The production had premiered in the fall, with Elina Garanca and Roberto Alagna in the title roles. I’d waited until the spring run because I reasoned, on the evidence of Anita Rachvelishvili’s vigorous Konchakovna, her well-sung and well-acted Azucena, and her full-steam-ahead Countess of Bouillon, that she would provide more of Dalila’s goods than Garanca, and that Aleksandrs Antonenko, despite negative recent reviews, might at least bring some metal to Samson’s music. Rachvelishvili did make delivery, though with a few items missing and others not as pictured in the catalogue. The tale of the tenors you have probably already heard, at least in outline, and I’ll add a few words presently. Let’s first look over the requirements of these two roles.

Dalila is designated for contralto. But there are contraltos and contraltos; the timbral variations among voices so called are wide. From the binary categorization I devised for Opera as Opera (bright/lean/taut on the left, dark/plump/loose on the right), singers to either side of the midline have succeeded in the part. In terms of range, Dalila’s music hangs low until the last scene. For two acts, the famous B-flat on “Lâ-â-che!” (sometimes augmented by the optional one, substituting for the written G, that launches the double-octave downward scale in “Amour, viens aider“) is the only sustained note above G. In the finale, there’s one sustained A-natural, a couple of runs up to G-sharp, and one quick turn over the high B-natural with the chorus. The single most important attribute a voice needs for the role is steady sonority and tonal beauty in the lower half of the compass, every pitch filled in and under dynamic control as the line crosses repeatedly through the passaggio in both directions, the intent seductive till it’s not. Whether the voice’s set is of the Anglo-American/Northern European contralto variety, deep-set and blended, or of the brighter Mediterranean sort, with the chest quality more clearly defined and vibrant, this lower-middle solidity and presence is crucial.

For these reasons, the most consistently effective Dalila I have seen was Rita Gorr, whose massive column of a voice, possessed of both core and warmth, had no soft spots, and whose French acculturation (she was Belgian) kept her singing musically and linguistically on track. Her studio recording of the part, opposite Jon Vickers, while of course not capturing the full impact of the voice or its easy carrying quality at softer dynamics, is a fair enough representation. And of the many singers who over the decades have recorded Dalila’s arias, my favorites are Louise Homer and Ebe Stignani. Homer succeeded to the role in 1915, the first year of the Met’s production centered on the Samson of Caruso.^(I) Here’s one of the finest of the Northern contralto voices, moving seamlessly and with nary a flicker along the line of the music, with organ-like tone that is seductive in an engulfing, mothering way, and, unlike many of her Northern colleagues (Schumann-Heink, Onegin, Branzell, et al.) singing in French. She recorded the Act 1 trio, “Je viens célébrer la victoire,” with Caruso and Journet, and all three of the major arias. (N.B.: “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” gets only a single verse, at the end of which Homer takes over Samson’s “Je t’aime” with neither the written F of the first verse nor the high B-flat of the second, but an A-flat, taken at mezzo-piano—a choice I can’t recall hearing from anyone else. It’s a beautiful note, which of course she would not have sung in the course of a live performance.)