„Breast Theresia” (fr. Les mamelles de Tirésias) – a comic opera (farce) by Francis Poulenc based on the play of the same name by Guillaume Apollinaire in two acts with a prologue. The opera was written in 1945, first performed on June 3, 1947 at the Comic Opera in Paris.
Chest Theresia is a hilarious operetta opera, almost a musical, expressing Poulenc’s amazing sense of humor.
History of creation
Avant-garde writers loved to gather at the Maison des Amis des Livres, Adrienne Monier’s bookstore. Apollinaire, Jacob, Eluard, Aragon have been here. Apollinaire, the illegitimate son of a Polish noblewoman, was a prominent figure in the bohemian life of Montparnasse. Thanks to him, the term „surrealism” appeared and the first representative of this trend, Henri Rousseau, gained fame. In June 1917, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Massine, Matisse, Picasso, Satie were present at the first performance of Apollinaire’s surrealist drama Breasts Theresia at the Montmartre theater, and young Poulenc was also here. Many years later, Poulenc said that he was shocked by this farce, he could not even dream that one day he would put it to music. At the same time, Poulenc called „Theresius’s Breasts” „the most authentic thing that he wrote.”
The first work of Poulenc on the verses of Apollinaire was the „Bestiary” (La Bestiaire, 1919). Poulenc again turned to the poet’s work in 1936 in the choral work Seven Songs. In the 1930s, he began to think about creating an opera based on the play Theresia’s Breasts. In 1935, with the consent of Apollinaire’s widow, he adapted the text of the play for the libretto and in 1939 began work on the music. Most of the work was written in one breath from May to October 1944 in the country house of Poulenc Noisey. Although the play was composed in 1903, its first performance took place at the height of World War I, and Apollinaire edited the text to add a dark prologue. Poulenc managed to reflect both the farce and the tragedy of Apollinaire’s play in the opera. Critic Jeremy Sams wrote that behind the merry mess in the opera lies a deep and tragic thought about the need to revive the people of France devastated by the war.
The title of Apollinaire’s comedy and Poulenc’s opera refers to the ancient myth of Theresia, a blind old man who experienced a miraculous transformation: he lived part of his long life as a woman, and another as a man. With the approval of Madame Apollinaire, Poulenc changed the time and place of the action: “I chose 1912 because it was the time of the first heroic battles of Apollinaire for Cubism … „Carlo – whom I adore and where the first 15 years of his life – is quite enough tropical exoticism for Parisians like me.” According to Poulenc, Monte Carlo became Zanzibar for him. The set for the first production depicted a small town in southern France, while, according to the libretto, the opera is set in Zanzibar.
Music
In the musical text of the opera, Poulenc used traditional numbered forms – solo arias, duets, choirs in the spirit of old folk songs. There are all kinds of dance rhythms: waltz, polka, gallop, pavana, gavotte. Unexpected plot twists are revealed by the frequent change of tempos and rhythms in music, alternation of genres and forms. Kaminsky writes that the music of the opera, like the music of Offenbach, Chabrier and Ravel’s Spanish Hour, captures the listener with a stream of „miniatures and vignettes”, dances and scraps of lyrical melodies, including arietta in the style of a comic opera or chants (after a duel).
Performances
The opera was accepted for staging at the Opera Comic in 1945, but the premiere did not take place immediately: there was a problem with finding a leading performer. Denise Duval, an actress from the Folies Bergère, was personally chosen by Poulenc. The opera premiered at the Comic Opera in Paris on June 3, 1947, in magnificent sets and costumes designed by Erte. In the premiere performance, they came up with a bright symbol: Teresa’s breasts turned into balloons and flew into the sky, symbolizing the transformation of a woman into a man. This stage technique has become a kind of theatrical tradition.
The opera was staged again in Paris in 1972, then in Lille in 1985 and Saint-Etienne in 1989. Outside France, Chest Theresia was performed in Massachusetts in 1953, in Basel in 1957. In 1958, the Oldborough opera was performed in the author’s arrangement for two pianos. The opera was staged in Philadelphia in 1959, in New York in 1960, in Milan in 1963, in London in 1979, in Dusseldorf in 1982, in Tokyo in 1985. In the 1982/83 season, Chest Theresia “Was staged at the Metropolitan Opera, and at the Hermitage Theater in St. Petersburg in 2010. At the Teatro Liceu in Barcelona, Chest Theresia was in the repertoire for the 2009/10 season.
Characters
Content
In a short prologue, the theater director talks about the play and promises to present to the public a moralistic play about the need to have children.
Act 1
The eccentric Teresa does not want to dutifully devote her life to conceiving and having children and becomes a man, Theresius. Teresa’s husband doesn’t like this at all, and besides, she makes him dress as a woman.
Meanwhile, a pair of drunken gamblers, Presto and Lacouf, kill each other; the townspeople mourn for them. Theresius declares himself a general and sets out on conquests, leaving her husband in the care of a gendarme, deluded by his women’s dress.
General Theresius launches a successful campaign against childbirth and becomes popular. Worried that France would become depopulated if women refuse sex, Theresia’s husband vows to find a way to have children without the participation of women. The resurrected Lakuf and Presto listen to him with interest and disbelief.
Act 2
The curtain rises to the shouts of „Daddy!” Her husband’s plans were crowned with success, and he gave birth to 40,049 children in one day. A journalist from Paris asks how he thinks to feed his offspring, but her husband assures that all children are very successful in the arts and made him a wealthy man.
The gendarme reports that due to overcrowding, the citizens of Zanzibar are dying of hunger. The offers to print ration cards on tarot cards. Suddenly a fortune-teller appears and prophesies that a husband with many children will become a multi-millionaire, and a childless gendarme will die in extreme poverty. An enraged gendarme wants to arrest her, but she reveals her face. It turns out that Teresa was hiding under the guise of a fortune-teller. The couple reconciles and all the performers from the proscenium turn to the audience with the appeal: „Frenchmen, have children!”
Recordings
- 1954: Opera-Comic, conductor Kluitance; Duval, Leguy, Girodeau (Angel Records)
- 1998: Saito Kinen Orchestra, Tokyo Opera, conducted by Ozawa; Lafon, Fouchecourt, Goetz, Clarke (Philips Classics)
- 2002: Metropolitan Opera, conductor Levine; Arteta, de Nys, Patriarco, Swenson, White (The Metropolitan Opera)
- 2003: Nieuw Ensemble, Opera Trionfo, conductor Spanyard; Arends, Hermann, Lonen, van de Weerd (Brilliant classics)
