Bizet's "Les Pêcheurs de perles" for the first time at the Vienna State Opera

The opera Les Pêcheurs de perles not only offers world-famous melodies that were quickly included in concert programs worldwide, but also an impressive take on the highly romantic subject matter by the not yet 25-year-old composer Georges Bizet. Composed and premiered in 1863 to a libretto by Eugène Cormon and Michel Florentin Carré, the opera tells the story of a love triangle between two friends and a beautiful priestess.

The themes range from vows of fidelity and forbidden love to betrayal, forgiveness and magnanimous renunciation: Nadir returns to his childhood friend Zurga - both had renounced the same woman so as not to destroy their friendship. Now she of all people reappears: Leïla, as a veiled priestess, who prays for protection for the dangerous work of the pearl fishermen and takes a vow of chastity in return.

The old memory becomes a new present, the vow a conflict in which personal desire, religious law and the order of the community inexorably collide. Nadir and Leïla find each other, are discovered and sentenced to death. Zurga, however, recognizes in Leïla the woman who once saved his life and allows the lovers to escape.

Ersan Mondtag works as a director, stage and costume designer and visual artist. His award-winning works move between theater, opera, visual art and performance and have been shown internationally at theaters, opera houses and art institutions such as the Berliner Ensemble, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Residenztheater Munich, the operas in Lyon and Rome and the Burgtheater. Future opera projects will take him to the Salzburg Festival, among others. For the new production of Les Pêcheurs de perles, he is responsible for the production as well as the stage and costumes.

He reads the pearl fishermen not as exotic material, but as a very contemporary model for the failure of capitalism outsourced to the so-called Global South, for example in the form of the role of a supplier for global luxury production. He locates the plot in the field of tension between textile dyeing and the utilization of its products in consumer temples: "The pearl fishers are initially about the exploitation of nature. Historical pearl fishing was a brutal process in which people risked life and limb for the luxury of others. If you want to bring this material into the present day, you need a field in which this danger and this logic of exploitation are still real. Dyeing is very similar in this respect: toxic processes, precarious work, dangerous conditions. This is precisely why we decided to replace the pearl with textiles. Immediately after that came the idea of using the shopping mall as a kind of frozen metaphor for the temple, cast in marble as it were. It was not to be a naturalistic shopping mall, but an exaggerated form in which consumption and sacralization collide."

On dealing with the exoticizing structure of Bizet's opera, Mondtag says: "The opera could not simply have been performed unbroken in the way it stands today. Everything is mixed together: religious symbols, colonial ideas, a diffuse exoticism. From today's perspective, it is in many ways presumptuous. But of course you also have to see the work in the context of its time. It was clear to me that it would be a shame to stop playing the music because of these problems. So you have to find a way to rewrite the work scenically without betraying it. I would therefore say: at second glance, I am faithful to the work. I change the symbols, nature becomes work, temple becomes temple of consumption, but within that the constellations of characters and relationships remain the same."