FULL LES MAMELLES DE TIRESIAS Feldkirch 2009 Magali Léger, Martial Delafontaine, Jean-Marc Salzmann
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Les mamelles de Tirésias
- Composer: Poulenc Francis
- Libretto: Francis Poulenc Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Montforthaus, Feldkirch, Austria, Festival de Feldkirch
- Recorded: June 13, 2009
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Magali Léger, Martial Delafontaine, Jean-Marc Salzmann, Loïc Guguen, David Lefort, Ivan Matiakh, Alena Sautier
- Conductor: Sébastien Rouland
- Orchestra: Symphonieorchester Vorarlberg
- Chorus: Kammerchor Feldkirch
- Chorus Master: Martin Lindenthal
- Stage Director: Philippe Arlaud
- Stage Designer: Philippe Arlaud
- Costume Designer: Andrea Uhmann
- Lighting Designer: Philippe Arlaud
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Philippe Arlaud
- Date Published: 2023
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Quote from Wikipedia:
Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) is an opéra bouffe by Francis Poulenc, in a prologue and two acts based on the eponymous play by Guillaume Apollinaire. The opera was written in 1945 and first performed in 1947. Apollinaire’s play, written in 1903, was revised with a sombre prologue by the time it premiered during World War I in France. For the opera, Poulenc incorporated both the farcical and the serious aspects of the original play, which according to one critic displays a “high-spirited topsy-turveydom” that conceals “a deeper and sadder theme – the need to repopulate and rediscover a France ravaged by war.”
Synopsis
In a short prologue, the theatre director introduces the work, promising the audience a moral piece on the necessity of having children.
Act 1
Thérèse tires of her life as a submissive woman and becomes the male Tirésias when her breasts turn into balloons and float away. Her husband is not pleased by this, still less so when she ties him up and dresses him as a woman.
Meanwhile, a pair of drunken gamblers called Presto and Lacouf affectionately shoot one another and are mourned by the assembled townspeople. Thérèse marches off to conquer the world as General Tiresias, leaving her captive husband to the attentions of the local gendarme, who is fooled by his female attire.
Off-stage, General Tiresias starts a successful campaign against childbirth and is hailed by the populace. Fearful that France will be left sterile if women give up sex, the husband vows to find a way to bear children without women. Lacouf and Presto return from the dead and express both interest and scepticism.
Act 2
The curtain rises to cries of “Papa!” The husband’s project has been a spectacular success, and he has given birth to 40,049 children in a single day. A visiting Parisian journalist asks how he can afford to feed the brood, but the husband explains that the children have all been very successful in careers in the arts, and have made him a rich man with their earnings. After chasing the journalist off, the husband decides to raise a journalist of his own, but is not completely pleased with the results.
The gendarme now arrives to report that, because of overpopulation, the citizens of Zanzibar are all dying of hunger. The husband suggests getting ration cards printed by a tarot-reading fortune-teller. Just such a fortune-teller immediately appears, looking rather familiar under his mask.
The fortune-teller prophesies that the fertile husband will be a multi-millionaire, but that the sterile gendarme will die in abject poverty. Incensed, the gendarme attempts to arrest him, but he strangles him and reveals himself as none other than Tirésias. The couple reconcile, and the whole cast gathers at the footlights to urge the audience:
Ecoutez, ô Français, les leçons de la guerre
Et faites des enfants, vous qui n’en faisiez guère
Cher public: faites des enfants!
Heed, o Frenchmen, the lessons of the war
And make babies, you who hardly ever make them!
Dear audience: Make babies!