The Pearl Fishers

How was Bizet able to compose Les Pêcheurs de perles without ever having left Paris? Mirabelle Ordinaire, who joined the Stage Directors team at the Met in New York several years ago, seizes on the mystery that accompanies the creative gesture to celebrate a prodigious score.

The young Bizet was twenty-five years old and had never lived outside the ninth arrondissement of Paris when he composed his opera. In this Orientalist reverie, the composer's flat looks directly out onto the Garnier Opera House under construction. Invited into the poet's creative intimacy, we witness the intertwining of these two geneses: the arcades of the Opéra become those of a Hindu palace, the water drained for the building's foundations spills into the Indian Ocean and transports us to Ceylon where Bizet, merging with Zurga, meets the bewitching Leïla.