The music of The Pearl Fishers (Les pêcheurs de perles) will forever be compared to Bizet's Carmen and will inevitably be seen as the lesser work. Carmen is extraordinary in every way: the musical characterizations approach the work of the mature Mozart or middle-period Verdi, melodic interest never wanes, the libretto is filled with human truth, the dramatic structure is as solid as any opera written before or since, it is brilliantly orchestrated, and it is virtually indestructible. Carmen is what every opera composer strives to achieve in terms of authentic music drama. On top of all that, while it endures as one of the three or four most popular operas in the repertoire, it has tunes which have entered the consciousness of people from every strata of society, in virtually every country in the world. On those terms, The Pearl Fishers can hardly compete.
But Bizet's earlier opera (his sixth by most accounts, although only his second
staged work) has its treasures. It certainly has no lack of melodic interest.
There is, of course, the 'big tune', the climax of the first act duet between
Zurga and Nadir, Au fond du temple sain
Perhaps the thing that captured the first audience's imagination in 1863 is what keeps the piece alive today: its exoticism. There are elements in the music that make it very much a part of the mid to late nineteenth century aesthetic that looked to the Middle or Far East for inspiration. (This was a typically French preoccupation, even from the earliest epoch of French operatic writing, e.g. Rameau's Les Indes galantes.) Certainly there is the requisite battery of percussion instruments in order to communicate local color, including cymbals, kettledrums and tambourine. But exoticism is also expressed through the heavy ornamentation of certain instrumental and vocal lines.The oboe introduction to Nadir's appearance in the second act is a case in point, as is Leïla's recitative in the same act and her incantation to Siva at the end of Act I. Although Bizet didn't seek ethnic authenticity to the point that Puccini did in Butterfly and Turandot, The Pearl Fishers still succeeds as an early example of exoticism, and audiences' expectations are as much fulfilled by this work as by Delibes' Lakmé or Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila.
One thing that sets this opera apart from efforts by other composers of the time is the sense of drive and melodic interest that exists in the recitative portions of the opera. The barriers that normally exist between 'numbers' and recitative in French opera at this time are broken down by Bizet using various means, most interestingly through the use of fully developed melodies that carry the ear from recitative to aria or ensemble. This makes the opera move quickly and gives a greater intensity to the drama. In that this is so, The Pearl Fishers has it over Carmen since the music for the recitatives for the later oprra weren't written by Bizet but by Guiraud. As someone who has always favored the opéra comique version of Carmen with spoken dialogue, I wonder what the opera would have been like with melodically driven recitatives by the composer himself!