"The Pearl Fishers," Georges Bizet's first opera, contains exceptionally gorgeous songs, but often receives a bad rap for its supposedly thin story line. But that criticism seems harsher than necessary.

Boy and boy meet girl in Ceylon. Both fall in love with her, which breaks up their friendship. They later reunite. Girl returns as priestess. Love triangle ensues anew. Deaths are plotted, a mind is changed, and the tables are tragically turned. In other words, pretty similar to what happens in many more celebrated tragic operas.

"Verdi had his troublesome 'Il Trovatore,' and Puccini and Mozart also had to contend with weak stories sometimes," said Dale Johnson, artistic director of the Minnesota Opera, which opens "The Pearl Fishers" Saturday. "But when you mix words with beautiful music, the sum can be greater than the parts. Bizet was masterful in his writing for orchestra even at that young age."

The story goes, said Johnson, that the librettist paired with the not-yet-25 Bizet wrote this fanciful piece but couldn't figure out how to end it. "Why don't you just set everything on fire?" suggested the opera-house director. Whether or not the comment was facetious, that's exactly what he did.

Though Bizet's "Carmen" would become far and away his most popular work, "The Pearl Fishers" drew bigger crowds for many years, because, Johnson said, " 'Carmen' was so scandalous. The gentilhommes preferred this gentler piece."

As for its inevitable colonialist viewpoint, Johnson suggests taking it at face value.

"Looking backward from today, an age of hyper-realism, things can look kind of silly," he said. "But this was smack dab in the middle of the Romantic Era. People didn't know what everyone else was doing across the world 24 hours a day. The Far East was very exotic to Europeans. Even something like "Carmen," with gypsy culture close by, was titillating for the staid French and English. You can't read too much into these things. Just sit back and listen."

With Isabel Bayrakdarian as Leïla, reprising her role from the 2001 San Diego premiere, and Jesus Garcia, who won a Tony for his Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann's Broadway production of "La Bohème," as Nadir, listening will be a pleasure.

KRISTIN TILLOTSON