Bizet’s pearl failed to shine with the critics

Georges Bizet’s first full opera premiered in Paris in September 1863. But audiences would not see his tale about best friends Nadir and Zurga, who both fall in love at first sight with the beautiful Leila, for another 23 years.

AUGUST 12, 2003 : Scene from the dress rehearsal of the production 'The Pearlfishers' at the Sydney Opera House, 12/08/03. Pic Bob Barker. Live Theatre

Steamy Ceylon appeared an exotic escape when the first full opera by fledgling composer Georges Bizet premiered in Paris in September 1863. But audiences would not see his tale about best friends Nadir and Zurga, who both fall in love at first sight with the incomparably beautiful Leila, for another 23 years.

Bizet’s Les Pecheurs de Perles (The Pearlfishers) was composed 12 years before his masterpiece Carmen, but includes his popular tenor and baritone duet, Au fond du temple saint.

Opera Australia opens a new production of The Pearlfishers at the Joan Sutherland Theatre tonight. As director, playwright Michael Gow adds gravitas to the traditional exotic production by exploring Ceylon’s colonial past. Gow transforms Bizet’s pearl fishing village into a place of beauty and terror, grandeur and decay.

Bizet was born Alexandre Cesar Leopold on October 25, 1838, to hairdresser and wigmaker, turned singing teacher, Adolphe and mother Aimee, an accomplished pianist, but used his baptismal name of Georges. His maternal uncle Francois Delsarte was a distinguished singer at the courts of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. Delsarte’s wife Rosine, a musical prodigy. at 13 was assistant professor of solfege singing at the Conservatoire de Paris.

Composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875).

Bizet was admitted to the Conservatoire on October 9, 1848, before his 10th birthday. Within six months he won first prize in solfege, impressing former professor of piano Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmermann, who gave Bizet private lessons until the older man’s death in 1853.

His other teachers at the Conservatoire, where Bizet wrote a one-act opera Le docteur Miracle in 1856, included composers Charles Gounod and Fromental Halevy. He learned piano with Antoine Marmontel, later writing to Marmontel that, “In your class one learns something besides the piano; one becomes a musician.”

His Conservatoire prizes culminated in the Prix de Rome for his cantata Clovis et Clotilde in 1857. The prize included a five-year state pension with two compulsory years at the French Villa Medici Academy in Rome, described by Bizet as “paradise”. During three years in Rome Bizet wrote a short opera buffa, Don Procopio, in the style of Donizetti.

Although a talented pianist, contemporaries considered Bizet concealed his ability “as though it were a vice”. But in a rare demonstration in May 1861 at a dinner party with Franz Liszt, Bizet played flawlessly on one of Liszt’s most difficult pieces.

“I thought there were only two men able to surmount the difficulties,” Liszt commented. “There are three, and ... the youngest is perhaps the boldest and most brilliant.”

Bizet fathered a son with family housekeeper Marie Reiter in 1862, but the boy believed he was Adolphe Bizet’s child until Reiter was on her deathbed in 1913.

Bizet’s one-act opera La guzla de l’emir, composed for the state-subsidised Opera-Comique, was in rehearsal when he received an offer in April 1863 to compose music for a three-act opera, Les Pecheurs de Perles, based on a libretto by Michel Carre and Eugene Cormon. A condition was that the opera was the composer’s first publicly staged work, so Bizet withdrew La guzla from production and incorporated some parts of its music into the new opera.

Bizet’s Les Pecheurs de Perles (The Pearlfishers) was composed 12 years before his masterpiece Carmen.

Originally set in Mexico, by the first performance at the independent Theatre Lyrique on September 30, 1863, it was set in ancient Ceylon. Despite a good public reception and praise from composer Hector Berlioz, press critics were dismissive.

Bizet was in love with Halevy’s daughter Genevieve by 1867, when he wrote “I have met an adorable girl whom I love. In two years she will be my wife.” Halevy died in 1862, but Genevieve’s mother dismissed Bizet as “penniless, left-wing, anti-religious and Bohemian”.

After their marriage in 1869 Bizet explored several opera concepts, but when the Franco Prussian War began in July 1870 he joined composers and artists in the National Guard.

Despite declaring he could not leave Paris, “it would be quite simply an act of cowardice” the couple briefly left the besieged city, returning to live with Genevieve’s cousin Ludovic Halevy, his wife Valentine and their two sons.

Although their marriage suffered under financial pressures and Genevieve’s fragile nerves, their son Jacques was born in 1872, as Bizet agreed to compose a three act opera for the Opera-Comique.

The chosen subject was Prosper Merimee’s risque short novel Carmen. Long plagued by ill-health, on June 3, 1875, just months after Carmen’s Paris premiere, Bizet died.

Originally published as Bizet’s pearl failed to shine with the critics