1/ “Epics” - in opera context this means anything with a mythical, ancient, or medieval setting. SAMSON is ancient. Saint-Saëns began it as an oratorio, which accounts for some of the odd dramaturgy in 1st half of Act 1: can the disconsolate crowd of Hebrews, barely roused
https://twitter.com/MetOpera/status/1338620642988490752
2/ by Samson’s stirring rhetoric, rly bump off Abimelech *and* ravage the Philistines’ fields in the time allotted to this in the score? With the High Priest arriving on the scene immediately? It grew more operatic as the composer went on, and it became a pinnacle of 19thc
3/ French opera. Samson’s mix if leadership and weakness, Delilah’s hate-filled but sensuous manipulation, and the cruelty and blasphemy of the High Priest of Dagon, are all made compelling in the music.
4/ Samson is the closest thing to a heldentenor role in the French rep, and strictly speaking Roberto Alagna “shouldn’t” be singing it, but he got through it successfully, and besides, go big or go home, right?
5/ This production, new in 2018, is pretty good; not sure it’s better than the one by Elijah Moshinsky that it replaced. I wish directors were more adventurous with building-falls-down special effects when the libretto calls for them, as at the end of SAMSON (also end of Act 2 of
6/ PARSIFAL). Here the 80-ft idol of Dagon is scary, but Samson’s divinely aided pushing seems only to result in sparks between its halves, suggesting an imminent catastrophe but not one we get to see. And look, if they can fill the stage with “blood” (red dye, glycerin, and
7/ warm water) for Act 2 of PARSIFAL - and then drain it in time for Act 3!!! - they can make Klingsor’s castle and (in tonight’s case) the Temple of Dagon fall-down-go-boom, that’s what *I* say. But it’s a good opera, well sung and staged, so watch.
8/ The Philistine priestesses’ song is one of the great poisonous-flowers tunes in all opera. Such a horrid irony when we hear it again in Act 3 summoning the blinded Samson to submit to mockery at the Philstines’ celebration.
9/ Fun fact: Saint-Saëns’s name is pronounced as if the part after the hyphen were spelled san, or sans, or even sang. I.e., the umlaut is silent!
10/ So is the final s. That’s the general rule for a single final s in French, but there’s a wide exception for proper names, e.g. MaurraS. Also for z: Boulez is pronounced as it looks, *not* Bou-lay. But Saint-Saëns is within the general rule, not the proper names exception.
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