Sinéad Campbell Wallace on Salome: ‘It’s just an onslaught. You literally can feel it on your skin and in your body’

Opera singers may be billed to the public as sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, tenors, basses, baritones or countertenors, but in their professional world the list is much, much longer.

It’s based on a set of German designations that allocates singers to a particular Fach, a word whose meanings include expert, specialist and pigeonhole. Once you’ve been identified as soubrette, lyric coloratura, lyric, dramatic coloratura, spinto, dramatic or heavy dramatic, you have been typecast not just in terms of the expected range, colour and effect of your voice but also in terms of the kinds of characterisation you are expected to handle and the roles you can be expected to know and be hired for.

A decade or so ago the soprano Sinéad Campbell Wallace took a five-year break to concentrate on family. When she resumed her career it turned out to be with a different voice quality that drew her “into the heavier-lyric, dramatic repertoire”. So making an appearance in the title role of Richard Strauss’s Salome, the highly expressionist 1905 opera based on the Oscar Wilde play, is not something she was ever schooled for.

Strauss’s take on it was that the orchestra was number one. That the lead role, if you like, isn’t Salome: it’s the orchestra

She first encountered the work in Joël Lauwers’s 1999 production for Opera Ireland. “I remember seeing it and thinking that it was wild, like absolutely. I don’t think I’d ever really seen anything like it before,” she says. “At that point I never could have imagined singing it or singing anything like it.” Even when she had resumed her career and someone mentioned Salome to her, “I still thought, oh, God, absolutely no, no way.”

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Campbell Wallace says that in recent years it has become more popular to use heavy lyric sopranos rather than full dramatic sopranos in the role, “once your voice has that kind of a speed or quality that can cut through an orchestra. It’s not so much about the colour of the voice, necessarily, more about the audibility.” And directors come into it, too, because Salome is actually supposed to be a teenager. “If you look a certain way, as the industry is certainly driving towards at the moment, then that’s something that’s of interest to them, and of interest to opera companies.

She started to think more seriously about the role two or three years ago. When the opera came up in a discussion with INO’s artistic director, Fergus Sheil – the company is on a kind of Strauss binge at the moment – the die was cast. “And it is a beast of a role.”

Campbell Wallace’s strongest memory of her 1999 introduction to the work was “the orchestra, I have to say. The orchestral world that it creates. That was something I hadn’t heard before. And it’s just an onslaught. You literally can feel it on your skin and in your body. It’s overpowering, overwhelming in the real sense of the word. I’ve since read that Strauss’s take on it was that the orchestra was number one. That the lead role, if you like, isn’t Salome: it’s the orchestra, the orchestral playing, and that whole magic that he creates, orchestrally. So I really get that.

“I do remember the singer” – the American soprano Karen Notare – “and that it was absolutely mental. She struck me as being, like, unhinged and possessed by something. At the time that wasn’t, to me, what classical music was like; it was much more contained and more beautiful. I think I was bitten at that point by the Strauss bug. It was sort of crazy and interesting.”

Campbell Wallace (whose upcoming roles include Gutrune in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in concert with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski, Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Savonlinna Festival in Finland and, further ahead, her American debut with Washington National Opera) says the singing is not the greatest challenge. “Even though it’s such an intense sing, a difficult sing, the singing is probably the easiest part of it. It’s everything else that takes you over. The emotional aspect of the psychology of it, the physicality of it, trying to portray this multidimensional person, slightly crazy, slightly unhinged, but young, so young, so affected by the situation she’s in, and suffering from some kind of a psychotic episode. There’s all that backstory.

“I suppose inhabiting her has been the most challenging part. And she’s been with me all the time since I started learning it. She’s just been with me all the time. So I affectionately call her Sally, and my mum will say, ‘How’s Sally today?’ or I’ll text my mum and say, ‘Oh, I’m just here with Sally.’ More than any other role I’ve ever done, she’s just completely just taken me over.”

Is Salome a twisted character? “I don’t think so, actually. I think her reaction and the psychology of what she’s doing is a very normal reaction to the situation that she’s in. So it’s a situational tragedy, I suppose. She’s dealing with this overbearing mother, and this stepfather/uncle who is lascivious, or certainly looks at her in a certain way. There’s all this thing about him looking and looking at her. It’s a huge thing in the text of Oscar Wilde. It’s almost like one has to look at her but then, oh no, you shouldn’t. You put yourself into the situation that she’s in and then it’s just a very natural progression from there.”

So how do you get from her being disgusted by Herod’s advances to wanting John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter? “I think it’s certainly a coming of age; it’s certainly a sexual awakening. That’s number one for her, for the character. John the Baptist becomes the vehicle for that sexual awakening, that feeling the heat of it, the fact that it’s sort of overtaking her. Then we come back to the person that she is in terms of getting what she wants, getting what she asks for, as she always does. All of a sudden that’s denied to her. Rather than it be a disgusting scene where this crazy woman is singing basically a love duet, on her own, to this head dripping with blood.

[ Sinéad Campbell Wallace on returning to opera: ‘It’s in my bones’ ]

“What’s most important to me is to make her as human as I possibly can. I think there are moments in it where she has realised that she has instigated this. So there’s a terrible pain and sorrow within her that she wanted this man; she wanted to kiss this man. And in a psychotic moment, or a neurotic moment, she demanded that this be done. But I think there’s a lot to be found in the text and the music that there is a huge regret in her also. She has the head, you know; she’s allowed to kiss it. But it’s not him, you know; it’s not the passion that she wanted; it’s not the love that she wanted. And she says, if only you’d looked at me, if only you’d seen me, almost dot dot dot, this would never have happened, we could have been happy together, we could have run off into the distance and the horizon and could have left all of this behind. There’s loss and grief as well.”

After all, Strauss himself did write that “anyone who has been in the east and has observed the decorum with which women there behave will appreciate that Salome, being a chaste virgin and an oriental princess, must be played with the simplest and most restrained of gestures, unless her defeat by the miracle of a great world is to excite only disgust and terror instead of sympathy”.

Although she’s not a dancer, Campbell Wallace will herself do the 9½-minute Dance of the Seven Veils, choreographed by Liz Roche. “It’s long, and we’re trying to have a narrative through it. So there’s storytelling through the physical movement as well.” And after that she’s got to resume singing, “get myself together again to sing the last 15 or so minutes of the piece, which is probably some of the most difficult vocal writing that he wrote for soprano, so it’s a challenge.”

Irish National Opera’s production of Strauss’s Salome, directed by Bruno Ravella, designed by Leslie Travers and conducted by Fergus Sheil, is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday, March 12th, Thursday, March 14th, and Saturday, March 16th