What’s most disturbing about Salome, both Oscar Wilde’s one-act “tragedy” and Richard Strauss’s one-act opera (whose libretto is essentially a German translation of Wilde’s original French), is not what the Boston Lyric Opera has been advertising as a “Biblical scandal” — the tale, briefly mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, about King Herod’s unnamed stepdaughter who in exchange for dancing for the Tetrarch wants John the Baptist’s head on a platter. For Wilde in 1892, and then for Strauss in 1905, this was a psychological fable about the self-destructiveness — and the grandeur — of uncontrolled obsession (perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, did the play’s English translation).

Salome’s rival for the Baptist’s attention is God. And when Jokanaan (John) reviles her, rejects body for spirit, she’ll stop at nothing to get what she wants, which is not just revenge but consummation. Her reason is overwhelmed by her desire. By the end, when she kisses the mouth of the severed head, she’s demented. But how demented is it to exclaim, “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death”? The bitter taste on John’s lips is “the taste of love.” Herod calls this not “crazy” but “monstrous.” This Salome is so subversive, she has to be destroyed.

Leon Major’s production, in cooperation with Cooperstown’s Glimmerglass Opera, went seriously awry in its emphasis on Salome as a spoiled teenager. In the early part of the opera, Major seems to want us to think Salome’s interest in Jokanaan is just a whim. Later, Salome giggles when Jokanaan is executed (and so did everyone sitting around me). For Wilde and Strauss, though, this character isn’t a giggler. She is deadly serious. Their very point is not that she’s a mental case, or merely spoiled, but that she does what any of us might do to fulfill our desires if those desires were strong enough to carry us beyond the restraints of civilized society. By diminishing this powerful central idea, the Lyric production becomes more titillating than dramatically compelling.

Major’s basic blocking, too, lacks strong definition. Too often characters seem to wander aimlessly around the stage, or around Jokanaan’s cistern, though it’s a good touch to have Salome end her Dance of the Seven Veils on top of the cistern cover. At the end, Wilde disposes of Salome by having the guards crush her with their shields, just as the Sabine soldiers crushed Tarpeia after she betrayed Rome. Major has the guards stabbing her with their spears. In this production, it’s not the only example of overkill.

The Lyric’s Salome is soprano Marquita Lister, once a student at New England Conservatory, now on her way to a big international career. She’s the daughter of devout Baptists — she told the Globe’s Richard Dyer that she was reluctant to accept this role before consulting with her parents. And though I think Major misconceives the character, Lister still gives a performance of considerable intensity. Her voice doesn’t have the laser penetration of the great Salomes of the past (Ljuba Welitsch, Birgit Nilsson), or much tonal variety, but its focus and prettiness — except when she’s pushing too hard over the orchestral climaxes, or shrieking and growling — convey her youthfulness and vulnerability.

She also moves well. She can actually dance. Through most of the Dance of the Seven Veils, choreographer Nicola Bowie has her weaving around and under kitschy silk scarves flapped up and down by handmaidens. Not much in the way of erotic suggestiveness, until at the very end blatant sexuality takes over. Herod awkwardly unhitches Salome’s complicated bodice and exposes her breasts. Yet Lister manages to keep her dignity and integrity. Maybe her best “movement” comes when she is sulking in silence, sitting on the edge of the stage. In her final monologue, undermined by a patently phony, lightweight, and ridiculously dripping severed head (another giggle getter), she’s still pretty convincing.

The production itself is “Modern” and ugly. Andrew Jackness has little on the stage except the hole for Jokanaan’s cistern. But hanging over the entire stage is a coffered ceiling that looks like the awning of a convention center. Johann Stegmeir’s costumes include gray Confederate uniforms for the soldiers (but with spears instead of muskets), candy-striped robes for the Jews, and evening gowns for Salome and Herodias, her mother, the Queen of Judea (mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler, directed by Major to be a kind of angry Gertrude staggering around the stage in inebriated frowziness). Jokanaan (baritone Christopher Robertson) wears a filthy robe and has matted long hair but, unusual for a John the Baptist, no beard. He’s also kind of beefy, and Jeff Harris’s lighting makes his skin look yellow. Salome’s lines about nothing being as beautiful Jokanaan’s black hair or as white as the “ivory column” of his body got a few more chuckles.

Beyond Lister, the singing is mostly acceptable without being exceptional. From my seat under the balcony overhang, the diction was even more muffled than usual at the Shubert (though I could read the supertitles quite clearly). Robertson’s voice lacks heroic or spiritual fire. Tenor David Corman is especially effective in the role of Narraboth, the young captain of the guards who is so infatuated with Salome that he stabs himself when he witnesses her passion for the Holy Man. (Major misses the point here, too: Salome is meant to be so obsessed with Jokanaan that she looks right past the suicide in front of her, but Major stages it behind her back.)

As Herod, tenor Dennis Petersen is vocally thin. He’s been directed to be something of a cross between a Harpo Marx chasing Salome around the stage and getting tangled in her veils and a dithering Bert Lahr cowardly trying to talk Salome out of her demand for the head.

Stephen Lord has a strong, energetic, and occasionally elegant orchestra (in Strauss’s later reduction), and he leads it with sweep and flair, though perhaps if his tempos had been just a shade slower, the music might have carried more weight and conviction at every moment. (Remaining performances of Salome are February 2 and 4.)

ONE OF THE MAJOR PROJECTS of this 30th-anniversary year of Emmanuel Music was the concert performance by our leading Handelians of one of the most obscure of Handel’s operas, Admeto, King of Thessaly. Handel scholar Ellen Harris told me during the intermission that the only previous American performance she’s aware of was in San Francisco in 1979. Boston Cecilia director Donald Teeters, another Handel expert, probably echoed most of the crowd by admitting he had never heard a note of this three-and-a-half-hour score.

The opera gets off to a good start, with an insinuating minor-key overture. But the first act seemed more compelling dramatically than musically — dealing with the myth of Alcestis, who takes her life in order to save her husband, Admetus. Then Hercules brings her back from the dead. (There’s both a Euripides play and a great Milton sonnet — “Methought I saw my late espoused saint” — on this theme, and a later opera by Gluck.) On first hearing, Handel’s music seemed more conventional than inspired — not as memorable as his operas of a few years earlier (Giulio Cesare, Rodelinda) or his oratorios of a few years later (like Hercules, which Emmanuel did last season). With a major exception: “Luce care” (“Dearest eyes”), Alceste’s exquisite, plangent lullaby, in which she decides to die for Admeto. This was radiantly and expressively sung by soprano Kendra Colton, with Julia Scolnick playing the melancholy flute obbligato.

Eventually Handel veers from the mythic/heroic plot into a psychological romance, ultimately unresolved yet oddly convincing, in which Admeto admits he loves both his dead wife (like Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife or Rex Harrison in Blithe Spirit) and the Trojan princess Antigona, the woman he was originally supposed to marry (and who still loves him) but didn’t because his brother, Trasimede, fell in love with her picture and gave his brother someone else’s.

The music keeps getting better, though — and more surprising. Where it isn’t sublime, some startling little melodic or harmonic turn would catch me off guard and take my breath away. Most of the individual numbers are quite short, and that keeps everything moving. In act two, Ercole (Hercules, sung with articulate coloratura by baritone Mark McSweeney) rescues Alceste from the demons of Hell to the accompaniment of musical lightning flashes and darting flames. Admeto has a long, magnificently tormented recitative and aria. In act three, Alceste, in a fit of jealousy, breaks off Antigona’s plaintive love song to Admeto’s picture. But she gets arrested, so Antigona starts over again and this time, lucky for us, gets to sing it all the way through.

Handel used both two castrati and two rival sopranos, creating fascinating vocal textures and dramatic confrontations. Admeto was the dark-voiced and dramatic American countertenor Jeffrey Gall; his brother was the lyric countertenor Drew Minter. Soprano Lisa Saffer’s glittering silver balanced Colton’s smooth velvet. Then they’d reverse their techniques, with Colton providing the coloratura dazzle and Saffer the lyric warmth. And there was powerful support from mezzo-soprano Pamela Dellal (the guard Orindo) and bass David Kravitz (Meraspe, Antigona’s protector).

What can I say about the Emmanuel Orchestra I haven’t been saying for 30 years? It breathes this music. And conductor Craig Smith, the heart and soul of Emmanuel Music, lets the music breathe. His Handel unfolds so naturally, he might fool you into thinking it was all effortless, or unthinking, until you realize how much variety he gets, how inexorable every note has become, and how gripped you’ve been for four fleeting hours.

A VERY BRIGHT LIGHT went out last week. Robert Garis, retired professor of English at Wellesley, former chair of both the English and Biology Departments, was also one of our most profound and eloquent writers on literature (The Dickens Theater), film (for Partisan Review), and dance (he called his intellectual autobiography Following Balanchine). He died of brain cancer at 76. He was completing his next book, a study of Orson Welles.

Irascible, difficult, and demanding as he was (some of his Wellesley students called him “God Garis”), he gave his ferocious intellect to the idea of art and what makes art great. “I don’t offer myself as a representative follower of the arts or an average one — such categories are empty,” he writes in the opening paragraph of Following Balanchine. Yet he was a living example for both his students and his friends of the passion for art and the importance (for him, the necessity) of making judgments and critical distinctions. “The judging I did instead of making art,” he writes, “did not seem negative or a substitute for something better. . . . Though I wasn’t making art — I was making myself, I was judging art in order to form and express an identity.”

I met Garis 38 years ago, and our conversations — about Toscanini; about Mozart and Verdi; about certain singers; about Balanchine and his greatest dancers, Suzanne Farrell, Violette Verdy, and Edward Villella; about Preston Sturges; about H.H. Richardson — became a crucial foundation for my own thinking about what makes art come to life: drama, expressivity, shapeliness, wit. And when I think back to those countless evenings we spent listening to and talking about glorious music, it’s clear that what those discussions were really about was what gives vitality to life itself.

Just as those animated discussions surely added to the vitality of our own lives.

What’s most disturbing about Salome, both Oscar Wilde’s one-act “tragedy” and Richard Strauss’s one-act opera (whose libretto is essentially a German translation of Wilde’s original French), is not what the Boston Lyric Opera has been advertising as a “Biblical scandal” — the tale, briefly mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, about King Herod’s unnamed stepdaughter who in exchange for dancing for the Tetrarch wants John the Baptist’s head on a platter. For Wilde in 1892, and then for Strauss in 1905, this was a psychological fable about the self-destructiveness — and the grandeur — of uncontrolled obsession (perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, did the play’s English translation).

Salome’s rival for the Baptist’s attention is God. And when Jokanaan (John) reviles her, rejects body for spirit, she’ll stop at nothing to get what she wants, which is not just revenge but consummation. Her reason is overwhelmed by her desire. By the end, when she kisses the mouth of the severed head, she’s demented. But how demented is it to exclaim, “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death”? The bitter taste on John’s lips is “the taste of love.” Herod calls this not “crazy” but “monstrous.” This Salome is so subversive, she has to be destroyed.

Leon Major’s production, in cooperation with Cooperstown’s Glimmerglass Opera, went seriously awry in its emphasis on Salome as a spoiled teenager. In the early part of the opera, Major seems to want us to think Salome’s interest in Jokanaan is just a whim. Later, Salome giggles when Jokanaan is executed (and so did everyone sitting around me). For Wilde and Strauss, though, this character isn’t a giggler. She is deadly serious. Their very point is not that she’s a mental case, or merely spoiled, but that she does what any of us might do to fulfill our desires if those desires were strong enough to carry us beyond the restraints of civilized society. By diminishing this powerful central idea, the Lyric production becomes more titillating than dramatically compelling.

Major’s basic blocking, too, lacks strong definition. Too often characters seem to wander aimlessly around the stage, or around Jokanaan’s cistern, though it’s a good touch to have Salome end her Dance of the Seven Veils on top of the cistern cover. At the end, Wilde disposes of Salome by having the guards crush her with their shields, just as the Sabine soldiers crushed Tarpeia after she betrayed Rome. Major has the guards stabbing her with their spears. In this production, it’s not the only example of overkill.

The Lyric’s Salome is soprano Marquita Lister, once a student at New England Conservatory, now on her way to a big international career. She’s the daughter of devout Baptists — she told the Globe’s Richard Dyer that she was reluctant to accept this role before consulting with her parents. And though I think Major misconceives the character, Lister still gives a performance of considerable intensity. Her voice doesn’t have the laser penetration of the great Salomes of the past (Ljuba Welitsch, Birgit Nilsson), or much tonal variety, but its focus and prettiness — except when she’s pushing too hard over the orchestral climaxes, or shrieking and growling — convey her youthfulness and vulnerability.

She also moves well. She can actually dance. Through most of the Dance of the Seven Veils, choreographer Nicola Bowie has her weaving around and under kitschy silk scarves flapped up and down by handmaidens. Not much in the way of erotic suggestiveness, until at the very end blatant sexuality takes over. Herod awkwardly unhitches Salome’s complicated bodice and exposes her breasts. Yet Lister manages to keep her dignity and integrity. Maybe her best “movement” comes when she is sulking in silence, sitting on the edge of the stage. In her final monologue, undermined by a patently phony, lightweight, and ridiculously dripping severed head (another giggle getter), she’s still pretty convincing.

The production itself is “Modern” and ugly. Andrew Jackness has little on the stage except the hole for Jokanaan’s cistern. But hanging over the entire stage is a coffered ceiling that looks like the awning of a convention center. Johann Stegmeir’s costumes include gray Confederate uniforms for the soldiers (but with spears instead of muskets), candy-striped robes for the Jews, and evening gowns for Salome and Herodias, her mother, the Queen of Judea (mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler, directed by Major to be a kind of angry Gertrude staggering around the stage in inebriated frowziness). Jokanaan (baritone Christopher Robertson) wears a filthy robe and has matted long hair but, unusual for a John the Baptist, no beard. He’s also kind of beefy, and Jeff Harris’s lighting makes his skin look yellow. Salome’s lines about nothing being as beautiful Jokanaan’s black hair or as white as the “ivory column” of his body got a few more chuckles.

Beyond Lister, the singing is mostly acceptable without being exceptional. From my seat under the balcony overhang, the diction was even more muffled than usual at the Shubert (though I could read the supertitles quite clearly). Robertson’s voice lacks heroic or spiritual fire. Tenor David Corman is especially effective in the role of Narraboth, the young captain of the guards who is so infatuated with Salome that he stabs himself when he witnesses her passion for the Holy Man. (Major misses the point here, too: Salome is meant to be so obsessed with Jokanaan that she looks right past the suicide in front of her, but Major stages it behind her back.)

As Herod, tenor Dennis Petersen is vocally thin. He’s been directed to be something of a cross between a Harpo Marx chasing Salome around the stage and getting tangled in her veils and a dithering Bert Lahr cowardly trying to talk Salome out of her demand for the head.

Stephen Lord has a strong, energetic, and occasionally elegant orchestra (in Strauss’s later reduction), and he leads it with sweep and flair, though perhaps if his tempos had been just a shade slower, the music might have carried more weight and conviction at every moment. (Remaining performances of Salome are February 2 and 4.)

ONE OF THE MAJOR PROJECTS of this 30th-anniversary year of Emmanuel Music was the concert performance by our leading Handelians of one of the most obscure of Handel’s operas, Admeto, King of Thessaly. Handel scholar Ellen Harris told me during the intermission that the only previous American performance she’s aware of was in San Francisco in 1979. Boston Cecilia director Donald Teeters, another Handel expert, probably echoed most of the crowd by admitting he had never heard a note of this three-and-a-half-hour score.

The opera gets off to a good start, with an insinuating minor-key overture. But the first act seemed more compelling dramatically than musically — dealing with the myth of Alcestis, who takes her life in order to save her husband, Admetus. Then Hercules brings her back from the dead. (There’s both a Euripides play and a great Milton sonnet — “Methought I saw my late espoused saint” — on this theme, and a later opera by Gluck.) On first hearing, Handel’s music seemed more conventional than inspired — not as memorable as his operas of a few years earlier (Giulio Cesare, Rodelinda) or his oratorios of a few years later (like Hercules, which Emmanuel did last season). With a major exception: “Luce care” (“Dearest eyes”), Alceste’s exquisite, plangent lullaby, in which she decides to die for Admeto. This was radiantly and expressively sung by soprano Kendra Colton, with Julia Scolnick playing the melancholy flute obbligato.

Eventually Handel veers from the mythic/heroic plot into a psychological romance, ultimately unresolved yet oddly convincing, in which Admeto admits he loves both his dead wife (like Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife or Rex Harrison in Blithe Spirit) and the Trojan princess Antigona, the woman he was originally supposed to marry (and who still loves him) but didn’t because his brother, Trasimede, fell in love with her picture and gave his brother someone else’s.

The music keeps getting better, though — and more surprising. Where it isn’t sublime, some startling little melodic or harmonic turn would catch me off guard and take my breath away. Most of the individual numbers are quite short, and that keeps everything moving. In act two, Ercole (Hercules, sung with articulate coloratura by baritone Mark McSweeney) rescues Alceste from the demons of Hell to the accompaniment of musical lightning flashes and darting flames. Admeto has a long, magnificently tormented recitative and aria. In act three, Alceste, in a fit of jealousy, breaks off Antigona’s plaintive love song to Admeto’s picture. But she gets arrested, so Antigona starts over again and this time, lucky for us, gets to sing it all the way through.

Handel used both two castrati and two rival sopranos, creating fascinating vocal textures and dramatic confrontations. Admeto was the dark-voiced and dramatic American countertenor Jeffrey Gall; his brother was the lyric countertenor Drew Minter. Soprano Lisa Saffer’s glittering silver balanced Colton’s smooth velvet. Then they’d reverse their techniques, with Colton providing the coloratura dazzle and Saffer the lyric warmth. And there was powerful support from mezzo-soprano Pamela Dellal (the guard Orindo) and bass David Kravitz (Meraspe, Antigona’s protector).

What can I say about the Emmanuel Orchestra I haven’t been saying for 30 years? It breathes this music. And conductor Craig Smith, the heart and soul of Emmanuel Music, lets the music breathe. His Handel unfolds so naturally, he might fool you into thinking it was all effortless, or unthinking, until you realize how much variety he gets, how inexorable every note has become, and how gripped you’ve been for four fleeting hours.

A VERY BRIGHT LIGHT went out last week. Robert Garis, retired professor of English at Wellesley, former chair of both the English and Biology Departments, was also one of our most profound and eloquent writers on literature (The Dickens Theater), film (for Partisan Review), and dance (he called his intellectual autobiography Following Balanchine). He died of brain cancer at 76. He was completing his next book, a study of Orson Welles.

Irascible, difficult, and demanding as he was (some of his Wellesley students called him “God Garis”), he gave his ferocious intellect to the idea of art and what makes art great. “I don’t offer myself as a representative follower of the arts or an average one — such categories are empty,” he writes in the opening paragraph of Following Balanchine. Yet he was a living example for both his students and his friends of the passion for art and the importance (for him, the necessity) of making judgments and critical distinctions. “The judging I did instead of making art,” he writes, “did not seem negative or a substitute for something better. . . . Though I wasn’t making art — I was making myself, I was judging art in order to form and express an identity.”

I met Garis 38 years ago, and our conversations — about Toscanini; about Mozart and Verdi; about certain singers; about Balanchine and his greatest dancers, Suzanne Farrell, Violette Verdy, and Edward Villella; about Preston Sturges; about H.H. Richardson — became a crucial foundation for my own thinking about what makes art come to life: drama, expressivity, shapeliness, wit. And when I think back to those countless evenings we spent listening to and talking about glorious music, it’s clear that what those discussions were really about was what gives vitality to life itself.

Just as those animated discussions surely added to the vitality of our own lives.