Super Salome

While the snare drums sizzled and the crowd gasped, two girls in tights stood on eight-foot pedestals a stage width apart, one with an end of a wire about her neck, the second holding the other end with her teeth. A man mounted the slack wire, stretched himself out flat-backed and flipped himself over and over. The gymnasts were Germany's famed Goltz Trio, making its successful rounds of the U.S. vaudeville circuit 40 years ago. Last week Christel Goltz, the wire walker's 34-year-old daughter, made her U.S. debut as another kind of acrobat: at New York's Metropolitan Opera she zoomed through the high, precarious passages of Richard Strauss's Salome.

Soprano Goltz whirled, rolled and jumped across the stage as if she were trying to revive her father's old act. As Herod's stepdaughter, she covered more mileage on foot, belly and back than any Salome in memory. But she gave an overpowering impression of the willful, depraved teenager, from her disheveled entrance to her final kisses on the lips of John the Baptist's severed head. Soprano Goltz (a strikingly versatile singer with a repertory of 116 roles, ranging from Musetta to Elektra) is most famous for her appearances in Richard Strauss's operas in Vienna, and last week she proved why. She sang the fiendishly hard music with complete mastery and with silvery smoothness, even when her voice had to pierce through the orchestra's loudest blasts.

Perhaps the only thing wrong with Salome was the "Dance of the Seven Veils," which was about five veils too long. It is musically insipid in an otherwise brilliant score, and Soprano Goltz, though originally trained as a ballet dancer, did not make it seem any better as she determinedly stripped to her white petticoat. Otherwise, Salome emerged as the great opera it is, its nervous, passionate music brilliantly conducted by another newcomer to the Met, the New York Philharmonic-Symphony's Dimitri Mitropoulos. With his long arms and shiny bald head making him look like a gnome in the orchestra pit, he turned the Met orchestra into a raging, powerful instrument that swept the action along at peak excitement.