If you know anything about Oscar Wilde, you know that he was Gay, transgressive, and brilliant. Salome, the most shocking of his works for theater, contains sexual obsession, murder, incest, suicide, adultery, necrophilia, and Salome’s “dance of the seven veils,” which is usually staged as a striptease.

Richard Strauss adapted Wilde’s disturbing play, based on a disturbing New Testament episode, into a disturbing opera. It isn’t Gay, but it’s certainly transgressive and brilliant. 

The basic plot is lurid in the extreme. Herod desires his stepdaughter Salome, who rejects him. Salome desires Jochanaan (John the Baptist), whom Herod has imprisoned; Jochanaan rejects her. Herod offers Salome any gift she wants if she will dance for him. She dances, and then demands the head of Jochanaan on a silver platter.

Seattle Opera’s current production is by far the best I’ve ever witnessed: the staging directed by Bruno Ravella is simple and effective, the singing on opening night was uniformly excellent, and the 80 members of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Benjamin Manis, played superbly.

Orchestral music is at the heart of every Strauss opera. The score of Salome is exceptionally complex and dense, and Manis (who had never conducted a Strauss opera before) did a great job of filling the hall with lush sound without ever drowning out the singers. In the post-performance Q&A session, Manis credited the set — a shell like an outdoor amphitheater, originally designed by Leslie Travers for the Irish National Opera — with amplifying the singers’ voices and making his task easier.

Ravella found an ingenious solution to the problem of portraying an aboveground banquet in a garden, and then descending to the underground prison cell of Jochanaan (baritone Michael Kupfer-Radecky, in an outstanding performance). The garden is represented by a flowering tree, which rises to expose a circular pool at the bottom of the shell-shaped cistern. The pool is central to the dramatic action, and the dangling roots of the tree produce water that falls into the pool and drenches the singers. It’s a breathtakingly simple and beautiful concept.

This production updates the setting from the first-century court of Herod to the home of a modern billionaire oligarch, which resonates well with an audience aware of the current political climate.