Ljuba Welitsch Is Salome

I first heard Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Chicago Lyric Opera when I was a kid, in the production with Maria Ewing where she was fully nude at the end of her dance of the seven veils. Ewing was excellent, and her performance held up when I recently looked at and listened to the film of it. But when I heard Ljuba Welitsch sing Salome, first in a recording of the last scene from 1944 and then in a live performance from the Met from 1949, I was agog, transported. And ever since, La Welitsch is Salome to me, and I really never want to listen to any other singer even try to sing this role.

Welitsch was born in Bulgaria in 1913, and Strauss himself coached her for the 1944 performance. She caused a sensation wherever she sang her Salome for around ten years, but at age 40 her voice was already starting to go, and so Welitsch transitioned to acting on stage and on film. Her voice as Salome is perfection because it is a piercing voice, hard and inflexible and stubborn, both childish and deadly. I’ve heard that when she sang it at the Met that Welitsch would actually sit on the severed head of John the Baptist and grind on it suggestively, and that some audience members would flee up the aisles at such effrontery.

Below is a link to the 1944 performance and the full opera from 1949, with an interview with her at the end. Treat yourself to them.