Bizet Before Carmen

Georges Bizet was just 24 when he wrote his first full-scale opera. He soon wished that he hadn't. The Pearl Fishers, wrote one caustic Parisian critic, had "neither fishermen in the libretto nor pearls in the music." Bizet, who died at only 36, went on to greater glory with Carmen, but Pearl Fishers has never had more than indifferent success outside France and Italy. Last week, at the opening of the Empire State Music Festival, it got a rare, full-dress U.S. performance. The performance suggested that Bizet's fishermen have been receiving less than their due.

Pearl Fishers' most conspicuous weakness is the one that plagued Bizet through much of his career--a limp libretto. Laid in Ceylon, it has to do with a colony of Indian pearl fishermen, two of whom are in love with a mysterious local priestess. After three talky acts, one of the suitors is stabbed by four priests, and the surviving principals make off to where "happiness awaits us yonder." Most productions follow the original Paris staging, in which the fishing village became as elaborate as a movie set, and the fishermen went about like oriental chieftains in turbans and silk robes. In last week's production, Chinese-born Set Designer Ming Cho Lee wisely changed all that--and made the opera far more credible. His sets, strewn with fishermen's huts, were starkly simple, and his costumes were equally plain.

Bizet's lushly orchestrated score with its mass choral effects still showed the clear influences of Verdi, Meyerbeer and--particularly--Gounod, whom Bizet considered his master (one 12-bar passage is note-for-note from Gounod's Faust). But under the expert leadership of Conductor Laszlo Halasz, and with a fine lead performance from Tenor Giuseppe Campora, the opera emerged at least in parts as the melodic masterpiece that the French have come to regard it (the Paris Opera-Comique has it in its regular repertory, as does La Scala). Outstanding were the fine tenor aria in Act I familiar to Caruso fans ("Je crois entendre encore"), the thunderous and majestic choral hymn of vengeance in Act II, a rhapsodic and haunting baritone aria in Act III.

Why is Pearl Fishers played so seldom? Because, thinks Conductor Halasz, modern audiences are interested only in name singers, not in the opera itself--and the hero of Pearl Fishers is really the score. Nonetheless, he thinks it will become "standard opera fare in the U.S." within a few years.

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