Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
Poulenc’s one-act opera La Voix humaine is a setting to music of a play by Jean Cocteau. There is only one character, a woman (‘Elle’ [She, Her]), and the audience eavesdrops while she talks on the phone to her lover. As in any overheard conversation, we are asked to use our imagination to fill the gaps.
Some things are clear: the relationship is over. He’s marrying someone else. He wants his letters back. She wants him to take the dog. They both lie, repeatedly.
Other things we have to fill in by guessing and piecing together hints. Did she really attempt suicide, or is she trying to make him feel guilty? Why does he say he is calling from home when clearly he isn’t? Viewing the relationship from outside, we never completely understand. We never see Him. But we form a picture of him from the jigsaw pieces we are given.
Cocteau wrote La Voix humaine in 1930 as a reaction to criticism that his plays depended too much on devices and production. He pared his drama down to basics: a room, a woman, and a telephone. The telephone in 1930 was still a relatively new and high-tech instrument. Cocteau uses it as a metaphor for the alienation inherent in modern life – the too easy access of one human creature to another, and the still easier cutting off of fragile relationships. There are wrong numbers, crossed lines, losses of connection, and panicky rediallings. Even when Poulenc’s opera was written in the 1950s, the French telephone system was notoriously unreliable.
The play was Cocteau’s most successful. After it was premiered by Berthe Bovy at the Comédie-Française in 1932, many great actresses took it up. It was filmed in Italian with Anna Magnani, and Ingrid Bergman, wife of that film’s director, Roberto Rossellini, later recorded it and acted it for TV.
Cocteau, of all poets, worked most closely with musicians, including Stravinsky (Oedipus Rex 1927) and Honegger (Antigone 1927). But La Voix humaine had already been written almost 30 years when Poulenc took it as the subject for his opera, his first collaboration with Cocteau since the days of Les Six in the early 1920s. The renewed collaboration brought mutual admiration. ‘My dear Francis’, said Cocteau, ‘you have settled, once and for all, the way to speak my text’. Poulenc for his part observed that ‘Cocteau’s short sentences are so logical, so human, so charged with incident that I had to compose a score which was rigorously ordered and full of suspense. Indeed, the music stops speaking as the single character listens to her interlocutor. The unexpected in the musical answer then suggests what has been heard’.
An ideal interpreter
It took a remarkable singer-actress to make such an opera even conceivable. When Poulenc was looking to cast the main role in his farcical opera based on Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947), he was turned down by the well-known soprano Geori-Boué. He discovered Denise Duval, who had sung at the Folies-Bergères, and whose off-stage as well as on-stage doings already fascinated Parisian snobs even before they knew she could sing.
Poulenc was smitten with her: ‘lovely as the day, chic on earth, a voice of gold’. She for her part, much as she loved making music with him, admitted that she found Poulenc ‘ugly as a louse’. Duval had style. Poulenc gossiped in 1947 that ‘Christian Dior dresses her, and that’s not all he does’. Knowing the details of Denise Duval’s stormy love-life helped Poulenc get inside the rejected lover of Cocteau’s play.
After Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Poulenc wrote for Denise Duval the central role of Blanche in his harrowing opera of the martyrdom of nuns in the French Revolution, Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957). With the enthusiasm of a creator for his most recent work, Poulenc later declared that he found Dialogues of the Carmelites a bore (‘I’d swap the whole score for La Voix humaine’), but he admitted that he needed ‘to go through the metaphysical and spiritual anguish of Carmelites to be in a position not to betray the terribly human anguish of Jean Cocteau’s magnificent play’.
It was Hervé Dugardin, the Paris director of the publishing firm Ricordi, who suggested to Poulenc that he set to music Cocteau’s La Voix humaine. Dugardin wanted Maria Callas for the role, but she resisted singing in a language other than Italian, and in any case Poulenc preferred the voice of Renata Tebaldi (and presumably Denise Duval to either). Duval was an ideal interpreter, and Poulenc, who often accompanied her in his songs, indicated that the soprano singing ‘Elle’ was almost the co-composer of the role, deciding when to take pauses, establishing the free tempos for her music, agreeing with the conductor before the performance. At the second performance, the orchestra (rarity of rarities!) gave Denise Duval a standing ovation. Critic Bernard Gavoty wrote ‘Denise Duval has found the role of her life’, and her realisation of it can he heard on the first recording, made soon after the premiere, which took place at the Opéra-Comique on February 5, 1959.
Poulenc told Stéphane Audel in an interview: ‘La Voix humaine is finished. Cocteau is delighted and the ladies are in tears. I shall orchestrate it quickly so as to get rid of the nightmare, for it’s a work I’ve written in a veritable state of fear…when shall I write happy music again?’ It has been suggested, wrongly, that because Cocteau and Poulenc were gay, the play and the opera were really about an older man being dumped by his boy lover. It is probably true that Poulenc’s fear, while he was composing La Voix humaine, of losing his then-lover Louis (younger, but not a boy) helped him attain the sometimes hysterical atmosphere of the opera.
But artistic achievement has deeper sources. Both Poulenc and Cocteau were fascinated, perceptive, and sympathetic observers of women, and made a telling and realistic comment on human relationships, shot through with intense anxiety. Poulenc could relate to Elle’s suicide attempt, as an abuser himself of sleeping-pills, tranquillisers, and anti-depressants.
The cheerful ‘street urchin’ becomes reverent
It was the cheerful ‘street-urchin’ side of Poulenc which first made him famous as one of the irreverent Les Six in the 1920’s. It was never submerged, but in the second half of his career the religious music and the operas Dialogues of the Carmelites and La Voix humaine showed Poulenc as a master of touching lyrical feeling, and a sometimes profound portrayer of the human condition. Above all these operas, like his many songs with piano, show Poulenc as a masterly setter of words to music, perhaps the greatest in France since Debussy.
Cocteau’s play is structured as a series of sequences or phases, such as the phase of memories, that of the dog that misses his master, of the lies, of the failed suicide and so on. Each of these is given a particular musical character, but Poulenc preserves continuity and unity with lyrical themes which are heard near the beginning, then recalled throughout. This continuity was necessary because of Poulenc’s quite daring strategy of reflecting, in extended recitative, the spasmodic, interrupted structure of conversations, in which the orchestra has to fill some of the gaps when there is no response, or the response is heard only by the woman.
A telephone conversation of which only one side is heard, plagued by crossed lines, cutting off, and hanging up, may not seem to call for an orchestral commentary whose richness and sentimentality (in the best sense) sometimes recall Puccini. Yet that is what Poulenc has given it – he insisted that the music should be ‘bathed in sensuality’. The transparency of the orchestration, however, always enables the singer to be heard, and Cocteau’s text is never subordinated to the music. Indeed, it has been suggested that Poulenc’s music makes the audience forget the ‘tour de force’ aspect of Cocteau’s play, and humanises it, making it all the more moving.