Pearl Fisher Ecstasy

Zugar has bounded in and taken center stage by right and by stage presence. His character focuses on mine, as I play a young pearl fisherman—just one of several on stage until Zugar singles me out. Our characters were once friends—close friends; very close friends, in the interpretation of the opera that Egor has given it and that has Milan all abuzz—before we both came under the spell of the Hindu high priestess, Leila. Zugar has won her from my character, Nadir, and Nadir has retreated to the edge of the sea, to dive for pearls and to forget not only the human pearl he has lost in Leila, but the man he has loved, who first coupled with him, but who stole the priestess from him after Nadir was brought under her spell and who, presumably, under Leila’s spell, is coupling now only with her.

Zugar has been searching for Nadir, though, having broken the spell of the priestess on he himself and realized it is the love of Nadir that is paramount to him. The two men come together, explosively, at the center of the stage, and I, as Nadir, quickly slipping into my imagination, start the duet, soaring up to an F, near the top of my range, but still a note I can deliver with power or sweetly, as I please.

Five measures in, Zugar mirrors my opening in a lower register but, after the initial three measures, releases me to soar again, alone. He doesn’t leave me, though, as his voice pursues mine, slipping in underneath mine in punctuated tones, teasing and courting me. His voice weaves the taking of me in his arms in the fantasy I have completely slipped into. But then, playing the game of a pursuit with our voices, he lets me go to soar alone once more. Before I can break through the clouds with a high A, he captures me, pulling me into him where, giving foundation to my traveling on the clouds in my speaking of the delights of the Leila that I have lost, he reclaims me as his.

As his voice grows stronger, mastering mine, he reasons with me that there are far more delights in what he can offer me than Leila can. As I melt to Jorge’s smooth but powerful baritone, undergirding my tenor aria, fantasy solidifies and reality totally evaporates for me. The stage and the other singers, the orchestra and the audience fade away. There are just Jorge and me. The huge black man, with the magnificent black cock that I know so well, want and need so much, have taken so often in my imagining, as we have sung this duet and disappeared into this fantasy world, nightly for weeks.