Les pêcheurs de perles form of creative work opera
It was Bizet's winning entry in a competition organised by the celebrated composer Jacques Offenbach, and gained him a cash award, a gold medal, and a performance of the prize work at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. In 1857 Bizet was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome, and as a result spent most of the following three years in Italy, where he wrote Don Procopio, a short opera buffa in the style of Donizetti. By this time Bizet had written several non-stage works, including his Symphony in C, but the poor reception accorded to his 1858 Te Deum, a religious work he composed in Rome, helped convince him that his future lay primarily with the musical theatre. He planned and possibly began several operatic works before his return to Paris in 1860, but none of these projects came to fruition.In Paris, Bizet discovered the difficulties faced by young and relatively unknown composers trying to get their operas performed. Of the capital's two state-subsidised opera houses, the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, the former offered a static repertoire in which works by foreign composers, particularly Rossini and Meyerbeer, were dominant. Even established French composers such as Gounod had difficulty getting works performed there. At the Opéra-Comique, innovation was equally rare; although more French works were performed, the style and character of most productions had hardly changed since the 1830s. However, one condition of the Opéra-Comique's state funding was that from time to time it should produce one-act works by former Prix de Rome laureates. Under this provision, Bizet wrote La guzla de l'Emir, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, and this went into rehearsal early in 1862.In April 1862, as the La guzla rehearsals proceeded, Bizet was approached by Léon Carvalho, manager of the independent Théâtre Lyrique company. Carvalho had been offered an annual grant of 100,000 francs by the retiring Minister of Fine Arts, Count Walewski, on condition that each year he stage a new three-act opera from a recent Prix de Rome winner. Carvalho had a high opinion of Bizet's abilities, and offered him the libretto of Les pêcheurs de perles, an exotic story by Carré and Eugène Cormon set on the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Sensing the opportunity for a genuine theatrical success, Bizet accepted the commission. Because Walewski restricted his grant to composers who had not had any previous work performed commercially, Bizet hurriedly withdrew La guzla from the Opéra-Comique; it has never been performed, and the music has disappeared.Writing and compositional history
The libretto was written by Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré. Cormon was a prolific author of libretti and straight drama, usually in collaboration with other writers. In his career he wrote or co-wrote at least 135 works, of which Les dragons de Villars, set to music by Aimé Maillart, was perhaps the most successful.Carré, who had initially trained as a painter, had worked with Jules Barbier on Gounod's opera Faust and had co-written the play Les contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann, which became the basis of the libretto for Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Before Les pêcheurs de perles Cormon and Carré had previously written a libretto for Maillart on a similar theme, Les pêcheurs de Catane, which had been performed in 1860; they had originally planned to set their new story in Mexico before changing its location to Ceylon.By general critical consent the libretto of Les pêcheurs de perles is a work of poor quality. The weak plot, as Bizet's biographer Winton Dean observes, turns on the unlikely coincidence regarding Leila's necklace, and no real effort is made in the text to bring any of the characters to life: "They are the regulation sopranos, tenors, etc., with their faces blacked". Mina Curtiss, in her book on Bizet, dismisses the text as banal and imitative. Donal Henahan of The New York Times, writing in 1986, said that the libretto "rank[ed] right down there with the most appallingly inept of its kind". The writers themselves admitted its shortcomings: Cormon commented later that had they been aware of Bizet's quality as a composer, they would have tried harder. Carré was worried about the weak ending, and constantly sought suggestions for changing it; Curtiss records that in exasperation, the theatre manager Carvalho suggested that Carré burn the libretto. This facetious remark, Curtiss asserts, led Carré to end the opera with the fishermen's tents ablaze as Leila and Nadir make their escape.Because he did not receive Carvalho's commission until April 1863, with the projected opening night set for mid-September, Bizet composed quickly with, Curtiss says, "a tenacity and concentration quite foreign to him in his Roman days". He had some music available on which he could draw; through the previous winter he had worked on the score of an opera, Ivan IV with the promise, which fell through, that the work would be staged in Baden-Baden. Ivan IV provided music for three numbers in Les pêcheurs de perles: the prelude; part of Zurga's "Une fille inconnue"; and the third act duet "O lumière sainte". The "Brahma divin Brahma" chorus was adapted from the rejected Te Deum, and the chorus "Ah chante, chante encore" from Don Procopio. It is also likely that music composed for the cancelled La guzla de l'émir found its way into the new opera's score, which was completed by early August. The libretto was changed frequently during the creation process, even when the work had reached the rehearsal stage; the chorus "L'ombre descend" was added at Bizet's request, and other numbers were shortened or removed.
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