Camille Saint-Saëns composed 13 operas, but only one of them, Samson et Dalila, is now part of the regular repertory. However, during the composer’s lifetime at least, Henry VIII, first seen in Paris in 1883, rivalled Samson’s popularity; there were performances across Europe, and even though it has only been staged a handful of times since Saint-Saëns’s death in 1921, it remains the most often performed of his other operas.
The libretto is based on Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play La Cisma de Inglaterra (The Schism in England), though Saint-Saëns and his librettists also incorporated incidents and characters from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. The action focuses on the English king’s determination to divorce Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn, and the split with the Roman church that provoked, though Calderón introduced another dramatic element with the Spanish ambassador Don Gómez de Feria’s love for Anne, and Catherine’s efforts to protect her rival from Henry’s jealousy. In many ways Catherine, who dies at the end of the opera, is more obviously the central character than the king, and she is certainly its most sympathetic figure.
