Looking for Love in a Hall of Mannequins

It can be surprisingly easy to upset an opera audience. For Claus Guth, director of the new production of Salome at the Deutsche Oper, the recipe was simple: take one much-loved operatic staple, set it in an upscale men’s clothing shop circa the mid-twentieth century, replace the risqué dance number at the centre of the work with a flashback sequence containing uncomfortable suggestions of child abuse, then sit back and wait for the booing to roll in.

Yet the audience outrage that inevitably erupted when Mr Guth and his team took the stage seemed wholly out of proportion to the perceived offence. Not only was this new Salome a work of great dramatic cohesion and psychological depth, it was also surprisingly demure, relying more on subtle suggestion than outright battery of the senses. When combined with a central quartet of excellent…