Scene from Les Mamelles de Tirésias

In 2012, the Glyndebourne Festival staged Ravel’s well-loved double-bill L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges, directed by Laurent Pelly. This season the festival has returned to another famous French composer to stage yet another double-bill, namely, Poulenc’s La voix humaine and Les Mamelles de Tirésias, once again directed by Laurent Pelly in celebration of his 60th year.

Although this is Glyndebourne’s third production of La voix humaine (written in 1958) previous interpretations include Cocteau’s own 1960 production starring French soprano star, Denise Duval (for whom he created the role of Elle) and a 1977 Festival production in which Italian soprano, Graziella Scuitti, both sang and directed while Felicity Lott took over the role for the Glyndebourne Tour the same year.

The libretto of La voix humaine is based on the play of the same name by Jean Cocteau, who, along with Denise Duval, worked closely with Poulenc in preparation for the opera’s première which took place at the Théâtre National de Opéra-Comique, Paris, on 6th February 1959, with Georges Prêtre conducting.  The scenery, costumes and direction were by Cocteau who befriended Poulenc early in his career because of his close relationship with Les Six, a group of six French composers of which Poulenc was a member.  

In composing La voix humaine, Poulenc strove to maintain the emotional effectiveness of Cocteau’s original drama and believed there were five types of ‘phases’ in the work dealing with chronology, psychological evolution, social interaction, telephone problems and the remembrance of past happiness. Shades of Marcel Proust!

However, if I remember Felicity Lott’s commanding performance of Elle, a fragile and manic-type character, confused and disturbed, dumped by her lover for another, I shall certainly remember Stéphanie d’Oustrac’s performance, too. A Gramophone award-winning Breton-born mezzo-soprano and, incidentally, the great niece of Francis Poulenc, d’Oustrac has worked with Laurent Pelly on several occasions including playing the female lead in his 2016 Glyndebourne production of Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict.

When we first meet d’Oustrac she’s curled up like a cat on a bare stage - in this production, though, a hi-tech hydraulic tilted platform but in my wild imagination a large, luxurious, silk-covered bed - hiding under an avalanche of dark hair wearing a rugged-style coat over a black satin slip not just coming to terms with life but embracing the loss of love and humankind at the same time.

Over the course of the opera the platform changes its shape in keeping with the movement and angst of the singer while a wide horizontal deep-red light, set against a black drape, breached the entire width of the stage, representing, maybe, Elle’s moods and uncertainties in relation to her telephone conversation. Towards the end the light fades into obscurity when hope seems all but gone.

Always at hand is her vintage long black cord Bakelite telephone and she’s always waiting a call from her ex-lover. The phone rings. She impatiently picks it up. Agonisingly it is a wrong number. But when they do make contact, the couple simply drag out their past relationship to no satisfactory conclusion.

Repeatedly, their telephone conversation is interrupted in all manner of ways such as when a third party crashed into their conversation through a party-line interception while another diversion witnessed Elle asking him to look after the dog and, indeed, for him not to go the hotel in Marseilles with his new lover where they enjoyed so much fun together.

Always blaming herself for the breakdown of their relationship, she tries to cajole her lover back but to no avail. Desperate, she finds herself abandoned, broken hearted and distraught, left with a dead phone with that long black cord dangling around her.

Throughout the work, d’Oustrac showed her mettle and strength in a solo performance of great magnitude and strength. And Glyndebourne’s resident orchestra, the London Philharmonic, under Robin Ticciati, showed their mettle and strength, too. Although this version of La voix humaine was scored for full orchestra it was rarely heard as a full ensemble and only in such moments when the soprano was not singing.  

Poulenc wrote La voix humaine in a gay and colourful way using different combinations of instruments to achieve certain effects. I think that the most important orchestral function other than unifying the overall work was the portrayal of the telephone ringing through repeated notes on the xylophone. Although the pitch and the duration of the ringing kept changing which added to the frustration of Elle, the timbre of the xylophone was simply used to represent the ‘voice’ of the telephone thereby making it easily identifiable. Therefore, the structure of the opera was further delineated by the phone cutting off frequently without warning which added extra tension to the overall plot.

As Poulenc’s writing for the voice is recitative-like in style representing the natural inflections of speech and in the case of this work imitating a phone conversation through its frequent pauses and silences it clearly offered d’Oustrac a pause, a break, a momentarily distraction, either to change stage position or gain composure before receiving another annoying call from her former lover.

If La voix humaine plighted the unfortunate character of Elle, Poulenc’s highly entertaining two-act opéra bouffe, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tirésias) - based on Guillaume Apollinaire’s surrealist play of the same name - proved quite the opposite to the principal character, Thérèse/Tirésias.

The work that Apollinaire (widely credited of coining the word ‘surrealism’) set out to write was duly completed in 1903 but Mamelles didn’t get its first staging until 1947 receiving its première at the Opéra Comique, Paris, conducted by Albert Wolff. The twin role of Thérèse/Tirésias was sung by Poulenc’s favourite singer Denise Duval while her henpecked husband by baritone, Paul Payen.

However, Thérèse/Tirésias in Pelly’s invigorating production was admirably sung by French soprano, Elsa Benoit, who put in a thoroughly commanding and effortless performance that thrilled a packed house while Régis Mengus as her Husband (matching, to a degree, Zanzibarian-born Freddie Mercury’s physique and facial expression) equally matched her vocal skills and stage prowess in every conceivable way.

They made a good double-act as did François Piolino as Lacouf (attired from head to toe in a tight-fitting, yellow-coloured suit with make-up to match) and Christophe Gay as Presto (in matching ‘green’), a pair of drunken gamblers who after offending each other’s honour affectionately shoot one another but revive themselves just in the nick of time!

Bizarre, surreal and funny in every sense of the word, the opera’s plot is simple and straightforward revolving round Thérèse who’s tired of life as a submissive obedient housewife cooking and producing babies by the dozen that she packs in her humdrum life for one that offers more interest and adventure.

The scene in which Thérèse takes on the masculine role of General Tirésias was marvellously entertaining and highlighted Elsa Benoit as a born actress too. She partially opens her blouse from which her breasts fly out, represented by two large pink helium-filled balloons. For all I know they could still be at loose flying over the South Downs! With beard, moustache and hat she goes off in a flurry of activity in search of new horizons and marches off to conquer the world embarking upon a successful campaign against childbirth.

Thérèse’s Husband is left holding the baby and not too pleased with his wife’s rash decision but before she leaves, she ties him up and trusses him up in a corset. Therefore, he’s left hook, line and sinker to cook and make babies. Overnight, he manages to produce over 40,000 of them by way of an ingenious Heath Robinson-type, cog-wheel industrial-looking set, intricately designed by Caroline Ginet with Urs Schönebaum’s lighting giving it that extra bit of bounce.

But the most surreal and one of the funniest moments of the whole opera witnessed twelve members of the chorus seen with just their heads showing above their hidden standing position with their hands and bodies portrayed as babies while a collective group of baby models are lined up row upon row behind them. The scene brought the house down and stamped Pelly’s credentials on a fine, entertaining and highly amusing production.

However, the Husband’s baby project hit the headlines. A Parisian journalist (Loïc Félix) turns up and quizzes him about how he can afford feeding such a brood. He explains that his children have all been very successful in their respective careers and, thereby, contributed greatly to his overall wealth. But when he decides to try and make his journalist son (James Way) into a media tycoon so he can partially take control the media, the plan fails miserably.

The scene, in fact, gave prominence to members of the chorus (well drilled by Aidan Oliver) having a big say in the matter. Attired in an eccentric array of black-designed clothing, created by Laurent Pelly in collaboration with Jean-Jacques Delmotte, adorned by an odd assortment of wigs and bearing white make-up, mirroring, in a way, Dickensian characters, they charge round the stage brandishing a broadsheet newspaper no doubt overstating the facts of the success of the Husband’s baby project and totally against his ambitious media plans.

A memorable moment comes when the Gendarme, Gyula Orendt (who, as Theatre Director, serenely sang the short prologue to the opera promising the audience a moral piece on the necessity of having children) arrives on the scene sniffing out a crime but mistakes the Husband for a member of the opposite sex. The sexual innuendo was superbly carried out with my thoughts racing back to Peter Pears in the role with Harvey Alan as the Gendarme making up to him.

And when the Gendarme jumps to attention to report that because of over-population the citizens of Zanzibar are in danger of dying of hunger, the Husband decides to act accordingly and enlists the services of a tarot-reading, fortune-teller. Hey presto! One turns up immediately but looking rather familiar beneath her mask. She claims that her fertile Husband will become a multi-millionaire and the sterile Gendarme will die in abject poverty. Incensed, the Gendarme attempts to arrest her she immediately reveals herself as none other than Thérèse.

As the opera closes, Husband and Wife reconcile with each other and the whole cast gathers at the footlights as a chorus line-up urging members of the audience to make babies: ‘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 war and make babies. You who hardly ever make them! Dear audience: make babies!) C’est la vie!

A wonderful and entertaining evening all round, this Poulenc double-bill - ranging from high tragedy to zany surrealism - brought the curtain down on yet another successful Glyndebourne season, the end of summer but with the annual Glyndebourne Tour just round the corner. Kicking off at Glyndebourne on 8th October, the Tour will then travel to Milton Keynes (1st November), Canterbury (8th November) Norwich (15th November) and Liverpool (24th November) playing with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Puccini’s La bohème and a concert performance of Mozart’s Requiem.

However, looking ahead, there’s more Poulenc to be rolled out on the lovely and inviting South Downs next year with Laurent Pelly’s new production of Dialogues des Carmélites. That’s certainly something to look forward to.