As the opera’s action starts, Assad returns to Solomon’s court unable to face his eager betrothed, Sulamith (daughter of the High Priest), and leading on behind him at a short clearance the Queen herself, with retinue. Solomon listens to Assad’s story (above), and advises him to man up. And so he does, until the moment when the Queen, whose face no man has ever seen, drops her veil for Solomon before the assembled celebrant populace. Assad recognizes her as his aquatic seductress, and is thrown back, very publicly, into his demented state, much augmented when she claims to have never seen him before. And so it goes: in the garden now, he is back in her embrace upon her assurances that she is no transient vision, but a flesh-and-blood woman full of desire, when the interruptus comes with the Temple Watchman’s call to morning prayer. The  Queen departs on the instant, with promises of more later.

Oy! First the mossy bank, then the celebration, then the garden—and now the wedding! For a couple of scenes later Assad, still trying hard to be a good Jewish boy, is literally directing the ring toward Sulamith’s extended finger when here She comes again, this time bearing a present for the bride! Again he goes crazy, again she claims to not know him, and now he profanes the Holy of Holies by declaring the Queen to be his Goddess! This cannot end well, and it doesn’t, but then on the other hand it does, on account of redemption. As he wanders into exile near Sulamith’s desert sanctuary, Assad meets the Queen once more. But she is changed; she realizes that she has come to truly love Assad. Putting aside her artifices, she pleads desperately with him. But his renewed faith allows him to withstand even this reformed temptress, and she departs. There’s a sandstorm. Dying, Assad reaffirms his devotion to Sulamith and she, appearing from her sanctuary, takes him in her arms as her companions sing of their eternal togetherness.

In this time of countless revelations concerning piggish men of authority importuning powerless women, the depiction of a woman of rank reducing men to rubble and creating social chaos thereby through the calculated deployment of superpowers of seduction is not, shall we say, the most natural fit with the cultural moment. Yet this fear of a disruptive female sexuality, evoked by the call of a voice, the drawing aside of a veil, the invitational water-nymph move, is certainly not dead, but only sleeping through our affects of transactional cool. As illustrated by the Queen of Sheba tale, it’s as old as the earliest myths and scriptures, then much enhanced over the centuries. All that really happens in its Biblical source (First Kings, 10) is that the Queen comes to Solomon’s court to challenge him with a series of questions relating to his vaunted wisdom, power, and riches and, ascertaining that it’s all true, goes back home. By the time Goldmark set to work on the libretto for Königin by the learned S. H. Mosenthal (1866) , they had over two millennia of legendary encrustations to work with, not to mention various recent Romantic operatic influences, most obviously that of Tannhäuser.