The Pearl Fishers

Bizet's The Pearl Fishers contains one of opera's best known scenes, the "friendship duet" between the fishermen Zurga and Nadir. The opera's proponents, of which Hector Berlioz was one, praise it for a string of wonderful musical numbers; its critics deride it as a "one aria opera" (or, in the case of the critics at its première in 1863, as "sub Wagner").