Abstract
Bohuslav Martinů wanted his librettist to create a singing cat. The librettist was unable to oblige, but did come up with a singing portrait. Martinů was satisfied and composed a wonderfully surreal short opera that refers to both Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus. To escape marital boredom, Alexander decides one day to put his wife Armande to the test. He shaves off his beard and seduces her as his own cousin from America. Although his wife, who until then has been completely faithful, recognises her own Alexander in the unknown cousin, she enjoys the affair so much that she elopes with Oskar immediately afterwards… Alexandre Bis – a virtuoso game with dream and reality, the double standards of bourgeois society, and a wide variety of musical forms.