‘Softly awakes my heart’ from ‘Samson and Delilah’, Op. 47
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
In the opera ‘Samson and Delilah’ by Camille Saint-Saëns, Delilah emerges as a particularly venomous person. She uses her powers of dissemblance and seduction to lure Samson into revealing the secret of his remarkable strength. She has already danced for him with as much abandon as an operatic mezzo-soprano might allow herself, and now, in this aria, ‘Softly awakes my heart’, she declares her love, falsely but persuasively. On the opera house stage, aroused and besotted, Samson joins with, ‘I love you’ after each verse, but the concert version omits these contributions, largely because he isn’t there. Our programme goes no further into the story than the completion of this aria, but the remaining narrative reveals more about Delilah’s character, and we shouldn’t duck the truth, albeit some 3,000 years after the event. Against his better judgement Samson tells Delilah that his strength derives from his uncut hair. Having captured his heart and his secret, and having then cut off his hair post-consummation, (consummation and tonsorial adjustment conducted off-stage), Delilah instructs her most brutal soldiers to put out his eyes with red-hot pokers. The degraded figure is the Samson Agonistes of John Milton and the inspiration for Aldous Huxley’s ‘Eyeless in Gaza’. It’s a nasty tale but a grand and successful opportunity for Saint-Saëns to explore the musical language of falsehood masquerading as love, and for a mezzo-soprano to exploit her vocal and dramatic range.
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
In the opera ‘Samson and Delilah’ by Camille Saint-Saëns, Delilah emerges as a particularly venomous person. She uses her powers of dissemblance and seduction to lure Samson into revealing the secret of his remarkable strength. She has already danced for him with as much abandon as an operatic mezzo-soprano might allow herself, and now, in this aria, ‘Softly awakes my heart’, she declares her love, falsely but persuasively. On the opera house stage, aroused and besotted, Samson joins with, ‘I love you’ after each verse, but the concert version omits these contributions, largely because he isn’t there. Our programme goes no further into the story than the completion of this aria, but the remaining narrative reveals more about Delilah’s character, and we shouldn’t duck the truth, albeit some 3,000 years after the event. Against his better judgement Samson tells Delilah that his strength derives from his uncut hair. Having captured his heart and his secret, and having then cut off his hair post-consummation, (consummation and tonsorial adjustment conducted off-stage), Delilah instructs her most brutal soldiers to put out his eyes with red-hot pokers. The degraded figure is the Samson Agonistes of John Milton and the inspiration for Aldous Huxley’s ‘Eyeless in Gaza’. It’s a nasty tale but a grand and successful opportunity for Saint-Saëns to explore the musical language of falsehood masquerading as love, and for a mezzo-soprano to exploit her vocal and dramatic range.