Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

For Bizet, this opera was part of his apprenticeship. His whole life may be seen as a preparation for his masterpiece, Carmen. Another late work, L'Arlésienne, would probably be equally admired if the play by Alphonse Daudet, with Bizet’s incidental music, could be appreciated outside France. But Bizet’s early death, when Carmen still seemed to him a failure, is usually regretted for having deprived France of the composer who might have given it a series of operatic masterpieces.

Masterpiece Pearl Fishers is not – but the French musical press of the day, in their response to it revealed ignorance and conservatism: ‘There were neither fishermen in the libretto nor pearls in the music’, wrote Jouvin in Le Figaro ‘…Les Pêcheurs de perles betrays on every page, along with the talent of the composer, the bias of the school to which he belongs, that of Richard Wagner’. Bertrand in Le Ménestrel found ‘shocking and violent effects worthy of the new Italian school’, meaning of course Verdi: ‘there is too much shrieking in the score of Pearl Fishers…nevertheless, there is talent floating in the midst of all these regrettable imitations, and one feels that one is dealing with a musician capable of a striking revenge’.

Hector Berlioz was the most just, as well as the most perceptive of the critics, showing admirable objectivity, considering that his own magnum opus Les Troyens finally reached the stage in part, in a sadly truncated version, in the same season (1863) and in the same theatre as Bizet’s opera. Berlioz particularly praised the fire and colour of the beginning, the chorus sung in the wings, the aria of Leïla ‘Comme autrefois’, with its horn solo, and the duet ‘Ton coeur n'a pas compris le mien’. He found good things in the tenor-baritone duet, Nadir's first solo aria, and Zurga’s aria in the third act. Berlioz sums up with typical irony, writing of his fellow Rome Prize winner: ‘M. Bizet, laureate of the Institut, took the journey to Rome; he has come back without having forgotten the nature of music. Since he has returned to Paris, he has rapidly acquired the very rare special reputation of an incomparable reader of scores. His talent as a pianist is such that, in his transcriptions of orchestral music, which he does at sight, no mechanical difficulty can stop him…The score of Les Pêcheurs de perles does M. Bizet the greatest honour, and he will have to be recognised as a composer in spite of his rare talent as a pianist.’

Bizet as a sight-reading virtuoso will come as a surprise to most people, but is only one of the fascinating things about this musician. We have only recently learnt a great deal more… but that is to anticipate. Many readers will already have exclaimed to themselves ‘But Pearl Fishers is a very attractive piece – and it’s popular, too!’ Pearl Fishers regularly tops polls when opera companies and magazines ask which opera people most want added to the repertoire. These aren’t just people who love Carmen so much they would be happy to see anything else by Bizet; the popularity of Pearl Fishers is based on isolated numbers, often heard on the radio or on record – the tenor and soprano arias, and above all the duet for Nadir and Zurga, ‘Au fond du temple saint’ or, in Italian, ‘Dal tempio al limitar’. In fact, this number is heard more often in Italian than in the original French, owing to a series of famous records, and especially the 1927 version by Gigli and De Luca. The opera The Pearl Fishers is popular in Italy, surely because its long vocal lines take better to singing in Italian than do many other French scores. (No doubt also because of Verdi’s influence on Bizet, too, evident in Pearl Fishers especially in the dramatic and forceful use of the orchestra).

Unfortunately for Bizet, the popularity of Pearl Fishers was entirely posthumous. It is an opera to be enjoyed, perhaps, in spite of its weaknesses – any discriminating person has to admit that as drama it falls short. The problem lies largely in the libretto, and here the critics’ sarcasm was well-placed. Even one of the authors, Eugène Cormon (a pseudonymn for Pierre-Etienne Piestre) remarked that had he and his fellow-librettist Carré realised Bizet’s talent, they would never have given him that ‘white elephant’ (cet ours infâme).

The plot comes from the story-trove of consecrated virgins who break their vows for love (Spontini’s La Vestale and Bellini’s Norma also belong). It is full of stock situations and far too many coincidences to be believable. The characters’ clumsily conflicting passions are manipulated by external events.

The librettists were not even sure where to put their story: a letter Bizet wrote Gounod while he was composing the opera suggests that it was originally set in Mexico – certainly the original title was Leila, and until a fortnight before the scheduled opening, the plot was without an ending. Librettist Carré asked for suggestions during the rehearsals, until finally the impresario of the theatre, Carvalho, said ‘Throw it in the fire’. This was taken literally: Zurga sets fire to the fishermen’s tents so that Leila and Nadir can escape. The death of Zurga is quite unnecessary (stabbed by one of the followers of Nourabad, the high priest, who has overheard Zurga’s plan to save the lovers from their punishment). This was added to the opera long after Bizet’s death, and is removed in some modern productions.

With manufactured plot goes superficial background and character. As Winton Dean, Bizet’s English biographer, points out: ‘It is impossible to believe in these “Indians”… they are the regulation sopranos, tenors etc. with their faces blacked’. So Bizet was battling against the odds, as can be seen when we compare his response to the dramatic values of Carmen and L’Arlésienne. At the core of both these is a man torn between his dutiful love for a ‘good’ woman and the fascination of a vibrant, sexually compelling and destructive femme fatale, who exercises her liberation by rejecting him for another man.

Recently, by intriguing literary accident, much more was discovered about Bizet the man, suggesting this ‘love triangle’ triangle may have corresponded to parts of his own experience. An American scholar, Mina Curtiss, was researching aspects of the life of the novelist Marcel Proust, who had been a frequenter of the literary salon of Geneviève Halévy-Straus, whom he took as the model for his Duchesse de Guermantes. She was the widow of Georges Bizet, and had married a rich lawyer, Emile Straus; one day a surviving relative literally spilled into Mrs. Curtiss’ lap a cupboard-full of hitherto unknown correspondence between Bizet, his wife, and the relatives of her father Fromental Halévy, composer of La Juive and Bizet’s teacher. Mrs Curtiss began to read, and became fascinated and curious about the man who wrote Bizet’s extraordinarily revealing letters; she then read Winton Dean’s biography of Bizet and ‘realised suddenly that I had in my hands the answers to countless questions which had occurred to me while reading it’. Interrupting her Proust studies, she wrote a full biographical study of Bizet. We learn, among so many other things, that while living in his father’s household after his mother’s death he fathered a son on the family maid, whose paternity was passed off on Bizet père.

Another revelation was Bizet’s very close friendship with his neighbour at Le Vésinet, in the countryside outside Paris, a famous demi-mondaine known as La Mogador. This amazing woman went from prostitute to lover of the poet Musset, stage dancer, horse-rider, and cabaret singer; then the aristocratic Comte de Chabrillan married her on a return visit from Australia, where he later became French Consul in Melbourne, taking his wife with him. He died in 1855, whereupon she returned to Paris and succeeded Offenbach as director of the Bouffes Parisiens.

When she knew Bizet, La Mogador was singing in a nightclub; in her autobiography, she wrote ‘No one, among women whose tendency is to say yes derives more pleasure than I do from saying no. So the men to whom I have given the most are those who asked least of me’ – words extraordinarily prophetic of Carmen’s ‘If you don’t love me, I love you’, and of Don José's ‘Women are like cats. When you call them, they don’t come; when you don’t call them, they do’.

What has this to do with Bizet’s Pearl Fishers? It shows that in the years immediately after he composed this opera, Bizet’s experience of life, and of women in particular, deepened immeasurably. His marriage to Geneviève Halévy, young, timid, and incipiently neurotic, was obtained against initial opposition from her family. Bizet soon discovered that his marriage was not to be a happy one, and much of his energy was taken up protecting a dependent wife. His attraction to free-spirits such as the singer Galli-Marié, so like the Carmen he wrote for her, is understandable.

Knowledge of himself and of his talent would have warned Bizet against accepting any more librettos in which character and motive was so ineptly drawn as in Pearl Fishers. Its composer was, as Martin Cooper has observed, ‘underdeveloped himself on the emotional side’, with still showing signs of adolescent contempt for women and for love.

But genius will out, and there were aspects of the Pearl Fishers libretto to which Bizet could and did respond strongly. Not surprisingly, these correspond to the passages in the music to which audiences respond with such affection. One is the friendship of the rivals for Leila’s affections, Nadir and Zurga. The famous duet, right near the beginning of the opera, is not just a vocal lollipop, but a revelation of what will be most compelling in Pearl Fishers’ music and drama, what Lord Harewood calls ‘a kind of erotic hypnosis, gentle and compelling…with which Bizet ensnares his young lovers and impregnates the score’.

The friendship theme, first played by the flute in the duet, illustrates Bizet’s desire to unify the musical treatment of the drama – he brings it back at crucial moments, to remind the audience of the bond of amity between Nadir and Zurga. Unlike the ‘fate’ theme in Carmen, however, the Pearl Fishers theme is too long and placid for the purpose, and is never really developed. This reveals a bad side of the influence on Bizet of his friend and mentor Gounod.

The last act, with its Hollywood-like necklace dénouement, is admittedly pretty feeble. Bizet and his librettists must take join responsibility (but the trio ‘O lumière sainte’, with its depressingly trite blend of grand-opera grandiosity à la Meyerbeer and sentimental obviousness, turns out, fortunately, not to have been composed by Bizet at all, but by Godard). The melodic inspiration of the opera at its best reflects Gounod’s greatest virtue - people appreciate this in Bizet without associating it with the influence on him of the once over-famous but now somewhat unfashionable Gounod.

But there is more, and Berlioz put his finger on it in praising the opening of Pearl Fishers - Ceylonese Bizet’s fishermen may not be, but the music of the opening chorus, preceded by the very striking orchestral prelude, with its memorable theme, creates a pungent atmosphere – not to be expected from reading the libretto. The ‘incisive’ rhythms, sharp modulations and touches of chromaticism launch us into the score (Winton Dean’s words) - a new and genuinely dramatic composer has arisen.

First published in Opera Australia, 1988