Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

When I was a schoolboy in Geneva, Switzerland, a teacher asked us to bring poems to read to the class. In our English-speaking household the only books of French poems I could find were by Rimbaud and Apollinaire, so I read from those. There was puzzlement – not only from the class, but from the teacher, too: ‘Why did you bring such difficult poetry?’. It was certainly a bit beyond the comprehension of 13-year old me. And it was Apollinaire, the source of the libretto, who was a bit beyond the starched shirts and bow-ties in the audience at Paris’ Opéra-Comique when Poulenc’s opéra-bouffe Les mamelles de Tirésias was first performed there in 1947. There were loud protests against the whole tenor of the piece, with its sex-change and burlesque of an apparently serious comment on the falling birth-rate. The critical response was more positive – even so, Fred Goldbeck’s review wondered how Poulenc, composing during the liberation of France in 1944, could have chosen this text, and been in the mood for laughter. Poulenc’s response was that having sung in the very serious Figure Humaine (1943) of his thirst for hope, he reckoned he had every right to celebrate with a light heart the return of liberty, in a work which was ‘a little crazy’. 

Critical opinion of Poulenc’s Les mamelles de Tirésias has remained extremely high (‘one of the most accomplished works of contemporary French lyric theatre’), but fastidious literary taste has never quite reconciled itself to the Apollinaire of the libretto – in fact, Poulenc has been praised for saving ‘this text where burlesque sometimes collides with good taste’. Poulenc’s genius was for getting right inside the texts of his operatic pieces (Cocteau told him, in relation to La voix humaine ‘my dear Francis, you have established, once and for all, the right way to speak my text’). Apollinaire’s play gave him the opportunity to amuse himself affectionately at the expense of the conventions of French musical comedy, composing what James Harding has called ‘the operetta to end all operettas’. 

Apollinaire’s text was first written in 1903, but revised and first performed in 1917. ‘Apollinaire’ was the nom-de-plume of Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky (1870-1918), of mysterious origins, who led a bohemian life in Paris and took part in all the avant-garde movements in France in the early 20th century. He was friendly with the Cubist painters, and in 1913 tried to define their aesthetic in print (this gives extra point to the Journalist’s ‘news’, in Mamelles, that ‘it is learned from Montrouge that Monsieur Picasso is making a picture which moves just as this cradle does’). When World War I began, Apollinaire enlisted in the infantry, and in 1916 received a bad head wound. During his convalescence, he revised Les mamelles de Tirésias for production and called it a ‘surrealist’ play – this is believed to be the first use of the term ‘surrealist’. Apollinaire expanded on what he meant in a modernist manifesto, L’esprit nouveau et les poètes (‘poets and the new way of thinking’), before dying in the influenza pandemic of 1918. 

‘Les mamelles de Tirésias’ could be translated as ‘Tiresias’ breasts’, but more in the spirit of the thing would be ‘the boobs of Tiresias’ or ‘Tiresias’ tits’. The reference is to the voluntary gender change of the heroine, who liberates her breasts from her blouse, whereupon they rise into the sky as two balloons, one red, one blue, restrained by strings. A few moments later, she blows them both up with her cigarette lighter. Before this comes Thérèse’s diatribe directed at her husband ‘You will not make me do what you want. I am a feminist, and don’t recognise the authority of man’. She wants to be a soldier, to make war, not children. She wants to be actress, politician, lawyer, telegrapher… Her breasts gone, she grows a beard and a moustache. The obverse of the masculinisation of Thérèse is her husband’s feminisation, to the extent that he produces 40,049 children, on the first day. The heroine’s name, Thérèse, was chosen so that it could morph into Tiresias, the man-woman of Greek myth (in one version of the myth, concerned with sexuality and ambiguity, Tiresias underwent seven changes of gender. This may have suggested the reference in Apollinaire’s text to the baker who every seven years changed her skin). 

With hindsight Apollinaire seems uncannily prophetic – though even in 1917, and again in 1944-7, the play had a certain topicality. As I was reading my Apollinaire poem to the class in 1959, General de Gaulle, just come to power, was exhorting the French people to increase their birthrate, which had never recovered from the losses of two world wars. In an apparently serious prologue the Theatre Director announces that the play’s aim is to reform morals: ‘Hear, O Frenchmen, the lessons of the war: make children, you who made scarcely any’ (a rhyming pun on ‘guerre/guère). The play’s proposed solution is far from serious. Thérèse returns to her original gender, and to her husband. Everyone sings of making love and making children, but the moral is undercut: ‘make children, scratch there if it itches,/and love the black or love the white,/ it’s much more fun when it switches. It is enough to see it right. Dear audience, go make children’. 

Apollinaire shows awareness of the growing movement for emancipation of women, even anticipating symbolic bra-burning, still 50 years in the future. Maybe he anticipated, too, the changes in feminine body image liberation would bring. But he wasn’t too serious. He said ‘We see too few pregnant women about nowadays’, and when Thérèse turns back into a woman, she doesn’t get her breasts back, to her husband’s great disappointment ‘But just look at you, flat as a tack’. To which Thérèse: ‘What does it matter, come pluck the strawberry with the banana-flower. Let’s hunt elephants the Zanzibar way…’. ‘Zanzibar’ is the imaginary setting of the play, where it is a place on the French Riviera. Translation cannot reproduce Apollinaire’s suggestive word-play – more than that, word-magic – in this crazy entertainment (bad puns abound: ‘puisque la scène se passe à Zanzibar, autant que la Seine passe à Paris’). What Apollinaire dubbed ‘surrealism’ here is surreal indeed but also what the French call ‘loufoque’ – daft, nutty, dippy, loony. 

The play has been justly described as a series of gags, in a half-bantering, half-serious spirit. When it was produced in 1917, in a Montmartre theatre, it had incidental music by a ‘Sunday composer’, Madame Germaine Albert-Birot. Apollinaire approached two likely suspects to put it to music, Erik Satie and Georges Auric, but both were put off by the absence of plot. It took Poulenc, much later, to intuit that it was precisely the play’s lack of real theatrical motive that gave music its opportunity to shape and define the show. His chose this play for his ‘opéra-bouffe’ because he loved French operetta, and this gave him the opportunity to extend its tradition. But the theme of sexual ambiguity must have resonated, consciously or unconsciously, with this gay man. As in Carmen, the ostensible subject is the fascinating ‘liberated’ female, but the man’s experience – Don José, the Husband – though less arresting, is more complex and interesting. Apollinaire is making fun of masculine inadequacies, one of the most poignant of which is that they can’t have children without women – a male fantasy indulged in Poulenc’s piece.

Poulenc, who loved children, would never have any. So he was attracted less to the topicality of Apollinaire’s play – his adaptation suppressed many references to the First World War – than to its vitality, its celebration of the erotic, and underlying themes of liberation in the most universal sense. Surrealism floats these up out of the subconscious. That’s the impression Apollinaire gives, as he moves from topicality to myth, through word-association. Thérèse, having quit the stage to fulfil, we are left to think, her virile aspirations, reappears much later. Here’s how: the husband’s journalist son, his 40,500th self-engendered child, exits to invent tomorrow’s news. Zanzibar’s population, with so many new mouths to feed, is starving. Give them cards, says the husband – they replace everything (these are the ration cards of wartime, as familiar to Poulenc in the 1940s as to Apollinaire in 1917). ‘Where are they to be got?’ ‘At the card-reader’s’ ‘Of course, seeing it’s a question of foresight’ - and, right on cue, enter Thérèse disguised as a card-reading fortune teller – or rather Tirésias, since that’s how we left her. And the – blind – Tiresias is the most celebrated ‘seer’ or soothsayer of Greek legend. You get the idea? 

To carry the audience through a work with such a nutty side to it the right singer-actress was needed for the part of Thérèse – ‘a girl with dash and nerve’ was what Poulenc was looking for, and it was the search for one that delayed the premiere from 1945, when Les mamelles de Tirésias was accepted for production at the Opéra-Comique, until 1947. In February of that year the stage director Max de Rieux drew Poulenc’s attention to a pretty singer who had been in the Folies Bergères and was rehearsing in the small theatre of the Opéra-Comique: Denise Duval. Poulenc was struck by her ‘luminous’ voice, her beauty, her chic, ‘and especially that healthy laugh, which works wonders in Les mamelles de Tirésias’. She was to be Poulenc’s dreamed-of interpreter, not only of Thérèse, but later of La voix humaine and of the key role of Blanche de la Force in Dialogues of the Carmelites. Denise Duval can be heard in the recording of Les mamelles de Tirésias made under the baton of André Cluytens in 1953, with a cast and in a style much to the delight of the composer, who said it gave him ‘one of the greatest joys of my life’. 

The joy the listener experiences is in no small measure Poulenc’s achievement. As Jean Gallois justly says in his notes for that recording, the music of Les mamelles de Tirésias cannot be analysed in musicological terms, but must be taken head on, letting the unquenchable humour overwhelm the listener. The musically informed listener, stepping back to see how it is done may notice that Poulenc has drawn, magpie-like, on many sources from the operetta tradition he so loved, blending these with up-to-date references to the modernist music he admired. The reminiscences of operetta include, obviously, Offenbach, and also Chabrier (L’étoile) and Lecocq. There is a whole phrase from Messager’s La Basoche. And Poulenc knew the music of operetta’s lesser lights, too, such as Henri Christiné, whose Phi-Phi was all the rage in 1918, just after Apollinaire had written Les mamelles. Many forms of French music from across the ages are drawn on. Thérèse’s breasts fly away as she sings a ravishing café concert waltz, and the drunkards Lacouf and Presto fight to the strains of a polka à la Offenbach, rewritten so as to sound a little like Prokofiev. There are pavanes and gavottes, chorales, and music which could come from a 1920s musical comedy. The orchestral entr’acte begins with Stravinskian severity, and leads to a kind of syncopated saraband. The orchestra in the pit becomes a music-hall band, whose members are asked to sing, as new-born babies, ‘Papa!’ As the second act begins, the cradles on the stage include seven containing new-born infants – dolls, not singing actors. 

The music binds these gags together, and one is aware of a style entirely Poulenc’s, making all the musical elements seem of a piece. Mixing seriousness and burlesque is justified by the music. Poulenc, himself a mixture of playboy, spoilt child and mystic, was sensitive not only to the fun, but also to an underlying melancholy in Apollinaire to which his own nature responded. To quote Poulenc: ‘when, in the midst of the worst buffoonery, a phrase can bring about a lyrical and melancholic change of perspective, I never hesitate to alter the tone, knowing the sadness Apollinaire’s smile could conceal’. Poulenc, then, may have disagreed with his biographer Henri Hell, who claimed that the composer had given back to Apollinaire’s puppets the heart the poet had denied them. Poulenc found the hearts were there, after all. 

An English review of the first recording observed that Les mamelles de Tirésias ‘exemplifies the kind of smart silliness which only a very clever people like the French think worth the trouble of dressing up to the nines’. This is altogether too serious a response and misses half the point. Surrealism and laughter may have been one creative way the French could cope with their 20th century vicissitudes. It was beyond my grasp as a 13-year old, but Poulenc’s take on Apollinaire has helped show me since then that being grown-up doesn’t mean being serious all the time. Les mamelles de Tirésias is childishness for adults.

First published in Opera~Opera, 2005