NEWS
WIM WENDERS DEBUTS IN MUSICAL THEATRE
LES PÊCHEURS DE PERLES · THE PEARL FISHERS
Libretto Eugène Cormon and Michel Carré
Music Georges Bizet
Conductor Jérémie Rhorer
Choirmaster Lorenzo Fratini
Direction Wim Wenders
Set design David Regehr
Costsmes Montserrat Casanova
Lighting Olaf Freese
Video Donata Wenders, Michael Schackwitz
Dramaturgy Detlef Giese
Orchestra and Chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Italian and English surtitles by Prescott Studio
Florence, Teatro del Maggio
16, 19, 21, 23 September 2025
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Set in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the story tells of the love triangle between the pearl divers Nadir and Zurga and the priestess of Brahma, Léïla. Nadir and Zurga are united by a strong bond of friendship, but conflicts arise due to their shared love for Léïla, since they discover that the priestess is the same woman with whom both men had fallen in love years earlier.
This production of Les pêcheurs de perles, a rare title even in France, was created in 2017 at the Schillertheater in Berlin, a theatre generally dedicated to prose. Since at the time the Staatsoper Unter den Linden was unfit for use due to work being carried out at its historic location, the Schillertheater hosted for seven years the opera house programme. Les pêcheurs de perles was the last production of this long period hosted at the at the Schillertheater .
The initiative came from an invitation to collaborate from Daniel Barenboim, former director of the Staatsoper, to his friend Wim Wenders. The latter proposed this opera by the young Bizet (1863) because the Nadir-Zurga duet and Nadir’s aria had made a lasting impression on him during his youth in California.
Wenders moves with great elegance and discretion in a context potentially rich in visual pitfalls, those of a superficial and ornamental exoticism. The scene is bare, shadowy but not gloomy, costumes prove to be timeless, the projections are evocative — a universe of solemn simplicity, not without a conscious naivety drawn from the fundamentals of opera.
«Of course, we are at the antipodes of regietheater», writes Guy Cherquiall the day after the premiere in Berlin: «Wenders does not offer a dramaturgical direction, but an aesthetic one; Wenders does not offer an interpretation, but only a system of evocations that is not naturalistic, yet somewhat faded, of bygone times, always avoiding that realism which in this case would be out of place. In this abstract landscape, each character is not what they seem; and the drama’s challenge is to work on being and appearance, on the subtle texture of friendships and rivalries, in which Zurga seems to be the most complex character, but also the most mature, consistent and profound».