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''Les mamelles de Tirésias'' (''The Breasts of Tiresias'') is a surrealist ''opéra bouffe'' by Francis Poulenc, in a prologue and two acts based on the play of the same title by Guillaume Apollinaire. The opera was written in 1945 and first performed in 1947. Although the action of the opera is farcical, it contains a serious message: the need to rediscover and repopulate a country ravaged by war. ==Background== Guillaume Apollinaire was one 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.〔Poulenc (1978), p. 98〕 Apollinaire, the illegitimate son of a Polish noblewoman, was described by the critic Edward Lockspeiser as the prominent leader of Bohemian life in Montparnasse.〔Hell, p. xv〕 Among his achievements were to bring to prominence the painter the Douanier Rousseau,〔 and to invent the term "surrealism", of which he was a leading exponent.〔Bohn, Willard. ("From Surrealism to Surrealism: Apollinaire and Breton" ), ''The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism'', Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter, 1977), pp. 197–210〕 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.〔Schmidt, p. 49〕 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.〔 Poulenc first set Apollinaire's words to music in his 1919 song cycle ''La Bestiaire'', and returned to the poet's work for the choral work ''Sept chansons'' (1936).〔Hell, pp. 93 and 98〕 During the 1930s he first thought of setting ''Les mamelles de Tirésias'' as an opera; in 1935 he adapted the script as a libretto, with the blessing of Apollinaire's widow,〔Poulenc (2014), p. 255〕 and began sketching the music in 1939, with most of the composition done in a burst of creativity between May and October 1944. Although the play was written in 1903, by the time of its premiere France was in the thick of the First World War, and Apollinaire had revised the piece, adding a sombre prologue. Poulenc aimed to reflect both the farcical and the serious aspects of the play. The critic Jeremy Sams describes the opera as "high-spirited topsy-turveydom" concealing "a deeper and sadder theme – the need to repopulate and rediscover a France ravaged by war."〔Sams. p. 282〕 With Mme Apollinaire's approval, Poulenc changed the date and setting from those of the original. "I chose 1912 because that was Apollinaire's heroic period, of the first fights for Cubism ... I substituted Monte-Carlo for Zanzibar to avoid the exotic, and because Monte-Carlo, which I adore, and where Apollinaire spent the first 15 years of his life, is quite tropical enough for the Parisian that I am."〔 Kaminski writes that the music, while in the line of Offenbach, Chabrier and Ravel's ''L'heure espagnole'', impresses the listener with its stream of "miniatures and vignettes", dances (a valse for Thérèse, a polka for Lacouf and Presto) and pastiches from other lyric music such as ariettes in the style of ''opéra comique'' or chorales (after the duel).〔Kaminski, pp. 1153–1155〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Les mamelles de Tirésias」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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