ABSTRACT
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan offers a strong reading of Richard Strauss's opera, one willing to raise a number of questions about the work and its accrued meanings. At the same time, his production refuses to reproduce a conventional account of the eponymous heroine as a cunning little vixen. If this was a scandalous Salome, then in large part it was because it was not a familiar one. Opera critics, like opera audiences, are not yet entirely literate in the growing number of re-readings that are gracing the opera stages of North America. In Toronto, Egoyan's production came under severe attack by a music critic for the National Post, who complained that the production's account of Salome's rape offended her as a woman and a Jew. Until recently, opera production in North America was unduly insular, its borders carefully patrolled, ostensibly in order to protect the integrity of the genre, but ultimately in order to fend off unfamiliar artistic influence.
