Opera: Last Week, East Berlin

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The lights came up on the curtainless stage of East Berlin's Komische Oper last week, and there, pregnant with portents of disaster, hung a textured moon that looked like a fly's swollen eye. A shock. When John the Baptist was pulled barefoot from his cistern prison, his long matted hair hung down to his animal skin sarong. Another shock. Then came Salome with her veils and her dances, and in a spirit perfectly suggested by the jewel stuck in her navel, she treated an earnest audience to a performance of Strauss's shocker that came straight from the libido. For its new Salome under the sophisticated hand of Director Götz Friedrich, 32, the Komische Oper signaled its intentions by tacking up a "No One Under 18 Admitted" sign at the box office. With Czech Soprano Jarmila Rudolfova as Salome, Friedrich had a tiger to inspire him and he made the most of it; after researching such questions as the typical nighttime temperature in Judea in A.D. 30 to ensure authenticity, Friedrich decided the production should be, above all, sexy. It was. Backlighting stripped Rudolfova of her seven veils before her dance had even begun, and when it reached its wild climax, she stood among her abandoned robes dressed only in a St. Tropez bikini. Later, moving in an almost ritualistic trance, she slithered to the floorboards to plant a 60-second kiss on the lips of the apostle's severed head, thus achieving a moment of nightmare delight that brought a horrified gasp from the packed house. The East Berlin press was justly enthusiastic about Friedrich's production and Rudolfova's performance, but the sticky thing was to explain what all this decadence had to do with art in a Workers' and Peasants' Paradise. The ideological Neues Deutschland quoted Lenin and observed that the opera epitomized the downfall of Herod's degenerate court, and was therefore historically instructive. It was better, said Neues Deutschland, than Luchino Visconti's 1961 production at Spoleto (where John was "a proletarian upon whose class consciousness Salome comes to grief") or Wieland Wagner's West Berlin production last December, in which religiosity was emphasized. But connoisseurs of the basic Salome, who do not bother themselves with such matters, were content to say that Rudolfova was the sexiest Salome since Margaret Tynes —or maybe even that red-haired genius, Ljuba Welitch.