This DVD documents the Metropolitan Opera’s ‘Live in HD’ cinema transmission of Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles on 16 January 2016. The performance was part of a run that marked the first time the opera had been performed at the Met in almost a hundred years. In a brief introduction that precedes the performance on the DVD, the host of the live broadcast, soprano Patricia Racette, offers a justification of sorts for the opera’s return to the Met’s stage: ‘the perfumed romance, the exotic setting and the intoxicating melodies of the young Bizet’ represent a ‘heady mix’ that have won over new audiences for the opera’s ‘guilty musical pleasures’.

The musical pleasures of Bizet’s score are well known – the tenor–baritone duet ‘Au fond du temple saint’ is a staple at gala concerts, and the tenor’s Act 1 romance ‘Je crois entendre encore’ finds a place in many a recital – but why should one feel ‘guilty’ for enjoying them? The answer presumably has to do with the ambivalence that a modern-day audience feels (or should feel) towards the unabashed orientalism of the libretto. The action of Les Pêcheurs takes place within a pearl-fishing community in Ceylon. As Hervé Lacombe has noted, the libretto abounds with words that signify a primitive, uncivilized milieu: palm trees and savannahs, jaguars and panthers, fishing boats and pirogues, braziers and incense, Brahma and Siva, evil spirits and dark divinities.Footnote ¹ Bizet dutifully responded to these prompts with exotic musical touches scattered throughout the score: driving dance rhythms punctuated by tambourine and triangle in the choral scenes, modal-sounding woodwind introductions in Nadir’s two solo numbers, melismatic invocations of Hindu divinities in Leïla’s Act 1 air. Orientalism, exoticism, primitivism, essentialization of the Other: these are the problematic legacies with which any audience for Les Pêcheurs has to grapple (perhaps guiltily) in our postcolonial age.

Ralph Locke has suggested that cultural imperialism ‘can be condemned in the realm of politics but … can and should be allowed to find expression in art, especially when the work in question is, in some sense, worthy enough’.Footnote ² In an interview that is included in the bonus materials to the DVD, director Penny Woolcock makes a case for Les Pêcheurs along those lines.Footnote ³ Woolcock argues that Bizet’s youthful opera is worthy because ‘the themes of love and friendship and the overwhelming force of nature are still very relevant now’. The production emphasizes this putative contemporary relevance by updating the opera’s setting to a fishing village in present-day Sri Lanka. The first act is set in the middle of the village, with no trace of the sunlit beach, bamboo huts, palm trees, giant cactuses, or ruined pagoda described in the libretto. The ramshackle buildings in the village rest on stilts and oil drums and are made from ‘cardboard and bits of tin’ (to use Woolcock’s description). The chorus mills about on scaffold platforms that conveniently double as choral risers. The costumes are an eclectic mix of East and West, with chorus members variously wearing saris, suits, turbans and baseball caps. The first scene of the third act, which the libretto sets in ‘an Indian tent’, is moved into Zurga’s office inside what appears to be a rusty warehouse, with election posters and a map of Colombo on the wall, rows of filing cabinets, a refrigerator full of beer and an old television set.

By updating the action to the present, Woolcock retains some mild local colour in the staging – palms-together ‘namaste’ greetings, veils and floral garlands bedecking Leïla – while avoiding some of the more condescending exotic touches. In the libretto, the opening number depicts the pearl-fishing community ‘dancing and drinking to the sound of various Hindu and Chinese [sic] instruments’, while singing to ward off evil spirits. Woolcock’s staging dispenses with this superstitious revelry and instead shows the villagers engaged in humdrum daily activities: reading newspapers, washing clothes, getting haircuts – doing everything except dancing even as they repeatedly sing the words ‘dansez, dansez!’Footnote ⁴ In place of the libretto’s simplistic depiction of the pearl fishers as credulous savages, Woolcock offers a more nuanced view of their society, suggesting in her interview that their fears and superstitions arise from the precariousness of their existence, dependent as it is upon the whims of the sea.

In Woolcock’s conception, the sea is the ‘fourth character’ in the opera after the central love triangle. This conceit is reflected in the production’s most memorable visual moments, which involve projected images of the sea and other natural elements. As the orchestra plays the brief Prelude, we see on stage a visual sequence of pearl divers (enacted by aerial acrobats) ‘swimming’ up and down the blue depths, with ‘bubbles’ (video projections) emanating from their nostrils. This stunning image is repeated in Act 2: as Leïla sings of Nadir in her cavatine ‘Comme autrefois’, we see Nadir (or his acrobat double) ‘diving’ in the background behind her. Video projections are used to good effect elsewhere in the production, providing visuals for the gathering storm, the churning sea and the giant wave that crashes over the characters at the climax of the Act 2 finale, in what is presumably a reference to the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. In presenting these projected images of nature, Woolcock reminds us of ‘a concept that the Romantics held dear: the close link between nature and drama’.Footnote ⁵

Woolcock’s staging also attempts to animate the cardboard plot, at the centre of which is a love triangle that was seen as clichéd even when Les Pêcheurs premiered in 1863. As recounted in the duet ‘Au fond du temple saint’, Nadir and Zurga have both loved the priestess Leïla from afar ever since they saw her at a temple in Kandy long ago. In order to preserve their friendship, they have vowed that neither would pursue that love. This pact breaks down when the veiled Leïla is brought to the village to participate in a ritual to protect the pearl divers. As the critic for Le Constitutionnel noted with amusement during the opera’s original run, ‘[Leïla] recognizes Nadir, whom she loves because he is a tenor; she doesn’t love Zurga, because he is a baritone. That appears to be the rule in India [sic] as it is in Europe’.Footnote ⁶ Zurga gets his chance at revenge when Leïla and Nadir are caught together in violation of Leïla’s vow of chastity.Footnote ⁷ The lovers are sentenced to death, but Zurga discovers at the eleventh hour that Leïla previously saved his life, and he repays this debt by burning down the village to create a distraction that allows the lovers to escape. Fin de l’opéra.

The competing suitors Nadir and Zurga are clearly differentiated from each other in the Met’s production. Zurga is shown to be a smooth political operator who has achieved some degree of status and material success since his youthful adventures with Nadir. His elevation to village headman in the first scene is facilitated by cash bribes handed out by henchmen in dark suits. Zurga himself wears a well-tailored black suit and a blue vest with a mandarin collar. His dramatic foil Nadir, on the other hand, is depicted as a more free-spirited tattooed type, dressed in a purple short-sleeved shirt and a lower garment that is a cross between a sarong and fisherman pants. The sartorial contrast between the two characters extends to their accessories: black leather shoes and a conspicuously shiny watch for Zurga, flip-flops and leather bracelets for Nadir. Even though the characters profess eternal friendship in their first-act duet, it is clear that their lives have diverged. Leïla, who starts the opera draped in veils, is a more generalized and passive character in the first act, but she comes to dramatic life as the veils come off, especially in her duets with Nadir and Zurga in the second and third acts.

The musical performances are impeccable across the board. The Met’s previous run of Les Pêcheurs, in 1916, featured Frieda Hempel as Leïla, Enrico Caruso as Nadir and Giuseppe de Luca as Zurga, but the present cast need fear no comparison with their illustrious predecessors. Diana Damrau is by turns innocent and virtuosic, introspective and lyrical, and finally defiant and dramatic as Leïla, a role that, like Verdi’s Violetta, ‘is written … from act to act for three singers of diverse skills and different styles, and offers serious difficulties for a single voice’.Footnote ⁸ Matthew Polenzani gives a more one-note dramatic performance as Nadir but sings beautifully, using his head voice to enthralling effect in the pianissimo high notes towards the end of ‘Je crois entendre encore’.Footnote ⁹

Mariusz Kwiecień as Zurga has the physical presence to be convincing as the leader of the village and, like the other two principals, shows a good grasp of French style and phrasing. Kwiecień is also sensitive to Zurga’s frequent changes of mood, especially in the last act, where the character is successively angry, regretful, confrontational, violent and finally magnanimous and self-sacrificing. Conductor Gianandrea Noseda leads an idiomatic performance with finely judged tempos and balances. The Met Orchestra luxuriates in Bizet’s rich orchestration and lush harmonies, and the Met Chorus, under the direction of Donald Palumbo, does a characteristically excellent job of navigating through some fairly intricate choral passages.

The performance mostly follows the recent critical edition by Brad Cohen and published by Peters, with two significant departures. The chœur dansé that opens the last scene is greatly truncated, in keeping with Woolcock’s decision to remove all dance elements from her staging. More disappointingly, the performance preserves the spurious ending to the Nadir-Zurga duet ‘Au fond du temple saint’, with the big tune (‘Oui, c’est elle,/C’est la déesse’) returning to round off the number. This crowd-pleasing ending makes neither musicological nor dramatic sense, but the audience’s expectations apparently could not be denied.Footnote ¹⁰

This DVD is a very welcome addition to the list of performances of nineteenth-century French opera preserved on video. Les Pêcheurs de perles is a musically and dramatically uneven work, and its orientalism remains problematic, but Woolcock’s strong concept, the production’s visual innovations and the excellence of the singing and music-making create a strong case for enjoying Bizet’s opera without (too much) guilt.