Nourabad tells Leïla that the divers have returned safely and she can now sleep until morning in the temple. He listens as she begins her incantation and, unable to resist any longer, calls out to her. Nadir, alone, reveals that he and Leïla have met illicitly and that he has followed her to the village. Her reward for keeping the divers safe from harm will be their finest pearl. Zurga, who does not recognize her, imposes an oath of obedience upon her on pain of death. Although she is veiled, Nadir immediately realizes she is Leïla, the priestess he still loves. She is to sing and pray all night to calm the demons of the deep and to ward off the spirits of the storm. Nourabad, the High Priest, brings a priestess to the village. Nadir swears he has kept the vow they both made to protect their friendship by staying away from her. He and Zurga recall that their friendship was almost destroyed when they both fell in love with a Hindu priestess. Nadir returns to the village after spending a year away. Zurga tells them they must choose a leader, and they unanimously swear loyalty to him. As the villagers prepare for their dive, they sing of their fear of the sea. Seattle Opera photo (Burden & Feigum) by Rosarii Lynch.A pearl-diving village in the Far East. Seattle Opera presents The Pearl Fishers at McCaw Hall through Jan. Good thing we had Jonathan Dean's supratitles to help us read the depth charts. ) took on a very different meaning when coeur (heart) was pronounced corps (body). "Ton coeur n'a pas compris." (Your heart didn't understand. Pearl Fishers was sung in French, and the credits included a French diction coach to help the singers navigate the shoals of pronunciation, though stumbles were inevitable. Blame the languid artists in the City of Brotherly Love. The theatrical highlight, a fight at the end of Act II, gives way to an almost comic, writhing group-grope in Act III. On the podium, Gerard Schwartz does his best to propel the music and the action forward, but stage director Kay Walker Castaldo (a Philly holdover) doesn't do much to showcase the drama, what little there is. Much of the time, the principals kneel or recline on the scenery like the deity on a bottle of White Rock soda and sing themselves to sleep. Gets warm in these south seas, no doubt, which accounts for the staging's languid pace. All this fuss over a one-tune wonder by Bizet, 24 years old at the time, composed 12 years before his masterpiece, Carmen.īack to the bare-chested guys. And why Philly? Turns out this is suddenly a very popular opera, with stagings in the past couple of seasons in San Francisco, San Diego, Denver, Detroit, Chicago, Montreal, and Washington, DC, in addition to the Philadephia set and costumes picked up by Seattle. In this production (from Philadelphia), it seems to be the bare-chested guys who do the dangerous swimming. The real pearl fishers, you may recall from the famous photos, are women on the Japanese island of Hekura. Well, it's a French opera, so sophisticated (or even credible) plotting isn't as important as an exotic locale (Ceylon) and the occasional ballet (principal dancers Bobby Briscoe doing his best leaping lizard moves, Lisa Gillespie writhing like a snake charmer to superfluously frantic choreography). Nadir is sung by William Burden, who impressed local audiences last season in Iphigenia he's a tenor, so you know he's going to get the girl, while Christopher Feigum, a baritone, sings Zurga, and you know he's going go through some soul-searching before he Does The Right Thing, in this case burning down the village that's just elected him chief so that his BFF and the girl (a fallen priestess) can make their getaway. The best music in George Bizet's early opera, The Pearl Fishers, comes barely 10 minutes after the curtain rises it's a justly celebrated duet between childhood buddies Nadir and Zurga.