40,049 babies, two breasts
Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias
Les Mamelles de Tirésias, by Francis Poulenc, is an odd little opera with a surprising amount of longevity given how much it’s a product of its specific time. A few things make it performance-friendly: it’s only an hour long, doesn’t require powerhouse singers, is thematically interesting, and — it’s actually funny and very delightful.
Among operagoers, Poulenc is famous primarily for a very different opera: Dialogues des Carmelites, about a group of nuns who are guillotined during the French Revolution after refusing to abandon their faith. Carmelites finishes with one of the most devastating scenes in the operatic repertoire: the nuns sing Salve Regina together as a chorus, with their song punctuated at irregular intervals by the loud swoop of the guillotine. One by one, the voices drop out of the chorus until only a single voice remains. I find the scene both intensely beautiful and difficult to listen to. A version from the Dutch National Opera can be seen here.
I love Carmelites, but I also love Poulenc for the lighthearted, witty, and deftly romantic music for which he was best known during his lifetime. Poulenc, born to a traditional Catholic bourgeois family with a musical mother, was not permitted to formally train for a musical career. He only pursued music seriously after the death of his parents and had to overcome a reputation as an untrained, unserious amateur (a fitting subject for this newsletter), but eventually became one of Eric Satie’s proteges. In the interwar period (he served as a soldier in both WWI and WWII), his friends and supporters included Satie, Cocteau, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev. During the occupation, he was on dangerous ground as a gay man and an artist but managed to be quietly anti-Nazi in his work without suffering persecution.
Les Mamelles de Tirésias (translated as The Breasts of Tirésias) is an adaptation of a 1919 surrealist, farcical play of the same name by the French poet, art critic, and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire. The original play premiered post-WWI, and Poulenc’s version was written during WWII and premiered in 1947. It purports to address a problem that was then top-of-mind: the need to replenish the devastated French population with more babies. In the somber prologue, the “theatre director” informs the audience that the show will contain an important message: make babies for the good of the country.
In the scene that opens the opera proper, the title character rejects that message: Therése is done with making meals for her ridiculous husband and decides she’d much rather be a man. She exuberantly rattles off the professions newly open to her: lawyer, prime minister, hotel bellboy — plus that other privilege of masculine life, a ballerina mistress. And then, in the moment that justifies the opera’s title, she dispenses with her breasts.
Most productions accomplish this by having Thérese open her dress to let two pink balloons float out. She sings lushly and lovingly to them (“Fly away, birds of my weakness; how pretty are feminine charms!”), toying with them before popping them. Meanwhile, her husband calls out repeatedly: “I want bacon; bring me bacon!”. Thérese embarks upon a gender transition, growing a beard and changing his name to Tirésias.
Since his former wife is no longer interested in babies, the bacon-loving Husband decides it’s all up to him to repopulate the country. As Act II opens, he announces that he’s managed to have 40,049 babies in a single day.
“I will buy them bicycles,” he announces. Soon reporters arrive to question this fantastic feat.
Q: How did he accomplish it?
A: Willpower.
Q: How will he afford them?
A: One of them is already a bestselling novelist, and the novel is bringing in money.
Q: How will they be fed?
A: Ration cards.
Eventually, Therése returns as a woman again (though still sans breasts). She and the others solemnly repeat the opera’s lesson to the audience: have more babies, more babies, more babies — especially those of you who haven’t already.
It’s all very silly and would probably be only a historical curiosity if not for the music being so much lovelier, funnier, and more sparkling than it needs to be. Poulenc’s opera is performed far more often than Apollinaire’s play. It has a cabaret-esque, vaudevillian quality and quite a few actually hummable tunes. The 1998 recording with Barbara Bonney in the title role and Seiji Ozawa conducting is excellent and readily available on Spotify. The fun production from which the above images were taken is from the Glyndebourne Festival in 2022 and can be streamed (for a fee).
A final note: all of Poulenc’s three operas were written with the soprano Denise Duval in mind, and she’s interesting as well. She was a classically trained singer but professed to hate singing. She preferred acting, and when offered a contract by the Paris Opera, she instead chose a more lucrative gig at the Folies Bergère, a music hall (“My teacher nearly had a stroke,” she said later). Her obituary tells this anecdote: “she caused a stir by jumping into a gleaming white sports car still dressed as a Carmelite nun and shooting off down the Champs Élysées.”
The insistence that the (white) population needs to have more babies is a classic reactionary talking point going back at least to Napoleon and likely further; usually it comes alongside intimations, subtle or otherwise, that women’s rights hinder this goal and thus are bad for society. The opera and its source material are both so intentionally ridiculous that their politics are vague: on its face, the story seems to lampoon and undermine the post-war fears about underpopulation, but Apollinaire was, in fact, passionate about the natalist cause and intended for his play to advance it. Perhaps that’s how he meant it, but that’s certainly not how it plays, at least not now. And Poulenc, being gay, wasn’t exactly doing his part. Tiresias is an opera about breasts and babies but does not feature any mothers — through this, at least, it retains its subversiveness.
Musical highlights
The prologue, with its solemn admonition:
The scene where Therése bids goodbye to her breasts (the most frequently performed aria from the opera):
The baby chorus:
The final waltz: