But to use "Thaïs" would have cost a fee, so Bernard Herrmann wrote choice excerpts of a fake French-Oriental opera — "Salammbô." (Dorothy Comingore did her own singing in the movie except for the opera-house sequence; that was dubbed by a professional singer who deliberately sang badly).
The stage became an Aladdin's cave of magical effects drawing from the traditions of ballet, opera, musicals, vaudeville, and oriental theatre, including kabuki.
The song reaches Elizabeth, in a skiff heading for the Pirate Brethren Court in Shipwreck Cove, and for a while the movie becomes a watery opera with a distinctly Oriental flavor.
His own comments that "operas hitherto based on Oriental and Jewish subjects lacked true Oriental colour and scorching sun" go some way towards explaining the score's gorgeous orchestration, but fail to account for its shocking power.
Now here's a chance to hear an opera by him -- an oriental fantasy from 1732, based on a play by Voltaire and to be performed in the not unsuitable precincts of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Though Lehnhof does a big production number on it, he treats it very much as an oriental fable, with the narrative admirably clear, but ducking the opera's awkward elision of essential humanity not only with altruism but with reproduction, which nowadays seems uncomfortable.
The full-scale opera and its regional variants remained the most significant form of Oriental musical theatre until the modern post-revolutionary times, but throughout the Far East the indigenous forms of music have always played a prominent part in theatrical presentations.
Her recent projects include bathtubs for Axor, hotels for the W and Mandarin Oriental chains, a new store for H&M that opens in London next month and sets for a production of Monteverdi's opera "L'Incoronazione di Poppea" in her hometown of Oviedo, Spain.
