Complete recording

Poster by Georges Rochegrosse for the Paris première (1913)

Pénelope ......................................................... Régine Crespin
Ulysse .................................................................. Raoul Jobin
Eurymaque .................................................... Robert Massard
Euryclée ................................................... Christiane Gayraud
Cléone ...................................................... Madeleine Cagnard
Melantho ....................................................... Françoise Ogéas
Alkandre .................................................... Geneviève Macaux
Phylo .................................................................. Nicole Robin
Eumée ............................................................ André Vessières
Antinoüs .......................................................... Joseph Peyron
Léodès .............................................................. Michel Hamel
Ctésipe ........................................................ Bernard Demigny
Pisandre ......................................................... Pierre Germain

Les Choeurs de la RTF et l 'Orchestre National
D.-E. Inghelbrecht, cond.

French Radio, May 24, 1956

When Fauré, with some theatrical but not specifically operatic experience was searching for a libretto, the singer Lucienne Bréval recommended a text by René Fauchois on the subject of Penelope and Ulysses. Fauré started work in 1907 but his directorship of the Paris Conservatoire meant that composing was virtually restricted to the summer break. it took him five years to complete the opera, premièred in Monte Carlo on March 4, 1913 and played in Paris two months later.

Outwardly unsensation and unspectacular, concerned not with doomed love but with a marrigae happy and lasting in spite of the strain of external events, Pénélope is composed in a bare, economical, pared-down musical style, in which Fauré clothes deep feelings running at high tension below the surface.

Act 1, part 1

Act 1, part 2

Act 2, part 1

Act 2, part 2

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