Francis Poulenc: La Voix humaine & Les Mamelles de Tirésias

Co-production with the Macerata Opera Festival, Italy

In his brilliant parody to the text from Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Poulenc created the prototype “Surrealist opera”. In it, Thérese, a feminist, has had enough of her inferior status as housewife, and therefore sheds her breasts and morphs into a male by the name of Tirésias. She leaves her husband who in his turn has to assume the feminine role. As women rally under the command of their general, Tirésias, to fight for emancipation, the husband announces that from now on bachelors are bound to bear children. The husband alone gives birth to 40,000 in a single day! But then, how to sustain them? Luckily, Tirésias/Thérese is by now weary of life without love, and everything reverts to its original state. The opera was premiered at Paris’ Opéra Comique, on June 3, 1947.

The lyric tragedy in one act, La Voix humaine, marked the climax of Poulenc’s long-time collaboration with the poet Jean Cocteau. In his monodrama of 1930, which also inspired Roberto Rossellini to make his film starring Anna Magnani, La voce umana, Cocteau dealt with the phenomenon of “depersonalized communication”. Here, the “dialogic” soliloquy of the heroine who is making her last attempt at establishing a contact on the phone with her former lover, is in Poulenc’s setting a suggestive psychological study, and a virtuoso piece for solo female singer. The premiere, directed and with sets designed by Jean Cocteau, took place at Paris’ Opéra Comique, on February 6, 1959.

Les Mamelles de Tirésias in Czech premiere

Premiere: Feb 22, 2007