After a daring season-opening production of Francesco Cavalli’s forgotten opera Eliogabalo—so forgotten that it was not even performed in the composer’s lifetime and only saw the light of day in 1999—Paris has settled into more familiar standard-repertoire runs. Yet even here the adventure continues, with the return of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila after a twenty-five year absence. Since its world premiere, in Weimar in 1877, the work has endured as a great operatic warhorse that combines the Biblical Orientalism that was then chic with the sumptuous femme fatale trope that had just begun to migrate from the page to the stage. Adapted from the Old Testament Book of Judges, Samson retells the downfall of the ancient Hebrew hero whose strength, which flows from his voluminous hair, promises victory over cruel Philistine conquerors. Yet his weakness for the wiles of the temptress Dalila compromises his fortitude and leads him to betrayal, captivity, and ruin. In one of opera’s most striking finales, God mercifully responds to his prayer and restores his strength for one last go so that he can topple the supporting pillar of the Philistines’ pagan temple, killing all within.
Traditional approaches to Samson usually wallow in Orientalist kitsch, filling out the opera’s dramatic weaknesses and embellishing its relatively simple plot with over-the-top grandiosity. Regietheaterreimaginings try with almost nauseating regularity to impute contemporary relevance to the work by unnecessarily updating the Hebrew–Philistine confrontation to some solemn reminder of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Both approaches tend