His friend, Zurga (baritone Christopher Feigum), and the newly chosen king, loved Leila in younger years. Soprano Mark Dunleavy (Leila), a tiny woman with a huge stage presence, worked well with handsome tenor William Burden, who sang the role of Nadir, her forbidden lover. Still, if the words about a veiled virgin goddess who comes to the exotic village to bring luck to the pearl harvest are silly, the singing and spicy harmonies were far from it. Librettists Michel Carre (Gounod’s “Faust”) and the prolific but uninspired Eugene Cormon, whose libretto the then 25-year-old Bizet worked with, remarked that if they’d known of Bizet’s musical brilliance, they wouldn’t have dumped such such trash on him. Leave out of that group the Metropolitan Opera, which has not touched it since 1916. Now “The Pearl Fishers” is one of the most popular operatic pieces and has recently been performed by a handful of U.S. The corny threesome plot and sad-sack libretto was salvaged by the short-lived Georges Bizet’s beautiful melodies, stage director Kay Walker Castaldo’s originality, and Neil Peter Jampolis’ eerie saturated lighting in the January run of the Seattle Opera production.īecause of the theatrics, it was a breeze to fall into the illusion of this opera, first performed in 1863 and poorly received, at least critically. When the harnessed “flying” dancer floated dreamily behind the blue scrim to signal the pearl harvest in a far-off country, we were invited into a visually arresting show of “The Pearl Fishers,” if not into the most compelling story.
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