Seattle Opera presents Bizet's exotic "Pearl Fishers"

"Carmen" it isn't. But while that crowning masterpiece would suffice by itself as Bizet's ticket to immortality, the French master's cruelly short career supplies several persuasive pieces of supporting documentation.

There is the astonishingly accomplished symphony he wrote around the time of his 17th birthday. There are the atmospheric pieces of incidental music for "L'Arlésienne," and the charming piano duets of "Children's Games." And then there is "The Pearl Fishers," an opera that in recent years has finally established itself as a repertoire work, one that for many operagoers — this writer included — stands at least equal to "Carmen" in dramatic fascination and sheer musical ravishment.

You could hardly ask for a sharper contrast between a composer's two most successful operas. "Carmen," completed a few months before Bizet's death in 1875 at the age of 36, is all hard-edged urgency, as highly charged in its dramatic force — and its explosive animal sexuality — as it is picturesque in its evocation of Spain. "The Pearl Fishers" ("Les Pêcheurs de Perles") is picturesque too, but the atmosphere it breathes is the perfumed enchantment of Ceylon — now Sri Lanka, but in Bizet's time a far-off island shrouded in the kind of religiously tinged mystery irresistible to his romantic temperament.

Originally the action was to take place in Mexico; it's tempting if futile to wonder how the music would have differed in that setting. But with the scene transferred to Ceylon, the opera became a wondrous confection of exotic colors and whispered suggestions, though Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré's libretto also provided Bizet with plenty of violent undercurrents and the opportunity for a tremendous storm scene.

The music

"Pearl Fishers" shares with "Carmen" a plot centered on a love triangle (see accompanying story). But where the later work presents a baldly sensual picture in its heroine's transfer of affections from old love to new, in "Pearl Fishers" much of the most riveting aspect of the story is the painful inner conflict — between loyalty and jealousy — that threatens to tear the central character Zurga apart. For most members of the audience it must surely be easier to sympathize and identify with this deeply ambivalent man than with the more emotionally one-dimensional characters in "Carmen." The contrast between the two works resembles the difference between the complex human beings of Anthony Trollope's novels and the pasteboard figures that inhabit those of Charles Dickens.

All this is realized in a score of precocious mastery for a 24-year-old composer, capturing to perfection the setting in "the bosom of the fragrant night," and replete with exotic touches like the two piccolos that accompany the offstage chorus in the opening scene of Act II as "Darkness descends from the heavens, [and] night spreads its veils." Equally atmospheric are the flute and harp heard in the two friends' duet "Au fond du temple saint" — their recollection of that fateful glimpse of Leïla "At the back of the holy temple" — a number dear to singers and audiences alike even before the work as a whole began its return to public favor.

The staging

Kay Walker Castaldo's production comes to Seattle from Philadelphia, where I saw and loved it five years ago for the straightforward yet powerful way it involved the audience in the story. The audience here can look forward to enjoying Boyd Ostroff's effective sets and Richard St. Clair's costumes. The latter, to tell the truth, are more striking for their relative exiguity than for any undue sumptuousness, the two male leads being bare-chested throughout.

Fortunately William Burden, one of the few tenors with a physique as impressive as his voice, will again be Nadir, and the Leïla is Mary Dunleavy, sweet-voiced and dramatically intense when she portrayed the role in Philadelphia. All in all, the prospect is of stage magic and musical voluptuousness — an indulgent oasis between the asperities of "Elektra" back in October and the challenging double bill of "Bluebeard's Castle" and "Erwartung" set to open in February.

Bernard Jacobson: bernardijacobson@comcast.net