Jean Anouilh

Inventive, cynical, deeply sensed, commercially effective, and post-modern prior to the term was coined, the has of Jean Anouilh will be good fodder for just about any modern opera composer having a Brechtian feeling of theatre. Puzzlingly, his composing has hardly ever intersected with music. Francis Poulenc made up the incidental music for Anouilh’s 1940 play Léocadio, that is attracted the well-known music Les Chemins de L’amour, and Anouilh had written the libretto for Jean-Michel Damase’s 1961 opera Colombe. In any other case, Anouilh’s function still awaits the musical treatment it deserves. Sketching inspiration, specifically from Molière, Pirandello, and Giraudoux, Anouilh developed certainly and intentionally artificial stage worlds, offered sort of self-aware theatre of illusion that makes viewers to contemplate all that’s false in real life. His individuals’ motivations and activities are barely absurdist, but their conditions aren’t reasonable. His 1944 treatment of Antigone, for instance, snips the individuals from Greek misconception (and generally, the play by Sophocles) and pastes them in to the middle of the 20th hundred years, smoking and generating fast cars, however the problems and actions stay accurate to the historic sources. Anouilh’s continuing theme, from his second play L’Hermine (1932), was the “great thirst for purity.” His protagonists are enthusiastic about their personal integrity and their inflexibility network marketing leads almost inevitably with their downfall, departing the antagonists — who bargain and comprehend true to life — to get the pieces. Usual of the doomed idealists are Joan of Arc in L’alouette (1953) as well as the name personality in Becket (1959), both spiritual martyrs. This isn’t to state that Anouilh’s eyesight is generally tragic; his performs range between anguished melodrama to exuberant farce. He eventually published his performs under disclosing if fanciful descriptive headings: pièces roses (light), pièces noires (dark), pièces brillantes (gleaming), pièces grinçantes (grating), pièces baroques, and many others. Especially in his has before about 1960, Anouilh’s more happy protagonists can evade the sorry destiny of these with integrity just through pure escapism; illusion frees the primary individuals in such has as Le Voyageur Sans Baggage (1937), Léocadia, and L’invitation au Chateau (1947). In the mid-’50s, Anouilh dropped right into a sour pessimism, making dark farces such as for example Pauvre Bitos (1956) and melancholy comedies such as for example Cher Antoine (1969). Notably, the heroes of the late takes on are more willing to bargain. Throughout his profession, Anouilh also had written or collaborated on many screenplays, some attracted from his stage functions, some modified from others’ tales, and some unique. Perhaps the greatest in the second option category can be 1947’s Monsieur Vincent, a respectful but unsentimental rather than humorless biography of St. Vincent de Paul.