Francis Poulenc

* Les mamelles de Tiresias*
* Le bal masque**

* Barbara Bonney (Therese), Jean-Paul Fouchecourt (husband), Wolfgang
Holzmair (gendarme), Tokyo Opera Singers, Saito Kinen Orchestra/Seiji Ozawa
** Wolfgang Holzmair (baritone), members of the Saito Kinen Orchestra/Seiji
Orchestra
Philips 456 604-2 Total time: 72:20

Summary for the Busy Executive: Putting the "ooo" in "ooo-la-la."

These two works lie roughly fifteen years apart, Le bal masque premiering
in 1932 and Les mamelles in 1947.  Poulenc conceived of Les mamelles as a
diversion from his serious works of the war, notably the choral masterpiece
La Figure humaine.  For the opera, he returned to one of his earliest
literary heroes, Guillaume Apollinaire, who exercised the greatest
influence over the composer immediately following the First World War.
Poulenc's music returns to his "bright" Satiean idiom of the Twenties.
Indeed, when I first heard the opera (the Denise Duval LP), I thought it
was from the Twenties.  Naively I believed that composers "progressed."
Surely, Poulenc had outgrown this sort of thing - a work of Dadaist
hi-jinks.  Poulenc did progress, in the sense that his work became
increasingly assured technically, but a good deal of his career consists
of a back-and-forth between an unashamed hedonism and a naive, direct,
and even stern Catholicism.  Actually, it's probably more accurate to talk
of an interpenetration of the two, particularly since key musical ideas
appear in either kind of work.

Poulenc wrote all three of his operas - Les mamelles, Dialogues des
Carmelites, and La Voix humaine - for the remarkable Denise Duval, a
singing actress of great range, who got her start at the Folies-Bergere.
Mamelles takes advantage of that aspect of her art.  It's essentially a
series of vaudeville comedy routines.

The piece also shows how Poulenc took over his texts.  Apollinaire had
written his skit as early as 1903, setting the action in "Zanzibar."
Without changing a word, Poulenc shifted time and place to the French
Riviera of the Twenties - for Poulenc, a magic place since childhood.  The
music and its vigorous pace call to mind the old Rene Clair musicals like
Le Million and the early Chevalier movies like Love Me Tonight - the opera
a high-class cousin, perhaps.  But there's a serious undercurrent to the
music at odds with the slapstick of the text, just as Apollinaire, apart
from his joking, has some serious points to make.  The prologue, for
example, in which the moral is set forth ("France!  Have more babies!"), is
sung to music that would not have been out of place in Poulenc's Dialogues
des Carmelites.  Tiresias was, of course, the blind prophet who had the
distinction of having lived as a man and as a woman.  The myth goes that
Tiresias saw two snakes mating, wounded the female, and became a woman
himself (or now, herself).  A number of years passed, when she saw the
same two snakes.  This time, she wounded the male and became a man again.
By this point, we should be able to guess that Apollinaire wants to talk
about gender.

Therese, a bored housewife, is sick of her confinement to the home.
We get a more exact idea of how bored when she interprets her husband's
calls for more bacon as lovemaking.  She aspires to more than household
drudge and recreation.  She wishes to be a mathematician, a senator, a
telegrapher, doctor, and so on, and so great is her frustration, that she
wants to become everything at once.  She opens her blouse, and her breasts,
transformed into balloons float up.  She explodes them with a cigarette,
and begins to grow a beard and whiskers.  Indeed, she becomes hairier than
her rather meek little milquetoast of a husband.  Once she shaves, she
transforms into an elegant young man, gives herself the name Tiresias,
and sets off on a great career as everything she wants to become.

The deserted husband meanwhile reasons that wealth is children.  He
determines to have children without the need of a woman and manufactures
40,049 babies in a single day.  Almost all of them have great careers,
and he lives off their income.  But all is not ideal.  The sudden huge
population increase has put a great strain on the resources of Zanzibar.
Therese returns with the knowledge that she is dissatisfied.  All the
careers in the world haven't made up for the love she has missed.  She woos
her husband and transforms back into a young woman.  The couple reunite -
not without the husband lamenting the loss of her breasts ("Bah!" she
replies, "Don't complicate matters") - and the opera ends with a grand
chorus advising people to "scratch if it itches."

One can, of course, see the work as sexist, but I think Apollinaire is
up to something else, or at least more.  What's wrong with the separate
careers of husband and wife is not the gender reversal, but the fact that
they are separate - a denial of love as well as of sex.  Civilization gets
in the way again.  Convention makes Therese unhappy enough to forsake love.
Forsaking love in pursuit of synthetic utopias also raises serious
problems.  Apollinaire ends his play in essentially one giant prelude to
lovemaking as all the women snuggle up to all the men and various actors
invite the audience to join in.  Poulenc ends his opera with a grand
chorus, which alternates between a sultry waltz and a kick of satyr's
heels, a hymn to "make babies!"

In Le bal masque, Poulenc again re-creates an imaginary Riviera.
The previous year, he had composed the song cycle 5 Poems of Max Jacob.
Jacob, a French Jew, converted to Catholicism and, in Ned Rorem's phrase,
"became more Catholic than the Pope." It didn't help him.  He died in a
concentration camp.  The verses of Le bal masque come from the 1921
collection Le laboratoire central.  It interests me that while the verses
Poulenc chose are highly acerbic satire, the music he wrote is so full of
fun and so good-natured.  There's an innocence that brings to mind a child
making up songs about what he's doing or seeing at that moment.  Poulenc's
cafe instrumentation (piano, violin, cello, oboe, clarinet, bassoon,
trumpet, drum kit, and comedy percussion) emphasizes the Rene Clair side
of Poulenc's musical personality.  Much of the Jacob verse uses puns and
near-puns ("le Comte d'Artois," "sur le toit," and "compte d'ardoises" -
"the Count of Artois," "on the roof," and "count the slates,"
respectively).  There doesn't seem to be an exact musical equivalent, but
it does give Poulenc a certain license for outrageousness.  Again, there's
the curious appearance of musical ideas that attain fuller expressive scope
in later, more serious work, like the organ concerto and the Dialogues,
but they don't appear in the serious-sounding sections of this "profane
cantata." Poulenc does throw an impressive curve ball, amidst the
cutting-up, with the song "La dame aveugle" ("the blind woman"), a piece
which sounds like an update of Schubert's lacerating "Die Kraehe" -
incidentally, one of Poulenc's favorite songs.  Why it appears in such a
sunny work I leave to better guessers.  The cantata finale comes loaded
with a funny surprise.

Ozawa's Poulenc has hitherto been almost criminally clueless, with truly
bad recordings of the Gloria and the Stabat mater, among others.  Here, he
does a superb job.  Fluke? You be the judge.  Holzmair continues a minor
tradition of great Germanophones performing La bal.  Fischer-Dieskau and
Wolfgang Sawallisch made a very fine recording of Le bal, with an equally
fine Faure La bonne chanson, and Holzmair and Ozawa at least match them.
In fact, I find Holzmair's reading less up-tight emotionally and almost as
accurate as Fischer-Dieskau's.  The recorded sound is what most of us would
consider acceptable, without calling attention to itself.  If you don't
have these works, this is a very good choice indeed.

Steve Schwartz