Les mamelles de Tirésias
| Work data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Tiresia's breasts |
| Original title: | Les mamelles de Tirésias |
| Shape: | Opéra-bouffe in two acts and a prologue |
| Original language: | French |
| Music: | Francis Poulenc |
| Libretto : | Guillaume Apollinaire |
| Premiere: | June 3, 1947 |
| Place of premiere: | Paris , Opéra-Comique |
| Playing time: | about 50 minutes |
| Place and time of the action: | French Riviera, 1930 |
| people | |
|
|
The opera Les mamelles de Tirésias (German: The breasts of Tiresias ) is a two-act opera (original name: "Opéra-bouffe") by Francis Poulenc . The text refers to the drama of the same name by Guillaume Apollinaire , which he began to write in 1903 , but only completed in 1916 and published in 1917 under the title "drame surréaliste" ("surrealist drama"), with which he introduced the term surrealism . The premiere took place on June 3, 1947 in the Opéra-Comique in Paris in a version with a large orchestra.
Origin and historical classification
Poulenc's opera is set in 1930. He began composing in 1939. Les Mamelles de Tirésias was completed in 1944. Poulenc changed the location of the opera compared to Apollinaire's original from the African Zanzibar to the fictional "Zanzibar" near Monte Carlo on the French Riviera, where Apollinaire spent his childhood. Poulenc said that this place was tropical enough for a Frenchman like him.
The central saying at the end of the opera is: “Ô Français, faites des enfants!” (German: “Oh, French, make children!”). Whether it is an effect of this saying that two sopranos had to give up before the premiere because of pregnancy has often been suspected with a smile. According to the author, the text was intended as a thesis against France's falling birthrate. The decline in the birth rate, which began in France as early as the 19th century, has assumed increasingly threatening proportions since the fin de siècle and has been hotly debated in politics and public opinion. In research one speaks of a French “obsession démographique” of those years. This demographic decline became a political issue due to the simultaneous rise in the birth rate of the newly formed German Empire, which put France's traumatic defeat against Germany in the war of 1870 in a new, population-political light: "The competition and fear of a powerful Germany explains the militant rhetoric of the mouvement nataliste, the French associations that fought for an active population policy. ”Their propaganda therefore castigated childlessness as unpatriotic behavior, and politicians reacted with increased penalties against abortion and even made information about contraception a criminal offense. For the same reason, the emancipation of women has been criticized as a danger to the nation: all topics that are dealt with in a satirical form by Apollinaire. However, since Poulenc set Apollinaire's drama from 1917 to music in 1944 and he made no secret of his homosexuality, an additional level of meaning was added: the end of the Nazi Vichy regime was in sight, and its mother cult and its misogynous ideal of masculinity were in line with National Socialist eugenics and racial hygiene a settlement with the third republic, denounced as decadent. In contrast, with his surrealist burlesque Poulenc celebrates everything that the Vichy regime had dubbed “degenerate”: “The role reversal between Thérèse and her husband hits exactly in this notch: feminized men and unfeminine women, that meant for the guardians of the grail of demography the certain popular death (...) You can hardly imagine anything more offensive in Vichy France. "
The German premiere took place on July 30, 1974 in the Cuvilliéstheater in Munich, under Marek Janowski.
action
prolog
The theater director announces to the audience at the beginning that the purpose of the following play is to get people to devote themselves diligently to the creation of children.
first act
Thérèse lives with her husband in the imaginary city of Zanzibar. Both are happy. Gradually, however, there is a change at Thérèse. She would like to give up her role as a woman and would prefer to be a general or a minister. To do this, she gets rid of her external feminine attributes by letting her breasts float into the audience as small balloons and putting on male clothes. She also puts on a beard and changes her name. She is now called Tirésias. Her husband also changes according to her wishes. He becomes a woman. Presto and Lacouf, just stepping out of a café, witness this transformation. The disguised husband explains to a police officer that Zanzibar must have many children. Apparently women cannot do this alone. For this reason he decided to take on this task himself. He actually manages to give birth to 40,049 children in a single day. The absurd happening is accompanied by infernal noise.
Second act
When the state budget is shaken as a result of the events and there is a threat of famine due to overpopulation, the state tries to clear up the events. A reporter asks the husband in disguise how such a large family can be fed. He explains that this is not a problem at all, after all, there are food stamps and some of the children are so big that they can feed themselves. A fortune teller who turns out to be Thérèse predicts that fertile husbands will become multi-millionaires while sterile husbands will die in poverty. A police officer rejects Thérèse and tells her that fortune-telling is against the law of the state. Now that Thérèse has regained her feminine form, her husband is also changing back.
In the end, they both dance happily, telling the audience to have lots of babies, with the audience sung the following song:
|
|
Web links
- Apollinaire, Guillaume on geschichte.2me.net
- Guillaume Apollinaire on erata.de ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- Audio sample (French; YouTube)
- Prologue (German; YouTube)
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Jürgen Grimm: The avant-garde theater of France , Munich: CH Beck, 1982, p. 79 ff.
- Jump up ↑ Martin Lade: “Zeugt Kinder!” Poulenc's “Die Breast des Tiresias” and the French “obsession démographique”. In: Program “Die Breast des Tiresias”, Cologne Opera 2005/2006 season.
- ↑ Ibid., P. 12
- ↑ Ibid. P. 18