Beyond Bizet by John Harris

Vancouver Opera’s The Pearl Fishers (October 22 – 30, 2022) has a prologue wherein a screen projection informs the audience, in writing, of the exceedingly obvious fact that Bizet and the “Frenchmen” who wrote the libretto were privileged men absolutely ignorant about the opera’s setting (Ceylon) and about the culture and religion of its characters.

It was like watching a prequel superimposed on Othello explaining that Shakespeare had never been to Venice, didn’t have a clue who Moors were, and had racist notions about Italians. Who knew?

Bizet and his writers Eugena Cormon and Michel Carre, carrying folders that presumably contain the music and lyrics, and wearing top hats and 19^th century garb, appear before the screen and the projected message. The folders they show to one another and to a European woman in period dress. The Frenchmen obviously regard themselves and what they are doing as important, but are treated, after the screen lifts, with a combination of deference and disrespect by the pearl fishers when they move among them with their folders. Then, quickly, they drift offstage, and the opera begins.

This prologue seems to be asking two questions. First, can musician-dramatists who are privileged members of their societies and ignorant about their settings and cultures produce credible opera? Second, can an audience that is European (mostly), privileged (mostly), and conditioned to assume that Bizet is a great musician, fully appreciate the opera without prompting from folk who know better?

Fortunately, after the prologue, the music, voices, costumes and setting captivate the audience. The usual conventions of the genre are affirmed, and the audience forgets whatever petty scruples are troubling the company’s producers and (maybe) performers, and falls back into enjoying the music, without a twinge of guilt for the racist attitudes and colonialist enterprises of its forebears.

What’s going on here is explained in the program. Vancouver Opera is intent on political correctness, with a post-colonialist slant. Messages from the General Director and the Board Chair speak of “making sure there’s a multiplicity of voices at the table” and “working towards increased inclusion and wider access to the arts for all.” This is ominous, but generalized enough to fit into Canada’s official multicultural approach to identity politics.

“Notes from the Director,” however, indicating the opera’s themes, is more directly informative of the company’s intent. One theme is said to be the choice between friendship and sexual love, or “between the good of the larger collective who are unknown to us, and the good of the few we love deeply.” This is familiarly humanistic (all humans are basically the same), and has probably appeared in one form or the other in the programs of many productions of the opera.

The other theme is said to be one that Bizet and his librettists should have, but failed to, develop, but that the producers have introduced as a correction. Vancouver Opera hopes their version will make the audience “think of Sri Lanka . . . and seek to know a deeper truth about it than the one Bizet, Cormon, and Carre have represented.” This truth is unspecified, but it is, apparently, more important than the one about love and friendship.

Following the messages from management, there is an academic essay, more of a lecture, actually. The lecture is meant to explain what the opera’s deeper theme is. The lecturer is Ajay Parasram, a professor of history at Dalhousie university. Parasram tells us that Ceylon, before the Europeans arrived, was a multicultural paradise, a “hub of globalization for thousands of years connecting Asia, Africa and the Middle East.” He goes on to say, “You couldn’t know that from The Pearl Fishers. . . set as it is upon the “arid and wild beach’ of Bizet’s Orientalist imagination.” The audience is advised, “Don’t look for evidence of universal stories tonight . . . . Imagine what kinds of stories become possible if cultivated on the fertile ground of ancient Lanka instead of the Orientalist landscape of Bizet’s imagination.”

So, the deeper theme is that people of European extraction are colonialists with no intent other than to exploit cultures and peoples that fell victim to their superior technology and racist attitudes to “the Other.”

The trouble is, no one looks for universal stories in opera. Usually, the stories are ridiculous, the characters one-dimensional — this is particularly the case in The Pearl Fishers, as Cormon and Carre knew. The music is everything, as the message from the conductor of the orchestra, Kamna Gupta, implies. Another problem is that Parasram seems to regard art as a kind of civic (nationalistic and ethnic) boosterism.  Bizet and the librettists should have studied up on the glories of ancient Lanka and celebrated them in song and story. The audience is supposed to ignore the opera and contemplate the greatness of Lanka.

Parasram is either a perpetual innocent or in the throes of some grand delusion. Or both, compounded by the fact that his studies in history have led him to build an academic career on the superficial formulas (“orientalism”) and silly jargon (“the Other”) of postcolonialism. He wants to “cancel” Bizet, but is unaware of the contradiction involved in celebrating an ancient empire that, as everyone knows, whether or not it really existed, would have featured all the qualities of the European empires he condemns: racism, colonialism, aggression, and slavery.

Like the sorcerer’s apprentice (I used to imagine Mickey Mouse in that role), Parasram has memorized the spells of postcolonialism, but hasn’t got a clue how to use them.