BIZET : LES PÊCHEURS DE PERLES

Bizet's Pearl Fishers

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 14th of February 2016 at 6.05 - 8.45 pm
Sunday 26th of July 2015 at 6.03 - 8.05 pm
Sunday 19th of June 2011 at 3.03 - 5.10 pm
Sunday 14th of June 2009 at 3 - 5 pm

2016
BIZET: The Pearl Fishers, an opera in three acts
Two friends are rivals for the love of the same woman, a priestess of Brahma, but what happens to this threesome if she breaks her religious vows?
Leïla.................................. Diana Damrau
Nadir................................ Matthew Polenzani
Zurga................................ Mariusz Kwiecien
Nourabad.......................... Nicolas Testé
Metropolitan Opera Chorus & Orch/Gianandrea Noseda 
2015
BIZET: The Pearl Fishers, an opera in three acts
Leïla................................. Diana Damrau
Nadir................................ Dmitry Korchak
Zurga................................ Nathan Gunn
Nourabad.......................... Nicolas Testé
Arnold Schoenberg Chorus, Vienna Radio SO
Jean-Christophe Spinosi (Austrian Radio)


INTRODUCTION (Wikipedia)
SUMMARY
LIBRETTO (French)

If anyone thinks of castigating me for not recounting the plot of the opera, let it be said that what you are requesting is supplied in two different forms under the first two headings. The New York Metropera has not staged this work in this century, so no study notes are available from that source.
And now, writing in 2016, Metropera notes are no longer available, and at last they are performing this opera, and we will see it at the cinema, too.
    In The Good Opera Guide Denis Forman rates this as one of the two most underrated operas (the other being Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur) and he awards them both Alpha (that is A, but without + plus). Georges Bizet was aged 24 when he composed it, and while it enjoyed moderate success initially (1863), the French have neglected it, along with the rest of the 30 operatic works by Bizet, except Carmen, who will certainly not let them ignore her.  Horrible to tell: Bizet's orchestral score is lost; only vocal scores survive; the orchestration has been restored by one Arthur Hammond (Esquire, or Monsieur?).
    I am a great admirer of this work (that is not to say that I am great, but that my admiration for this opera is huge). My earliest encounter with it was the duet from Act 1, Au fond du temple saint (In the depths of the holy temple), and by coincidence Léopold Simoneau and René Bianco have just started singing it on the record I am listening to (Jean Fournet conducting); but I have already heard it twice today in the Toulouse production (Michel Plasson), with John Aler and Gino Quilico; they provide two versions (the original one is in an appendix, and its weakness is the lack of a return to the big tune). Alain Vanzo and Guillermo Sarabia are in the third recording I have (Georges Prêtre), and thus I own three of the four sets listed in the Wikipedia (not five, as the Pierre Dervaux set appears twice, and sleuths will detect why).
    The best-known version of the duet of the two pearl-fisher friends, Nadir the tenor, Zurga the baritone, is the one I first heard: a 45 rpm seven-inch vinyl disc, with Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill (I never bought a copy because you could hear it on the radio every day). This is what it is about. Nadir has been away from home for a long time, hunting tigers and other ferocious felines; now he is reunited with Zurga; they recall that the parting of the ways came when they found they were each in love with the same woman, a virgin-priestess they had seen inside a Hindu temple. (At this point in my slow progress, side 1 of the Prêtre recording has reached the duet, and Vanzo and Sarabia bypass the reprise [damned cheek!] and move into "a Polonaise-cabaletta", I am told).
    Now for the pedantry. Pearl fishers? Do they catch them with nets or lines? They are not pursuing fishes but seeking oysters, which will be hiding a pearl in their shells. All right, they are shell fish, but these are properly pearl divers, or pearlers, as I call them in my book on the subject of mystical pearling.

https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/pearlwisdom

   The librettists were Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré, and at first Mexico was to be the setting of the story, but then they decided on Ceylon (aka Serendib, as in serendipity, or Sri Langka). Marco Polo knew that Ceylon and the Coromandel coast of southern India were important pearling grounds; the season lasted only six weeks in April and May (so Nadir would have plenty of time for wild-game hunting). Marco was also well aware that the Singhalese people were Buddhists ('idolaters', he called them misleadingly). So why are we looking at a Hindu temple (admittedly in ruins) and people worshipping the god Brahma (the Creator, who is said to have only one temple dedicated to him in India, the reason being that Vishnu the Sustainer and Shiva the Destroyer are the deities that worshippers must keep propitiated, with offerings)? (Yes, that was a question, and not simply rhetorical.) We realize from events in our own time that the Singhalese in the south (descendents of Aryans from northern India) are Buddhists, and the Tamils (some of them are tigers) in the north of the island (their ancestors were Dravidians from South India) are Hindu. But here the two Hindu friends are talking (or singing in their duet) about a visit they made to Kandy, in the mountains, in the south, NE of Colombo, and there in a Hindu temple they prostrated themselves before a beautiful virgin and adored her as a goddess; indeed they both fell in love with her (against regulations); and yet the temple in Kandy is the shrine of a tooth of the Buddha, with monks as attendants, and definitely no priestesses, or even nuns.
    What about the names of the characters? They are more Islamic than Indian: Nadir (an Arabic word meaning the lowest point, opposite of zenith), Leila (Semitic 'night', making her a lady of the night), Nourabad (light/fire-servant?), Zurga (Greek?).
     Anything else? Well, I don't think it is a silly story. Years ago (in the religious college which employed me as a lecturer, in South Australia) a Christian student shared a tape recording of the opera with Helen and myself; he had recorded it from ABC TV, without the picture; he related the story fervently; I can understand that the ending impressed him, where a man lays down his life for his friends.
    I have seen a performance of this opera, in the Wellington Opera House, with our Roger Wilson on the stage.
    That old Björling record still gets requested on the radio, and on Wedensday 12th of June 2009, at a funeral in Taranaki, I heard 'Deep inside the sacred temple' played as a euphonium duet.

2009
BIZET: The Pearl Fishers, an opera in three acts
Zurga............................ Philip Addis
Nadir............................ Antonio Figueroa
Leïla.............................. Karina Gauvin
Nourabad..................... Alexandre Sylvestre
Montreal Opera Chorus,
Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal
Frédéric Chaslin
2011
BIZET: The Pearl Fishers, an opera in three acts
Zurga............................ Gerald Finley
Nadir............................ John Osborn
Leïla.............................. Nicole Cabell
Nourabad..................... Raymond Aceto
Chorus & Orch of the Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden/Antonio Pappano (BBC)