Glyndebourne’s Poulenc double bill contrasts ideas of womanhood- review
<First published online in the New York Times on August 11, 2022>
The sociologies of Glyndebourne Festival Opera, onstage and off, remain fascinating. The social order of each audience, the social order of each opera and the social order of each (often revisionist) production have often worked together with subversive tensions. True, the Glyndebourne dinner interval can still seem an embodiment of social privilege — but the fare onstage has often raised issues that rattle complacency.
In this summer’s final programme, the topic is womanhood. But the heroines of this double bill of one-act works by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), in new productions directed by Laurent Pelly, face in opposite directions. The passive, neurotic protagonist of La Voix humaine (1958) is one we recognise without often meeting these days: the woman who lives only for the love (and telephone calls) of one man, and whose needy existence is pathetically defined by that love. As she realises he’s been cheating, she moves towards suicide.
By contrast — after dinner — arrives the world-changing heroine of Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1945), Thérèse announces that she’s a feminist with plans to do work usually exclusive to men. So she becomes the trans man Tirésias! She loses her breasts; she gains a beard. Her husband, a reluctant trans woman, devises a laboratory for mass-breeding babies without mothers. Les Mamelles is comically surreal, energetically bonkers.
Almost everything in these Glyndebourne productions is a tribute to la belle France. The words in La Voix humaine are by Jean Cocteau, those for Les Mamelles by Guillaume Apollinaire. Pelly, French, has both directed and designed the costumes. The sole singer of La Voix humaine is the mezzo Stéphanie d’Oustrac (French) — who happens to be Poulenc’s great-niece. A high proportion of the Les Mamelles soloists are French, too.
The set designer, Caroline Ginet, has created utterly unalike stage worlds. La Voix humaine occurs on a disconcertingly shifting plateau. Only the woman and her telephone occupy the stage, which at first seems to be her room but later seems to be her mind. Les Mamelles is one cartoon upon another. Our first view of thousands of babies, in serried rows, is the most hilarious moment of many.
Although lucid diction used to be the sine qua non of French operatic style, it’s been many years since I’ve heard opera singers deliver French words so clearly as here. The soprano Elsa Benoit (Thérèse/Tirésias) and baritone Régis Mengus (her husband) both set peak standards. The vibrant brightness of their voices is what once seemed the basis of French opera; I marvelled to hear it again. They act as they sing: ebulliently.
D’Oustrac, though not lodging words in the audience’s ear with the same skill, has the artistry to take the La Voix humaine monologue into a kind of expanding love-death morbidity. Robin Ticciati, conducting, finely contrasts the two: La Voix becomes a post-Debussy study in changing harmony and fragmented melody, while Les Mamelles, briefly Stravinskian at first, is all brio and buffo élan.
How remarkable that Poulenc created women so utterly unalike! Next season, Glyndebourne presents his full-length tragedy Dialogues des Carmélites (postponed from 2020), with some of the greatest women’s roles in all 20th-century opera.
@Financial Times, 2022