2019’s gratifyingly weird , which featured David Thewlis in is Egoyan’s most absorbing movie in years, and probably his most brazenly self-reflexive since the first swells of the Toronto New Wave. Indeed, given its themes of inheritance and spectatorship, it could easily swap titles with either (1984) or (1987), or, in light of its subplots about thespian ambition, (1989).
