Love and friendship ignited by memories - Les pêcheurs de perles by FC Bergman

© Annemie Augustijns Friday 

Friday, 15th December 2023, the premiere evening of The Pearl Hunters, staged by the Flemish Opera and Ballet in Antwerp's 1907 opera house. The red curtain is closed. On either side of the front stage, there are formica tables and chairs. An old man is sitting in one of them. The conductor arrives, and the applause ends. The first note of the prelude is a hard beat. Just during this beat, the man's head falls into the plate in front of him. At that moment, the curtain opens upwards to reveal a grey, cold dining hall. Old people are sitting, and nurses are walking around in an unpleasant nursing home. During the prelude, two nurses arrive on a stretcher and take the deceased person away. After that, the opening chorus featuring an oriental melody follows. It is sung by a choir aged with make-up; the elderly, like pearl hunters defying death, are one step closer to death every moment, but they resist death with every moment they live. Meanwhile, on the other side of the stage, a woman passes away and is also taken away on a stretcher.

The Pearl Hunters (Les pêcheurs de perles) is Bizet's second most famous opera, following Carmen. Despite this, it is one of the lesser-known and rarely staged works in the general opera repertoire. 

The Pearl Hunters premiered at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris in 1863. Although the audience received it favourably, the composers and critics of the period did not appreciate it, except for Hector Berlioz. Unfortunately, the history of the work's journey is complicated. Bizet never staged the opera again during his lifetime. The opera was later revised several times, with changes made especially to the ending, and additional music was composed. Arthur Hammond intervened in the early 1970s to approach Bizet's original version. In 2010, Bizet's conductor's score of 1863 was discovered in the National Library of France.

The Pearl Hunters is a three-act opera with a libretto by Eugene Cormon and Michel Carré. It tells the story of two men, Zurga and Nadir, in ancient Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). They are torn between their vow of friendship and their love for the same woman, Leyla. She, a Hindu priestess, is torn between her love for one of the men and her sacred vow. This conflict arises as she tries to balance her personal feelings with her religious duties.

At the start of the opera, Zurga (baritone) and Nadir (tenor) reminisce about the old days. They have not broken the oath of friendship they swore to each other, despite both being in love with the same woman. Their duet 'Au fond du temple saint' is a beloved and well-known piece in the opera repertoire.

Nadir followed Leyla, who had left the village the year before. When Leyla returned to the village temple to pray for the pearl divers' protection, he followed her back to the village. 'Je crois entendre encore', in which Nadir expresses his love for Leyla after Zurga sails away, is not only one of the most heartfelt arias written for the tenor voice but also the most famous and frequently performed piece of the opera. Leyla (soprano) is in love with Nadir. She sings the famous aria 'O Dieu Brahma', which includes her prayer to protect the pearl hunters, because of her love for Nadir.

While Leyla and Nadir are in the temple recalling and renewing their love in the duet "Ton coeur n'a pas compris le mien", another famous piece of the opera, they are captured by the abbot Nourabad (bass) and exposed to the village. The villagers demand that Zurga execute them. When Zurga sees Leyla's face, which he had not recognised because it had been covered with a veil from the beginning, he realises that Nadir has betrayed the vow they made together; he is therefore very angry and wants revenge, but he is also sad to lose Nadir, with whom he has been friends since their youth, as he sings in the aria "L'orage s'est calme". As Leyla and Nadir are being led to execution, Leyla gives Zurga a necklace to take off her neck and deliver it to her mother. The necklace was given to Leyla by a fugitive she had rescued by finding him a hiding place when she was young. Zurga recognizes Leyla as the girl who saved him years ago upon seeing the necklace. He sets fire to the village, distracting the villagers and allowing Leyla and Nadir to escape. The opera's original version concludes with Zurga sitting alone on the beach.

In the 1886 version, restaged after Bizet's death, Zurga is stabbed to death after Nourabad informs the villagers that he allowed Leyla and Nadir to escape. In later versions, Zurga meets his demise in various ways.

Staged as a production of the Flemish Opera and Ballet (Opera Ballet Vlaanderen), which is based in the Belgian cities of Ghent and Antwerp and performs in the opera houses in these two cities, Pearl Hunters is directed by FC Bergman, one of Belgium's world-renowned theatre collectives. The team, which received the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Theatre Biennale last summer, consists of Stef Aerts, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck, graduates of the Theatre Department of the Antwerp Conservatory.

FC Bergman team has moved the story to a retirement home. This choice is interesting, but considering that in most of the arias the protagonists tell their memories with each other rather than their feelings and thoughts in the present, it is not strange to move the narrative to a retirement home where the past is strongly remembered. In the original story, the protagonists meet again after experiencing love and making vows. FC Bergman chooses to move this reunion to the last phase of the protagonists' lives instead of a year later.

© Annemie Augustijns Friday

The opera production features a revolving stage, which is a common element in most opera productions. One side of the revolving stage depicts several areas of the nursing home, including the dining hall, the death washing room, and the morgue. The other side of the stage is covered by a massive wave that is frozen at its highest point. Additionally, there is a large window on one side of the dining hall that opens to the side of the wave.

The stage rotates slowly and sometimes its rotation never stopps, intertwining the spaces of the nursing home where death is ever-present and one of the residents could succumb at any moment, with the space of the frozen wave, which represents immortalized memories. So, the rotating stage merges the present and the past, creating a seamless transition between the two. In that sense I believe this is a rare instance where a rotating stage in an opera production enhances the narrative by providing a deeper meaning, rather than just facilitating quick and practical scene changes.

FC Bergman also made some changes in the narrative and story. The most important change in the narrative is that there are two each of Zurga, Nadir and Leyla; Nadir and Leyla's youth is played by young dancers (Bianca Zueneli and Jan Deboom), while Zurga's youth is played by a young singer (Jacob Abel) who also sings Nourabad's score in the later parts of the work, but who is part of the movement design together with the dancers in the early parts - so that most of the audience, like me, initially thought that he was only a dancer. Thus, while the older versions of the protagonists perform arias that speak of the past and memories, their younger versions first revive certain memories with still postures resembling photo frames, and in the following scenes they also become animated. The most impressive of these is the love duet between Nadir and Leyla, in which two naked young dancers make love under the frozen wave with a wonderfully fluid movement design, either standing or lying down, either touching each other or giving each other momentum with their feet or hands.

The fact that Nourabad's score is a younger version of Zurga's does not make any difference in terms of the story, because the strict and prescriptive words of the abbot Nourabad serve to express the harsh side of Zurga's inner dilemma after she learns of Nadir and Leyla's betrayal. The most important change that FC Bergman made to the story was to remove the necklace object from the story, as they felt that the libretto's linking of Zurga's forgiveness of Nadir and Leyla to the simple fact of his discovery of the necklace was too simplistic in resolving the conflict between his friendship and love for Nadir and Leyla and his disappointment and anger at being betrayed by them, and that this would be unfair to the pysche of Zurga's character.

© Annemie Augustijns Friday

There are nice details in the world that FC Bergman constructs on the stage. It is meaningful that the frozen wave has an imaginary meaning such as fixing a powerful moment/memory in time, as well as the coincidence of a wave of gigantic dimensions similar to Hokusai's famous estamp, which may soon reach the shore with all its power and destroy everything in its path, and a wave that will affect the present by recalling a past memory/experience.

The black humour and the "meta" view of theatre, which is present in all of Bergman's works, is also evident in this staging. In the last part of the show, the frozen wave is treated as if it was a diarama (a life-size and three-dimensional model of a real or fictional event, moment or story, using light plays), in other words, the wave's "state of being a prop" is underlined with a meta-perspective: A fulcrum is placed under the wave so that it does not tip over, a restorer renews its paintwork, and even Nadir and Leyla's escape from the old people's home is realised by climbing directly onto the wave on which they are leaning a ladder. It is no coincidence that Nadir and Leyla's dream, that is, their wish to be together forever, is realised by climbing on the wave, and that we have seen paintings with wave motifs and the aquarium in the spaces of the nursing home from the beginning; this is actually the dream of all the elderly in the nursing home, to reach a wavy shoreIn this section, the small dining tables are placed as a single long table, half in the dining hall and half on the frozen wave diarama side of the window, that is, in a way that connects the two spaces, so that in this last section the two worlds contained in the narrative are now merging into a single reality.

It is also significant that from the first moment we see the wave, there are frozen seagulls flying with it: Do we know a seagull that does not play with the wave, is there a wave without seagulls? If the wave is a passion, and Leyla is the object of desire in this story, aren't Nadir and Zurga the seagulls who admire and fall in love with her? In fact, considering that Leyla is an old popstar in FC Bergman's interpretation, those seagulls are not only Nadir and Zurga, but also all the old people of the nursing home who accompany Leyla while she sings the aria "O Dieu Brahma" by lighting their lighters as if they were at a pop concert. And it is no coincidence that in the last scene the seagulls are lying upside down on the ground and Zurga is lying face down on the ground, because Zurga is the loser of the story. At this point, seeing Zurga being subjected to the same death ritual (pouring water over his head, covering it with moss and taking his photograph) as was done to an elderly person who had died in the first half of the show is a sign that Zurga is dead, or that he is so devastated that he is dying; FC Bergman may have used this mise-en-scene as a subtle, ironic reference to the interventions made to the Pearl Hunters after Bizet's death, all of which, without exception, killed Zurga.

© Annemie Augustijns Friday

FC Bergman staged the production, which lasts 105 minutes without intermission, for the first time at the Flemish Opera and Ballet in 2018. It was such a success that it was performed again this season, between 15 December 2023 and 24 January 2024, with a new conductor and a new cast of singers.

Belgian conductor Karel Deseure leads the orchestra with precision, revealing all the details and layers of the orchestration, which critics accused Bizet of being "Wagnerian" after the work's premiere in 1863, in a majestic and brisk, but at the same time emotional and elegant manner. The chorus, conducted by Jan Schweiger, accompanies the orchestra to perfection, creating the necessary impact in the scenes in which they are present.

The Russian lyric soprano Elena Tsallagova, who also sang the role of Leyla in the 2018 production, deserves praise not only for her crystal-clear voice, clear articulation and effective performance, but also for her acting in the scenes of Leyla's old age, as well as for her courage in the second half of the production, when she sheds her make-up and prostheses and transforms into the young Leyla.

The Turkish baritone Kartal Karagedik, who takes on the role of Zurga for the first time in his career, perfectly captures and conveys the anger, melancholy, sacrifice and acceptance of his protagonist, who is torn between friendship and love, trust and betrayal, who has experienced all this in his youth and whose calm psyche is again clouded in his old age, with a meticulous, nuanced and convincing approach to both acting and singing.

The 58-year-old Belgian tenor Marc Laho is also convincing as the old Nadir who remembers his friend and his love. In the two most famous pieces of the opera; in the duet with Zargo ( 'Au fond du temple saint') Laho was balanced and in his aria ('Je crois entendre encore') he was lyrical and emotional enough to bring the audience, or at least me, to tears.

© Mehmet Kerem Özel

The greatest handicap of contemporary productions of historical operas can be the betrayal of the music and libretto; in the name of updating the work, contemporary directors can treat it recklessly, in a way that has nothing to do with the time or place in which the story is set. The success of FC Bergman, a collective of theatre artists, in staging this first opera lies not only in the fact that the staging is based on the content of the text, which has a flesh-and-blood relationship with the composition, but also in the fact that the movements and the staging of the characters and the revolving stage are prepared by observing almost all the accents, continuities and interruptions in the music, with a meticulousness that I cannot mention one by one here, but as I gave the first example at the beginning of this article. FC Bergman's direction updates The Pearl Hunters, whose story has been purged of its previously disliked, orientalist or outdated features. Of course, this extraordinary direction would not have been possible without the commitment and successful performance of the orchestra and chorus of the Flemish Opera and Ballet, the guest conductor and the singers.

The Turkish version of this article was published in Andante (Issue 207, January 2024).