Veils aside

The Flemish Opera presents a new Hérodiade, and Salome has never been more sinless

For an opera house these days to programme anything by 19th-century French composer Jules Massenet is a risky business. Not because of any kinky scenes or jarring sounds that might offend viewers' sensibilities. Quite the opposite: whatever whiff of scandal these works may have had in Massenet's lifetime has long evaporated, leaving only stilted, implausible plots and old-fashioned melodies that seem straight out of a crackling vintage recording.

But there are signs that Massenet may be slowly wheedling his way back into our modern sensitivities. In 2007, De Munt in Brussels put on a riveting production of Werther that involved French tenor Ludovic Tézier and US mezzo Jennifer Larmore. French conductor and tastemaker Marc Minkowski conducted Don Quichotte, also at De Munt, in May last year, and will be revisiting Cendrillon at Paris' Opéra Comique next month.

But right now the spotlight is on Hérodiade, which is about to be staged at the Flemish Opera by Joachim Schlömer, an exciting German dancer and choreographer turned stage director, with house conductor Dmitri Jurowski in the pit.

It is exactly 130 years since the work was premièred, at De Munt of all places. It was initially destined for the Paris stage, but Massenet had to fall back on Brussels when the French organisers got cold feet about its so-called immoral subject matter.

It is hard, today, to understand what the fuss was all about. Granted, the plot is borrowed from one of the most seething stories in the New Testament - the death of John the Baptist around 36 AD - that also inspired Richard Strauss' Salome. But while Salome, based on a short story by Oscar Wilde, is a tinderbox in its style and content, Hérodiade is like its timid twin sister - sharing the same DNA but a lot tamer in character.

Far from the depraved teenager depicted by Strauss, Salome is portrayed here as a victim - an abandoned child who has no idea who her mother is. The famous dance of the seven veils is skipped, as is the scene where she asks Herod for John's head on a platter; Herodias is alone responsible for orchestrating John's death.

Provided one doesn't mind these drastic departures from the Biblical source, there's a lot to be admired in Hérodiade. The string of unhappy love interests - Herodias loves Herod, who loves Salomé, who loves John, who'd rather not be involved in any earthly love at all - has the formal elegance of a 17th-century French tragedy. Musically, the opera is a peculiar mixture of German influences and exotic trappings, which has caused one unkind critic to describe it as "musk-flavoured sauerkraut".

Others prefer to see it as a precursor of Debussy, with its long drawn-out melodies that never seem to settle into any particular mood but hover in and out of arias, treating the libretto as prose rather than verse. See it in this production, which stars Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio as Salomé, Serbian tenor Zoran Todorovich as John and Russian mezzo Julia Gertseva as the formidable Herodias, and it may well grow on you.