Bizet, Georges

The two men who are friends and rivals for the love of the heroine Leïla in Bizet’s opera Les Pêcheurs de perles are Nadir and Zurga. Bernard Shaw used to call them Nadir and Zenith - was he thinking, perhaps, of the unevenness of Bizet’s first major operatic work? Bizet may have come to share contemporary critics’ largely negative reaction – though he did call his large black-and-white watchdog Zurga...

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