‘Samson et Dalila’ all over again
As the few among you who have read volume II of my Memoirs will know, I am a music lover, with a special fondness for the opera. To be sure, many operas deemed to be classics and brought back on the stage decade after decade were brilliant music composed for frivolous librettos. Rossini’s master works typify this genre. Modern operas, like the recently staged first opera by Belgian organist, festival director and former Intendant of our Théâtre de la Monnaie, Bernard Focroulle, often try too hard to be politically and socially relevant and sacrifice their musical merits to banal, politically correct messaging. Then there are operas of the medium past which contemporary stage directors try to make socially relevant, often with the intent to compete better for state funds against the organizers of sporting events. Here, too, the risk of cheapening the art runs high. But sometimes it works brilliantly.
In the last named category I today bring to your attention a 2009 production of Camille Saint-Saëns opera Samson et Dalila at the Opera Ballet Flanders.
It is not my custom to offer links to other websites on these pages, but today I will violate that rule twice. I begin with the web page of that 2009 opera production:
https://www.operaballet.be/en/programme/season-2008-2009/samson-et-dalila
I quote here an overview paragraph from the opera house management:
A surprisingly topical opera about the mechanisms of fanaticism: the biblical story of Samson and Delilah is an exemplary illustration of how reconciliation is found wanting in the face of religious and political motives. Using the example of the impossible love between the Jew Samson and the Philistine Delilah, Camille Saint-Saëns shows the deadly conflict between two hostile cultures and religions. Samson and Delilah sacrifice their personal happiness for their religious ideals, urged on by political advisors (High Priest, Satrap of Gaza, and an old Hebrew man). The opera ends with the collapse of the Temple of Dagon and the death of all those in attendance due to the reaction of the deeply humiliated Samson. The people of Israel are free, but the notion of reconciliation between the enemies remains a dream.
I remind you that the show was first put on in 2009, when the director of the theater was the naughty boy, enfant terrible, Ariel Cahn, who now has been appointed Intendant of the Deutsche Oper Berlin after having served a stint in Geneva. Among the several outstanding features of the show was its joint Palestinian-Israeli production team. And, of course, the inverted interpretation, whereby our sympathy is directed to the Pharisee (Palestinian) side of the equation.
However, what brought this Samson et Dalila to mind this morning was the very last scene in the opera when the blinded Samson shakes the pillars supporting the roof of the temple and brings death and destruction upon them all. Regrettably, we are on the cusp of such a Biblical denouement as you will realize when you open my second link of the day, to a recent interview with the retired British diplomat and spy Alastair Crooke on the widely viewed Judging Freedom hosted by Andrew Napolitano.
Alastair Crooke: The Deterrence Paradigm has Failed.
In particular, I point to Crooke’s description of a little noticed recent speech in Hebrew by Benjamin Netanyahu in which the Israeli leader speaks of the present conflict as a second war of liberation, as a struggle between good and light on one side and evil and darkness on the other that must end in the total destruction of Gaza and of the Palestinians therein.
If Israel is allowed to proceed with this plan unhindered, I fear we all face the prospect of the temple roof coming down on our heads.
What could possibly halt the genocide would be military intervention by Hezbollah. But that takes us up another escalatory ladder to a direct U.S. military conflict with Iran and to the possible intervention of Russia. The scenario leading to nuclear war is all too clear.
On the other hand, United Nations intervention on the basis of a resolution of the Security Council could put a stop to the killing and to the escalatory cycle. For that to happen, the United States must remove its veto, and all possible political pressure in the United States should be marshaled for that purpose, now, before it is too late.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023