Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1983)

This opera is a pure surrealist bonbon; it is an early women’s lib fairytale in the form of a Neo-Dada nightclub revue, with the comedic buffoonery of an early René Clair silent film. Set in Zanzibar, a French village as remote from reality as Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny, it is the story of a tired housewife who wants to be free of A) her marriage and B) the limitation of being female. In her militant desire to assume male roles, she abandons house and home; her husband, in turn, in desperation assumes females ones, and strange to say, becomes capable of producing children. Herein lies the theme of the opera: “make children, not war.”

The parable ends with the bittersweet reunion of man and wife on a new basis of understanding, a reconciliation à la Massenet being an ingredient basic to French life and certainly, to French opera. The roles re-verse themselves and peace resigns in the land: “Ecoutez, O Français, les leçons de la querre, et faites des enfants, vous qui n’en faisiez guére.

Frank Corsaro