Last night at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera we saw one of the great spectacles of nineteenth-century French opera: Samson et Dalila by Camille Saint-Saëns. It was magnificent.

The cast was superb, but Delilah herself was extraordinary, especially in that great aria, Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix, sung with such warmth, seduction and fullness of tone by Aigul Akhmetshina that one suddenly understood why Samson could not resist her. The role demands not only beauty of voice but emotional intelligence for Delilah must persuade both Samson and the audience at the same time. Akhmetshina, a Bashkir mezzo-soprano of Tartar origin from Russia, is widely regarded as one of the leading young voices in international opera today. Born in 1996 in a village in Bashkortostan (near the Ural Mountains) she grew up in a modest rural family with strong musical traditions.

The tragic hero Samson was very expressively sung by SeokJong Baek, a South Korean tenor and a member of the Royal Opera House’s young artist development programme..

And then there was the famous Bacchanale towards the end of the opera — one of the most intoxicating orchestral passages in all French music. Saint-Saëns fills it with imagined Eastern colour: exotic rhythms, sensual orchestration, winding melodies suggesting Egypt, the Levant, ritual, intoxication and danger. One feels completely overwhelmed by the sheer theatrical splendour of it.

This opera belongs among the great orientalist works of nineteenth-century European music. One thinks immediately of Delibes’ Lakmé, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, and later Puccini operas such as Madama Butterfly and Turandot. Europe in that period was fascinated by imagined Eastern worlds — places of mystery, sensuality, cruelty, ritual and danger. But Samson et Dalila is darker than many of these works because beneath all the spectacle lies a brutal biblical story about betrayal, occupation, masculinity, humiliation, religion and revenge.

The story itself remains astonishingly powerful. Samson’s strength lies secretly in his hair. A woman discovers the secret by pretending to love him. He is betrayed, captured and blinded. Yet in the end he takes revenge by pulling down the columns of the Philistine temple, destroying not only his enemies but himself and the woman he loved.

It is one of the oldest tragic structures imaginable: victory and annihilation arriving together. It is a theme which constantly returns as in Anthony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and his Lady, Mata Hari and her lovers.

And yet, sitting there in the theatre, another thought intruded unexpectedly. At one point my wife quietly remarked to me: Samson was blinded — “eyeless in Gaza.” Suddenly the word “Gaza” itself seemed terribly resonant.

For centuries, the phrase “Eyeless in Gaza” has belonged to literature, especially through Milton’s Samson Agonistes:

“Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves…”

Once, those words sounded remote and biblical, almost ceremonial. Today they cannot help carrying modern associations. The ancient setting suddenly acquires echoes of the present world.

Of course, the historical Philistines of the Hebrew Bible are not simply identical with modern Palestinians, and history should not be crudely collapsed into modern politics. Yet the emotional resonance of names survives across centuries. Hearing “Gaza” in a theatre now inevitably awakens contemporary thoughts and anxieties.

And still the audience did not turn the evening into a political demonstration. Instead, we surrendered to the spectacle, the beauty, the ritual, the voices, the orchestral colour. Opera creates a strange suspended world in which audiences contemplate violence, revenge, holy war and destruction through music of overwhelming beauty.

Perhaps that is precisely why the opera remains so disturbing.

Saint-Saëns wrote other operas, of course, but this is surely his theatrical masterpiece. The work combines French elegance with biblical grandeur and psychological intensity in a way few operas manage.

So we left the theatre exhilarated, chastened, entertained, puzzled and emotionally unsettled all at once. And afterwards we travelled home through an unexpectedly cold May evening in London, carrying with us the strange aftertaste of the opera: beauty mixed with cruelty, antiquity colliding with the present, and the haunting sound of that single word — Gaza.

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Postscript:
We’ve had, in a sense, personal experiences with both Saint-Saëns and Samson himself—across very different musical settings and moments in time.
The first came many years ago with Handel’s great oratorio Samson, based on the biblical story from the Book of Judges. We performed it with the Plumstead Choral Society, singing as members of the chorus. It remains a substantial and powerful work, both dramatic and musical, and it was a memorable experience to be part of its unfolding narrative in performance.
More recently, we returned to Saint-Saëns in a very different spirit, singing his Christmas Oratorio at the Borgo a Mozzano festival. This was a much earlier work of his, written when he was still a young man, and it has a lighter, more lyrical and charming character. The performance took place in the Friary church of San Francesco which provided a fitting and atmospheric setting for the music. It was, again, a thoroughly rewarding experience, but of a very different mood and scale from the Handel.
Taken together, these two performances form an interesting pair: one rooted in the grandeur and drama of a biblical epic, the other in the gentle warmth of sacred music for Christmas but both described as oratorios.