Les pêcheurs de perles. Georges Bizet

Abstract

Looking at old photographs of vintage operatic productions and Golden Age singers both in costume and in (usually regal) mufti is, for me, five parts nostalgia to one part amusement. As a consequence, my battered copy of Daniel Blum’s A Pictorial Treasure of Opera in America has given me hours of pleasure.1 It has also colored my mental picture of operas I haven’t seen onstage, and the color is generally sepia. Thus, my image of Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles was formed by the photos on pages 300 and 301 of Frieda Hempel, Enrico Caruso, Giuseppe De Luca, and Léon Rothier, who starred in a new Metropolitan Opera production of the work in 1916. In that only-three-performance revival, Caruso sports a toothbrush moustache redolent of silent-screen comic Ben Turpin, a lightly polka-dotted sleeveless blouse, slippers that curl up at the toes Ali Baba–style, a calf-length patterned skirt with large tassels hanging from a kind of belt-sash combo, and a big turban over what looks like shoulder-length dreadlock-style braids. De Luca has an upturned lampshade on his head, wedgelike sandals on his feet, and several big necklaces around his neck; his shirt-vest has puffy elbow-length sleeves, and his sarong is overlaid with what looks like a skirt made of knotted cords. Hempel is shrouded in a gauzy white sarilike affair complete with cape and cowl, Rothier’s long white hair and beard suggest Charlton Heston’s Moses, and the “dancing chorus” looks like a bus-and-truck backup corps for Ruth St. Denis or Little Egypt.