Music: Strip Tease

The Dance of the Seven Veils in Richard Strauss’s Salome has always been the despair of opera impresarios. Problem: to find a soprano hefty enough to sing the music, loose-limbed enough to do the dance, shapely enough to weather the moderate public disrobing.

A generation ago, when supple, stage-wise Mary Garden performed this apotheosis of the strip tease, she brought down the house. But when the teetering Swedish soprano, Goeta Ljungberg. undertook the role at Manhattan’s Metropolitan in 1934, her chiffon-hung shuffling drew titters. Not only was Soprano Ljungberg a dithering dancer, she annoyed the cash customers by starting her dance costumed like a cyclone-swept handkerchief counter, finishing it fully clothed.

Last week Salome was revived at the Met, with buxom Australian-born Marjorie Lawrence in the role of Strauss’s necrophilic heroine. Soprano Lawrence, who had been coached by Japanese Dancer Nimura, peeled herself like a true Judean temptress, ended unabashed in nothing much but a black net. Solemn music critics agreed that Lawrence was both vocally and visually one of the most lavishly endowed of all Salomes.