Opera librettos, like Hollywood films, are notoriously indifferent to the true representation of historical events and cavalier in their treatment of plots borrowed from literature; but—with respect to Flaubert, who must shoulder some of the responsibility—even Hollywood has rarely thought up a more preposterous distortion of a Bible story than in Herodiade. Here Salome is an innocent girl devoted to John the Baptist a who has been kind to her in her search for her unknown mother, and the two of them sing a love duet; Herodias learns that Salome is her daughter only by consulting a soothsayer; and when Herodias, demanding John's head, has him put to death Salome rushes to kill her, but on learning that this is her mother stabs herself instead. With the help of Massenet's music, which kept a prudent eye on the bourgeois audience, the whole story is sanitized: even Herod's lust for Salome is toned down to irresistible longing, his drug-inspired vision of her directed to be sung ''avec le plus grand charme''; and of course even the thought of a dance of seven veils never arises. Of the febrile, decadent atmosphere of the Wilde/Strauss opera there is no trace whatever; but despite its tame conventionality Massenet's work is by no means to be ignored. Apart from its flexible prosody (which pointed to future developments in French opera), its lyrical invention represents the highest point in his early operas before his first runaway success, Manon.
To the best of my knowledge, Herodiade has never been recorded complete: it still hasn't, for, besides the omission of the ballet music, act 4 is heavily cut in this radio performance, which oddly enough was given before an audience that was not dissuaded from hysterical outbursts after familiar arias (and broke in with smothered applause at one orchestral juncture) or coughing in quiet moments (such as the introduction to ''Vision fugitive''). The Orchestre Lyrique in 1974, as I well remember from my own experience with it, was not Radio France's pride and joy; but give or take one or two hairy moments and false entries, an occasional bout of ragged ensemble, and the odd singers' mistakes common in the heat of the moment, David Lloyd-Jones succeeded in getting a very fair performance that now serviceably fills a gap in the recorded repertoire. Chief honours are taken by NadineDenize in the title-role: she shows quality both in fury (as in her outrage at her denunciation by John) and in tenderness (her ''Ne me refuse pas'' wheedling of Herod). Ernest Blanc is in fine voice, even though he doesn't make Herod's vacillations altogether convincing; but he is unaccountably faulty in rhythm in ''Vision fugitive'' (which nevertheless receives a thunderous minute-long ovation from the audience) and adds an unnecessary barnstorming high A flat at the end of ''Demande au prisonnier'' (again greeted with shouts of ''Bravo!''). The casting of Salome presents a problem: her entries are signalled orchestrally by a girlish tripping figure, but her vocal part calls for anything but a girlish voice, and Muriel de Channes, the possessor of a rich lyrical tone and an admirably firm upper register, cannot really be blamed if the Salome whose imagine she conjures up sounds rather mature. Jean Brazzi makes an unpromising first entrance, with a heavy vibrato, but he improves to make an acceptable, if beefy, John the Baptist.
On the technical side the balance is mostly good, and such shortcomings as there are seem attributed to the orchestra itself—brass which tends to be assertive, and rather thin violins whose pizzicato in the brief Act 2 dance of Babylonian slaves is too weak. No attempt has been made to edit the recording of the broadcast, and in the transfer to LP there is a clumsy change-over from Sides 1 to 2: on Compact Disc (whose overall quality does not differ greatly) the change-over point comes, unbelievably, less than four minutes before the end of Act 2.'