About the work
The double bill „The Telephone & Trouble in Tahiti" unites two short twentieth-century English-language operas: Gian Carlo Menotti's light miniature „The Telephone" (1947) and Leonard Bernstein's satirical one-act opera „Trouble in Tahiti" (1952). Both works take a wry look at everyday American life.
Plot
„The Telephone": Ben wants to propose to Lucy before he leaves on a journey — but again and again the couple are interrupted by the ringing telephone, on which Lucy chatters endlessly. At last Ben finds the only way to get through: he calls her from a phone booth and proposes over the line, and she joyfully accepts. — „Trouble in Tahiti": Sam and Dinah, a well-off suburban couple in 1950s America, live in a prosperity that barely conceals their inner emptiness and estrangement. While a swinging vocal trio extols the advertising idyll of the „little white house", the marriage crumbles into irritability, boredom and unspoken longing. Dinah escapes into a kitschy South-Seas film — „Trouble in Tahiti" — yet the longing for happiness remains unfulfilled.
Cultural significance
The pairing of the two one-acts is a popular double programme of the chamber-opera repertoire. Menotti's „The Telephone" is among the most-performed comic short operas, while Bernstein's „Trouble in Tahiti" is regarded as a sharp-eyed, jazz-infused critique of the American dream of prosperity and was later continued in „A Quiet Place".