Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
The story of Samson, told in the Bible’s Book of Judges (Chapters XIII to XVI) is vivid and memorable. It is the epic of the hero of the young nation Israel, in guerilla warfare against the Philistines, their occupying and oppressing neighbors. Samson performed amazing feats of strength, fighting a lion with his bare hands, carrying off the gates of a city, routing Philistine warriors with the jawbone of an ass.
Although Samson is a consecrated man of God, his birth foretold by an angel, he is a rough-hewn stone, with a notorious weakness for Philistine women, and he meets his nemesis in one of these, Delilah. She, in turn, is a sensual temptress who ensnares him with love and does her patriotic duty by goading him into revealing the secret of his strength – so that, shorn and weak, he can be delivered to his enemies, who blind him and put him to humiliating work at the mill with slaves.
This is very strong stuff, too strong to be seen on the stage at most times in the history of theatre. Goethe realised as much, when he was contemplating an opera on the subject of Samson, and wrote to his friend the composer Zelter:
‘The old myth is one of the most dreadful. An entirely bestial passion of an overly powerful, divinely gifted hero for the most accursed hussy on earth, the raging passions which again and again lead him to her, although every time he straightway knows by repeated deception that he is in danger, this lustfulness that escapes from danger; the mighty conception that must be made of the extraordinary presence of this gigantic woman who was able so to enchain such a bull. If you consider the matter, you will immediately see that all this must be reduced to nought in order to produce the mere names according to the conventions of our time and theatre.’
Reviewing the history of musical treatments of the Samson story, one feels that none so far has done justice to the Biblical source, including Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, though the story did inspire this composer to his most successful theatrical work. The most notable earlier treatment of the Biblical story was Handel’s oratorio Samson (1742), based on John Milton’s poem Samson Agonistes. The ageing poet, blind, lonely, and disillusioned, turned the story into a classical study of mental agony and moral recovery, beginning with Samson already blind and in chains, portraying him as a passive sufferer rather than an agent. In Milton Samson’s final great action of revenge, the pulling down of the Philistine temple on the worshippers’ heads, takes place off stage, and is described by a messenger.
Saint-Saëns, with conventional romantic theatricality, makes that action the climax and end of his story, whereas Handel’s oratorio concludes with a scene of mourning for Samson followed by Israelite rejoicing. In other respects, however, Saint-Saëns’ version resembles an oratorio, particularly in the important place given to the chorus, which as in Milton’s drama (consciously modeled on the ancient Greek pattern) comments on the action as well as representing the peoples of the drama.
It is not impossible that Saint-Saëns, a great student and champion of the then-neglected 18th century, knew Handel’s oratorio; at any rate when the subject of Samson was first suggested to him by ‘an old music lover’ of his acquaintance, it was with a view to making it an oratorio, a form in considerable favour at the time in France.
The poet to whom Saint-Saëns proposed a collaboration was Ferdinand Lemaire, a Creole from Martinique who had settled in Paris and married the cousin of a cousin of the composer. Lemaire’s reaction was ‘An oratorio? No, let it be an opera!’ Saint-Saëns sketched out the main lines of the dialogue and gave general indications for choruses, and Lemaire quickly produced a libretto in octosyllabic verse, which became the basis for an oratorio-like opera – the least dramatic, according to the composer’s biographer James Harding, of his 12 operas.
This may have been to Samson et Dalila’s benefit, as it enabled Saint-Saëns to concentrate on musical aspects for which his technical facility and sense of form equipped him superbly, rather than dissipating his energies in an uncongenial search for theatrical effect. He may have been conscious that what he had written was an oratorio in operatic disguise, because in a much later memoir he explained his change of aim by claiming that ‘owing to modern progress, oratorio is a form that can no longer be utilised, concerts being devoted almost exclusively to orchestral works’.
Few if any stage works that have proved so durable have had such difficulty in reaching the stage at all. In 1867 parts of Act II were tried out by the composer’s friends with his piano accompaniment, and most of the hearers predicted that no theatrical manager would consider an opera with a Biblical subject. It looked as if Samson et Dalila, if he finished it, would add further to Saint-Saëns’ frustration at his failure to win success in the theatre, so coveted by all French musicians of his day: his other operas, including Le Timbre d’argent (1877), Etienne Marcel (1879), Henry VIII (1883) and Déjanire (1911) are virtually forgotten today.
The first glimmer of hope for Samson et Dalila came when Liszt heard of his young French admirer’s difficulties: Saint-Saëns, one of the few pianists capable of executing Liszt’s transcendental virtuosity, was also an enthusiastic advocate for the avant-garde creations of the Hungarian, and had impressed Liszt both with his playing and his understanding. Without having heard a note of Samson et Dalila, Liszt committed himself: ‘Finish your opera; I will have it performed at Weimar.’
Not until 1877 did this promise come to fruition – meanwhile Saint-Saëns
had completed Act III (1873), and the great singing actress Pauline Viardot-Garcia, for whom the part of Dalila had been intended, had arranged a performance of Act II, on a small stage in a private garden, before a carefully selected audience of theatre managers and impresarios, including the director of the Paris Opera. They were still unconvinced that a Biblical story was viable. It was not until Saint-Saëns had become an international celebrity – for his piano playing and his compositions for piano and orchestra – that Samson et Dalila was staged in his own country.
The first performances at Weimar in 1877 were successful, but had little sequel; in 1890 the opera was given at Rouen, and the following year in Paris at the Théâtre Lyrique, where it had packed houses. Finally, after 20 years of hesitation, the Paris Opera decided to mount Samson et Dalila in 1891, and the performances under the famous conductor Edouard Colonne had ‘a triumph immediate and unquestioned’, belatedly establishing the opera as a permanent item in the repertoire. It had 500 performances by 1922, the year after Saint-Saëns’ death, and 1000 by the 1960s.
Ironically another great French composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau had similar problems in the 18th century with the story of Samson. His collaboration with Voltaire on this theme never reached the stage, foundering on the refusal of the church and the royal censors to accept a Biblical subject in the theatre. In England, where the ban on Biblical representations caused problems for Thomas Beecham in mounting Richard Strauss’ Salome in 1910, King Edward VII had personally intervened to raise the Lord Chamberlain’s ban when Samson et Dalila was first allowed to be staged in London, in 1909.
All this fuss would be more understandable if Saint-Saëns’ opera had really followed the Biblical original, but it is mild enough in all conscience. The fascination of the story for modern readers is Samson’s downfall through sex: the imagery of the weakening of his masculinity through the shearing of the locks on his head is powerfully symbolic of male fears of loss of potency.
The ensnaring Dalila who causes Samson’s eye to be put out is indeed – in the Bible - monstrous. Saint-Saëns, unlike Handel, made her the real centre of the story, but she is little more – in the opera - than a romantic seductress, irresistible though she be. Musically, Saint-Saëns rises to the occasion, giving Dalila melodies, such as ‘Printemps qui commence’ of a subtle and delicious sensuality – coming as a refreshing change, Harding observes, from the cloying voluptuousness of Wagner and Strauss. But whereas Milton, in pursuance of an anti-feminist propaganda, had portrayed Dalila as unflatteringly as possible, Lemaire’s libretto departs from the Bible in the opposite direction, making Dalila reject the Philistines’ offer of money, so that she seduces and betrays Samson for laudably patriotic motives. Perhaps this characterisation was inevitable, to placate the parents of the respectable young ladies in the audience, who had been so shocked by Bizet’s Carmen. Dalila’s actual conquest and betrayal of Samson takes place off-stage. Amusingly, it is brief. We are never told what his secret was – the cutting of his hair is neither shown nor mentioned.
In other respects Lemaire keeps close to the Biblical account, though Samson is shown neither as the rough, uncouth fighter of the Book of Judges, nor as Milton’s self-critical, remorseful, depressive anti-hero. In Act I he is the divinely inspired warrior, singing in themes and accents of uplifting heroism as the military and religious leader of his people. In Act II he is torn between his sense of duty and desire, and his self-castigation in Act III comes dangerously close to sentimental self-pity.
Taken in themselves these characters are little more than the stock-in-trade of romantic melodrama, and the events are only a little more dramatically lifelike. What must have caught the admiration of admirers of the opera such as Liszt and his son-in-law the Wagner disciple Hans von Bülow (who thought it the best and most successful opera during the past 15 years – with the exception, of course, of Wagner’s) was the unity and coherence of the whole work. Martin Cooper attributes this to Saint-Saëns’ unusually genuine emotional involvement in the subject. One might add that the qualities of balance and proportion in Samson et Dalila were not only characteristically French, but were such as a musician of Saint-Saëns’ classicising bent - academic in the best sense - was pre-eminently qualified to supply.
Gabriel Fauré, pupil of Saint-Saëns at the Ecole Niedermeier and thereafter lifelong friend, described him as ‘the most complete musician we have ever had’. Born in 1835, Camille Saint-Saëns first came to notice as a child prodigy interpreting the works of Mozart and Bach with precocious mastery. He became a champion of the nearly forgotten music of Rameau, Gluck, and other greats of the past; then, as founder of the Société Nationale de Musique, promoted the new French music against German domination of the repertoire. He was critical of Wagner, and largely escaped his influence, so pervasive in French musical circles in the later years of the 19th century. Yet Saint-Saëns was also one of the few French musicians to gain the admiration of those ‘musicians of the future’, Liszt and Wagner, through his amazing facility and technique both in playing and in composing (he played Tristan und Isolde faultlessly from memory). Saint-Saëns performed Liszt’s misunderstood symphonic works, and they served as models for his own symphonic poems, such as Le Rouet d’Omphale and Danse macabre.
Saint-Saëns’ popular pieces for piano and for violin, such as the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, written for Sarasate, and the Piano Concerto No.2, have a showy virtuosity. Taken with his mastery of the modern orchestra, this has concealed from many his aesthetic preference for classical proportion and order. As a boy he was introduced to opera through Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and he revered Mozart’s music. His other operatic hero was Gluck, an enthusiasm he shared with Pauline Viardot-Garcia, who had commissioned from Berlioz his version of Gluck’s Orphée et Euridice – the edition still the basis of most modern performances.
Gluck’s classical sense of proportion, his elimination of mere virtuosity in singing, the importance he gave orchestra and chorus, the truthfulness to the drama of his music – all these helped shape Saint-Saëns’ operatic style, as they had that of Berlioz, whose explosive romanticism masked an admiration for classical virtues. Berlioz had the perceptiveness to greet Gounod and Saint-Saëns as torch bearers for the best traditions of French music amidst much that was meretricious.
Not that Saint-Saëns’ music always does avoid the meretricious. There is ever-present danger in the deft facility of such a master craftsman, so polished, so prolific. And there is a further problem: the suspicion that Saint-Saëns employed his admirable technique to conceal a void [The Record Guide]. He was the very opposite of a flamboyant personality, and avoided all display of feeling – ‘Surtout, pas d’émotion!’ was his watchword – he wanted no false intrusion of sentiment into music-making.
Saint-Saëns’ life was marked by tragedy: the early deaths of his two children and the breakdown of his marriage – the only sign, however, that betrayed his disturbance was a chronic irritability. A man of wide culture and knowledge, with interests in astronomy, literature and art as well as music; a clubbable, gregarious man, he outlived his contemporaries (and many of his juniors) amidst ever growing recognition and fame. He became a living national monument, dying in 1921 aged 86.
This sketch of the composer’s personality and achievements helps to explain why his one successful opera inspires respect and admiration, rather than imposing itself as an overwhelming experience. Samson et Dalila draws on some of the best aspects of opera and oratorio of the past, deftly adapting them to current theatrical conventions. It is less obviously original than poised and balanced. The Bacchanale, for example, in Act III, represents the rejoicing of the Philistines at their festival. Its ingenious orchestration and instrumental effects (Saint-Saëns carefully supervised these at the Paris Opera) make it popular as an orchestral excerpt (a favourite Beecham lollipop). Saint-Saëns’ oriental exoticism here, mild though it seems, is an early trace of this new flavour in French music, later to be developed by Debussy, Ravel, Roussel and others. It must have been stimulated by Saint-Saëns’ time living in Algeria during the composition of Act III, as it reflects clear skies, bright lights, and strong colors.
These dances also neatly fit the obligatory requirement that every French opera must include a ballet (not in Act 1!). Wagner’s Tannhäuser Bacchanale had flouted this convention, earning him disastrous hostility from the ballerina-ogling opera-goers of the Jockey Club. The desire to please, so obvious in Saint-Saëns’ hated rival Jules Massenet, can’t help surfacing occasionally in Samson et Dalila, but on the whole the opera impressively avoids cliché.
The part of Dalila, conceived for Viardot, is rewarding for a dramatic mezzo –soprano, and achieves distinction and nobility at times. In Dalila’s great duet with Samson in Act II her music rises well above Massenet’s usual standard. Sung as a solo, rather than the duet it actually is, ‘Mon Coeur s’ouvre à ta voix’ has become Saint-Saëns’ most famous vocal piece. A Gluckian breadth of phrase, and the languorous orientalism of the woodwind scales strike a new note in French music. Like Gluck, this number is best performed with a certain objectivity (‘pas d’émotion’) as in the famous old recording by Germaine Cernay and Georges Thill.
The same approach will benefit the opera as a whole. It is as much a ‘chorus opera’ as Boris Godunov, and its choruses (modeled on Handel and Gluck) are somewhat statuesque, musically exciting rather than dramatic. Pieces of Meyerbeerian grand opera filter through in more conventional passages such as the duet for Dalila and the High Priest: swearing vengeance, and rather too obvious unisons. There is some Massenet, too, in Dalila’s taunting of Samson in the last act, where the themes of the earlier love duet are transformed in Lisztian manner. This moderate, discreet use of motifs reveals the modernity of Saint-Saëns’ opera. Alfred Einstein justly sums up Saint-Saëns as ‘an elegant exploiter of all possible old traditions and of the newer influences, his is a very French form of the romantic movement’.
First published in Opera Australia 1983