Cecil B. DEMille’s 1949 movie Samson and Delilah was all loincloths and a smouldering Hedy Lamarr, its Bible story memorably “gingered up” with liberal smears of sex, violence and flammable draperies.

Samson et Dalila
Royal Opera House, London

Cecil B. DEMille’s 1949 movie Samson and Delilah was all loincloths and a smouldering Hedy Lamarr, its Bible story memorably “gingered up” with liberal smears of sex, violence and flammable draperies. The film’s buccaneering, breast-baring spirit is very much that of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila – the oratorio that lost its footing on the way to the concert hall and tumbled headlong into a full-blown operatic bacchanal.

Inspired by Mendelssohn, Bach and Handel, he schemed his own sacred drama for chorus and soloists inspired by the story of the Israelite warrior Samson and the Philistine seductress Delilah. However the lure of the stage soon transformed a sober ideal into one of the sexiest works of the nineteenth-century repertoire – ripe with orchestral surges and dances, its central seduction swollen to the length of an entire act.

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