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Salome, Sacrilege and the Censor

Opera and the Bible: an unholy alliance?

…Verdi’s Nino, re d’Assyria and Gounod’s Irene made some headway, but of course we haven’t heard of any of them. Their locales and titles had been changed to hide their biblical connections: we know them today as Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, Verdi’s Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar) – and Gounod’s La reine de Saba (The Queen of Sheba) – the last is a Queen of exemplary deportment, which is presumably why she doesn’t surface much today.

Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila (1877) – now a ubiquitous vehicle for star tenors and mezzos – did not get staged until 1890, by which time its original Dalila-designate, celebrated diva Pauline Viardot, was over sixty, though she did perform it in concert. Only after 1910 did the work do the rounds of international opera houses. In fact, Saint-Saëns, under the influence of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, had originally intended the work to be an oratorio, a genre best described as a dramatic work in concert. If a work was not staged, then the censor did not intervene, with the result that many more memorable musico-biblical encounters occur in oratorio rather than opera. Act One of Samson et Dalila, with its static choral tableaux clearly reveals its oratorio roots; only when Dalila comes into her own in Act Two does the stage drama heat up.

Massenet’s Hérodiade (1881), which features a French incarnation of Salome, is a very decorous affair by comparison to Strauss's Wildean extravaganza. Even so, the director of the Paris Opéra would not touch a biblical theme and the work premiered in Brussels, finally reaching the stage of the Opéra after Strauss’s Salome. By that time, despite the very French volupté of the music, Hérodiade seemed dated in the extreme. “Love me if you must,” says John the Baptist to Salome in Massenet’s version, “But only with a love that is pure.” Salome immediately agrees to the bargain; no hint of underage lust or necrophilia there.

Though the reference books do list a number of biblical operas, very few of them get exhumed today; in addition to Gounod there are Queens of Sheba by the German composer Goldmark (1875) – his violin concerto has been championed by Itzhak Perlman – and Reynaldo Hahn, whose greatest claim to fame, despite some very beautiful music in diverse genres, was being Marcel Proust’s boyfriend.

Will and Testament

Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto (1818), not quite a repertoire piece, has some uncommonly powerful music and has enjoyed some starry revivals in recent times. Its most famous number, a prayer in the last act, was hurriedly inserted when the scenic demands of the parting of the Red Sea could not be met, resulting in howls of derision and abuse from the audience. Ironically, this prayer became the opera’s highlight, with the novelist Stendhal reporting that young ladies fainted with emotion upon…

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