Les Mamelles de Tirésias

Francis Poulenc's *Les Mamelles de Tirésias* unfolds as a brilliantly absurdist operatic farce that celebrates fertility, desire, and the topsy-turvy reversals of gender and social order. Based on Guillaume Apollinaire's surrealist play, the opera follows Thérèse, a woman living in the French seaside town of Zanzibar who, in a moment of liberatory exasperation, allows her breasts to float away like balloons and transforms herself into the male prophet Tirésias. Her bewildered husband, left to manage household and reproduction alone, spirals into comic desperation as he attempts to birth children through sheer force of will. Poulenc's score—playful, irreverent, and kaleidoscopic—weaves together music-hall rhythms, jazzy inflections, and classical parody to match the opera's anarchic energy. The work revels in its own theatrical mischief: characters break the fourth wall, the orchestra comments with cheeky asides, and the boundary between sense and nonsense dissolves entirely. Beneath the carnival atmosphere lies a provocative meditation on autonomy, desire, and the arbitrary constraints of gender, all delivered with a wink and a flourish that refuses solemnity. *Les Mamelles de Tirésias* remains a singular achievement—simultaneously a satire of operatic convention and a celebration of human appetite in all its forms.