The Nightingale (Stravinsky) & Les Mamelles de Tirésias (Poulenc) Paris 2023 Sabine Devieilhe, Cyrille Dubois, Laurent Naouri
In this video
The Nightingale by Igor Stravinsky and Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Francis Poulenc
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, France
March 2023
CAST
The Nightingale:
Sabine Devieilhe — The Nightingale
Cyrille Dubois — Fisherman / 1st Japanese envoy
Chantal Santon Jeffery — Cook
Laurent Naouri — Chamberlain
Victor Sicard — Bonze
Rodolphe Briand — 3rd Japanese envoy
Francesco Salvadori — Japanese envoy
Jean-Sébastien Bou — Emperor
Lucile Richardot — Death
Les Mamelles de Tirésias:
Sabine Devieilhe — Thérèse-Tirésias / The Cartomancer
Laurent Naouri — Theatre director
Jean-Sébastien Bou — Thérèse’ husband
Victor Sicard — A gendarme
Cyrille Dubois — A reporter from Paris / Monsieur Lacouf
Rodolphe Briand — The son / A woman
Chantal Santon Jeffery — An elegant lady
Lucile Richardot — A newspaper vendor
Francesco Salvadori — Monsieur Presto
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François-Xavier Roth — Conductor
Les Siècles
Ensemble Aedes
Mathieu Romano — Chorus master
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Stage Director: Olivier Py
Stage Designer: Pierre-André Weitz
Costume Designer: Pierre-André Weitz
Lighting Designer: Bertrand Killy
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The Nightingale (Russian: Соловей, romanized: Solovey) is a short opera in three acts by Igor Stravinsky to a Russian-language libretto by him and Stepan Mitusov, based on a tale by Hans Christian Andersen: a nasty Chinese Emperor is reduced to tears and made kind by a small grey bird. It was completed on 28 March 1914 and premiered a few weeks later, on 26 May, by the Ballets Russes conducted by Pierre Monteux at the Palais Garnier in Paris. Publication, by the then Paris-based Éditions Russes de Musique, followed only in 1923 and caused the opera to become known by its French title of Le Rossignol and French descriptor of conte lyrique, or lyric tale, despite its being wholly Russian.
Synopsis
Time: Ancient times Place: China.
The Fisherman acts as commentator on the story’s events.
Act 1
At the seashore just before sunrise, a Fisherman hears the song of the Nightingale, which causes him to forget his troubles. The Cook has brought officials from the court of the Emperor to hear the Nightingale, telling of the beauty of its singing. However, the Nightingale is nowhere to be heard. The Court Chamberlain promises the Cook a position as private cook to the Emperor, if she can find the Nightingale, who finally appears, and receives an invitation from the Cook and the Chamberlain to sing for the Emperor. The Nightingale accepts the invitation, but says that its sweetest song is in the forest.
Act 2
Courtiers festoon the palace with lanterns in advance of the singing of the Nightingale. The Cook describes the Nightingale to the courtiers noting that it is small, gray and virtually invisible, but its song causes its listeners to cry. A procession denotes the Emperor’s arrival. He commands the Nightingale to sing, and its singing touches him so deeply that he offers the bird a reward of a golden slipper to wear about its neck. Later, three Japanese emissaries offer the Emperor a mechanical nightingale, which begins to sing. The Emperor is delighted by this novelty. Taking insult at this, the genuine bird flies away, and the angered emperor orders it banished from his realm. He names the mechanical bird “first singer”.
Act 3
The Emperor is ill and near death; the figure of Death appears in the Emperor’s chamber. The ghosts of the Emperor’s past deeds visit him while he calls for his court musicians, but the genuine Nightingale has reappeared, in defiance of the imperial edict, and has begun to sing. Death hears the Nightingale’s song and is greatly moved, and asks it to continue, which it does on condition that Death returns to the emperor his crown, sword and standard. Death assents and gradually removes himself from the scene as the Nightingale continues to sing. The Emperor slowly regains his strength, and on seeing the Nightingale, offers it the “first singer” post at court. The Nightingale says that it is satisfied with the Emperor’s tears as reward, and promises to sing for him each night from dusk until dawn.
Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) is an opéra bouffe by Francis Poulenc, in a prologue and two acts based on the eponymous play by Guillaume Apollinaire. The opera was written in 1945 and first performed in 1947. Apollinaire’s play, written in 1903, was revised with a sombre prologue by the time it premiered during World War I in France. For the opera, Poulenc incorporated both the farcical and the serious aspects of the original play, which according to one critic displays a “high-spirited topsy-turveydom” that conceals “a deeper and sadder theme – the need to repopulate and rediscover a France ravaged by war.”
Guillaume Apollinaire was one of a group of poets whom Poulenc had met as a teenager. Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, the Maison des Amis des Livres, was a meeting place for avant-garde writers including Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon. Apollinaire, the illegitimate son of a Polish noblewoman, was described by the critic Edward Lockspeiser as the prominent leader of Bohemian life in Montparnasse. Among his achievements were to bring to prominence the painter the Douanier Rousseau,[2] and to invent the term “surrealism”, of which he was a leading exponent. In June 1917 the audience for the first performance of Apollinaire’s “drame surréaliste”, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, at a theatre in Montmartre included Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, Léonide Massine, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, and the young Poulenc. Many years later Poulenc said that though he had been immensely amused by the farcical piece it did not occur to him at the time that he would ever set it to music.
Synopsis
In a short prologue, the theatre director introduces the work, promising the audience a moral piece on the necessity of having children.
Act 1
Thérèse tires of her life as a submissive woman and becomes the male Tirésias when her breasts turn into balloons and float away. Her husband is not pleased by this, still less so when she ties him up and dresses him as a woman.
Meanwhile, a pair of drunken gamblers called Presto and Lacouf affectionately shoot one another and are mourned by the assembled townspeople. Thérèse marches off to conquer the world as General Tiresias, leaving her captive husband to the attentions of the local gendarme, who is fooled by his female attire.
Off-stage, General Tiresias starts a successful campaign against childbirth and is hailed by the populace. Fearful that France will be left sterile if women give up sex, the husband vows to find a way to bear children without women. Lacouf and Presto return from the dead and express both interest and scepticism.
Act 2
The curtain rises to cries of “Papa!” The husband’s project has been a spectacular success, and he has given birth to 40,049 children in a single day. A visiting Parisian journalist asks how he can afford to feed the brood, but the husband explains that the children have all been very successful in careers in the arts, and have made him a rich man with their earnings. After chasing the journalist off, the husband decides to raise a journalist of his own, but is not completely pleased with the results.
The gendarme now arrives to report that, because of overpopulation, the citizens of Zanzibar are all dying of hunger. The husband suggests getting ration cards printed by a tarot-reading fortune-teller. Just such a fortune-teller immediately appears, looking rather familiar under his mask.
The fortune-teller prophesies that the fertile husband will be a multi-millionaire, but that the sterile gendarme will die in abject poverty. Incensed, the gendarme attempts to arrest him, but he strangles him and reveals himself as none other than Tirésias. The couple reconcile, and the whole cast gathers at the footlights to urge the audience:
Ecoutez, ô Français, les leçons de la guerre
Et faites des enfants, vous qui n’en faisiez guère
Cher public: faites des enfants!
Heed, o Frenchmen, the lessons of the war
And make babies, you who hardly ever make them!
Dear audience: Make babies!
Quoted from Wikipedia