Le pauvre matelot

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Work data
Title: The poor sailor
Original title: Le pauvre matelot
Original language: French
Music: Darius Milhaud
Libretto : Jean Cocteau
Premiere: December 12, 1927
Place of premiere: Paris
Playing time: about 40 minutes
Place and time of the action: French port city at the beginning of the 20th century
people

Le pauvre matelot (English: The poor sailor ) is a one-act opera in three pictures by Darius Milhaud . The composer himself called his work "A Lament". The libretto was written by Jean Cocteau . It premiered on December 12, 1927 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The German premiere took place on November 29, 1929 in Berlin at the Kroll Opera .

action

The opera is set in a French port city at the time of its premiere, i.e. in the 20s of the last century.

First picture

The sailor's wife runs a bar in the harbor. The income from this business is barely enough to keep herself and her father afloat. The woman has longed for her husband to return home for 15 years. Her husband's friend had already assured her several times that her husband must have been missing, and had courted her himself. But she always trusted her feeling that one day her husband would stand in front of her again.

In fact, the supposedly missing person shows up at his friend's house, outwardly greatly aged. When he treats him like a stranger, he reveals himself to him and asks him not to tell his wife about his return for the time being. He wants to surprise her tomorrow. The sailor sleeps at his friend's house.

Second picture

The next day the sailor visits his wife and claims to be a friend of her husband. It won't be long before he'll be back too. However, her husband was not able to make his fortune abroad. He was as poor as the first day he went to sea. On the other hand, he, the friend, was lucky. He was able to accumulate a small fortune. His most valuable asset is a pearl necklace, which he always carries with him. The woman and her father offer the apparently stranger a place to sleep for the night.

Third picture

During the night, the woman kills the sleeping man with a hammer in order to get possession of the pearl necklace. In this way she wants to ensure that she and her poor husband, if he returns to her soon, would have taken care of the future.

When the father asks his daughter about the perpetrator, she confesses her guilt and describes her motives to him. Together, the two throw the body into the nearby cistern. They want to tell the neighbor that the strange visitor left very early in the morning. The opera leaves open whether the crime will be solved.

music

In terms of material, the opera belongs to verism , but the music takes a completely different direction. It is deliberately kept primitive and largely sounds like a morality or a lamentation song, in a way comparable to the Threepenny Opera . This loosens up the dreary plot and breaks the gloomy tragedy ironically. The music is relatively easy to understand for the listener.

expenditure

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