In many ways, Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine proved to be the perfect pandemic opera. It has a cast of one – Elle – who is stuck in her apartment, waiting for the lover who’s dumped her to call her on the telephone. Crossed lines, crossed wires and a mounting sense of desperation feature in an intense monodrama to which lockdown audiences, where human contact for most of us was limited to Zoom and Skype, could well relate. Many opera companies streamed it, with sopranos from Patricia Racette to Barbara Hannigan. Danielle de Niese didn’t take the easy option. Her film version, directed by James Kent and screened on BBC Two later this month – “Poulenc on prime time television? When would this have happened?” – was recorded live on set in Paris to an orchestra recorded in London.
De Niese arrives at the café in Fitzrovia looking every inch the operatic diva – engulfed in a voluptuous scarf, sunglasses perched atop her head – dragging a suitcase and dress bag ahead of a photography shoot at the Royal Opera House. But she exudes natural warmth and enthusiasm. “La Voix humaine was on my bucket list – it’s a very ‘Danni piece’ that entwines acting and vocal skills – so it was actually my mum who suggested filming it right at the start of lockdown.”
The opera is based on Jean Cocteau’s 1928 play, a monodrama first staged at the Comédie-Française, in which a young woman (“Elle”, French for “She”) is put through the emotional wringer during her final phone call with her ex-lover. There’s been a revival of interest in Cocteau’s play recently: Pedro Almodóvar’s film version (The Human Voice, 2020) with Tilda Swinton twists the plot wittily; and Ivo van Hove’s production starring Ruth Wilson is just about to finish its brief run at the Pinter in London.
Although there was a suggestion he write it for Maria Callas, Poulenc’s operatic version was composed in 1958 for his regular muse and collaborator, Denise Duval. It was an opera born out of heartbreak, both composer and soprano emerging from broken relationships. “That poor human voice, too human, like a diamond, nothing can tarnish or scratch you,” Poulenc wrote to Duval. “We were both caught up in the drama of our feelings. We would cry together. And that Voix humaine was the diary of our heartbreaks.”
“Poulenc took out certain parts from Cocteau that he thought bordered on hysteria,” De Niese explains. “I felt like a real detective. My favourite thing to do with a score is to dig into it and look for every clue possible. The way he writes her, it’s clear Poulenc completely sympathises with Elle, he completely lives her emotions.
“I love singing Poulenc. He was a composer of dichotomy. He had a religious side and he also had a very artistic, worldly side.” His music can flip in an instant from the melancholic to the ironic and sophisticated. I explain how the critic Claude Rostande famously described the composer as “moitié moine, moitié voyou” (half-monk, half-rascal). “Quite! If you think of Poulenc’s Gloria, at one point you feel a religious calling and at another you just want to take all your clothes off!”
De Niese was due to sing Blanche in Barrie Kosky’s staging of Dialogues des Carmélites at Glyndebourne in 2020 before Covid struck – it’s being rescheduled for 2023 – but isn’t singing Elle in the Poulenc double bill at the festival this summer. That honour falls to Stéphanie d’Oustrac, who is also eminently qualified, being the composer’s great grand niece!
When De Niese began learning the opera, she started with the male character – the unseen, unheard “Monsieur” on the other end of the line. “There’s so much speculation, because the Monsieur part is not written so you have a lot of agency about how you can develop the piece. I needed to understand who this person was and build a complete person.
“I think a certain level of pressure has been put on him that this relationship cannot continue in perpetuity. At the same time, there are many indications that he’s not being quite straight with Elle. Perhaps this is a person who is greatly at odds with himself. I can feel this in the man and the biggest indication is that he calls her back! There’s a big twist in the middle when we discover something and then she becomes obsessed with drawing this truth out of him. If he was a purely valiant, noble man who was prevented from following through on a relationship with her, then he wouldn’t be lying to her, so this tells you something about the man’s qualities. There’s a lot of gaslighting that happens in this piece. There’s manipulation. Why does he want to come and collect this bag of letters? Maybe it’s a shrine to their love but then he’s thinking if he’s getting hitched and Elle shows up at the wedding…
“But I think he’s greatly conflicted because if he’s not, then we risk throwing Elle into a trope, a cliché of a completely desperate woman who completely misreads the situation, which can be the case sometimes but I really don’t think it is here.
“James and I wanted to fight for Elle and her sanity and the plausiblity of her predicament, rather than making it a jagged, wild spectrum of emotion, even though there’s the potential for that in Cocteau. I needed Elle to be a person that I could relate to, a real person, not a manic person but somebody who I could look into because the other thing is that when you capture it on film, the lens was really close!”
De Niese explains that putting opera on film – with just six days on location – brought its own challenges. “When you’re zooming in that close, thoughts become smaller, yet in another way they become amplified so they don’t lessen, they intensify.
“We wanted this to be a film that also happens to be an opera, not a film of an opera. That meant we had to make every line believable so that meant avoiding singing ‘operatically’ and filling the sound, even if you were not projecting. It was about making the lines as believable as dialogue. How much could you peel away or wind down any vocal, physical performance of your face to as close to speech as possible? I would do a couple of tests for James and when you pull in that close that your eyeball is three metres on the cinema screen, he’d say ‘maybe even less’!”
The soundtrack was pre-recorded by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and conductor Sir Antonio Pappano. Sound designer Mike Hatch from Floating Earth had De Niese wired up to Pappano in another room to sing the score so they could get a “clean” orchestral track. “We had to figure out how I was going to sing live on set in Paris because when you’re making a movie, you want the director to feel free. Poulenc already gave us lots of fermatas [pauses] and Tony and I spent a lot of time together where he would indicate to me the places where he didn’t want to take much time, where he really wanted the music to move.
“But the piece doesn’t allow for everything to sound like dialogue. There are some incredible melodies, harmonies erotic beyond belief so we knew that we were going to have to marry bits that could sound like dialogue to bits that would have to open up and breathe. We also had to accept that the acoustic was not going to be Symphony Hall! It was going to be the claustrophobic nature of a small apartment, so I had to leave any vocal vanity behind!”
The film has a deliberately ambiguous ending. The opera ends with her winding the telephone cable around her neck, but here the cocktail of pills that Elle tells Monsieur she has taken are referenced. De Niese reveals that in preview screenings, audiences have had very different thoughts about the opera’s final moments. “I’ve sat in front of people who’ve watched this and are convinced that Elle is about to take the pills! And just as many people who think that she doesn’t! Is it the death of Elle? Or the death of love? Or, if you put her through the lens of today, does she steel herself, wake up and realise ‘I’m still here, I’m still alive, it’ll never be as bad as the night I took those twelve pills’? So there were lots of options and we filmed them all. It’s great to think that people will sit there on a knife-edge! Ambiguity is a funny old thing!”
La Voix humaine is broadcast on BBC Two at 10pm on 15th April
