La Voix Humaine

The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House presents a new production of Poulenc's short opera La Voix Humaine, featuring soprano Danielle de Niese and shot on location in Paris and London.

On a foggy afternoon, a woman who is lost in the middle of the countryside, finally reaches him on the phone. She calls him “darling” but has to give back his letters.

La Voix Humaine is a concerto for soprano and orchestra, centering on the break-up of a relationship by telephone. It represents one side of a conversation between a young woman (sung by American soprano, Julia Migenes) and her lover, who has jilted her. In a 1930s, Parisian apartment, a woman is seen making for the door. As she passes the telephone, it rings. From now on she sings, sitting, standing, on her knees, pacing up and down the room, pulling at the telephone cord, going through every emotion until ultimately, in despair, she takes her own life. Jean Cocteau wrote, it is not just that the telephone is sometimes more dangerous than the revolver but that its tangled cord drains us of our strength, while giving us nothing in return.

An elegant young woman in her messy room answers the phone call from her lover. This one, who intends to leave her, tries to make her understand what he is up to without hurting her too much, hypersensitive as she is . All means are good: big words, cajolery, denial, lies. As for the woman, who senses that this is the end, she desperately tries to win him back, passing from tenderness to passion, from the threat of attempted suicide to calm, from regret to outbursts of violence.

A woman’s last phone conversation with her lover, who now loves someone else.

A woman spends a surreal evening unraveling on the phone with her recently lost lover.

La voix humaine (English: The Human Voice) is a forty-minute, one-act opera for soprano and orchestra composed by Francis Poulenc in 1958 (Wikipedia). This is a version of it directed by Pierre Jourdan at the Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne.

A woman calls her ex-lover, unable to let go of him. She flatters, despairs and blackmails in the hope that he will not hang up the phone. / The clockmaker’s wife takes advantage of her husband’s absence to receive her lovers. In Opera Zuid's double bill of 20th century French masterpieces, everything revolves around the female protagonists and their emotional development. The one-act operas La Voix humaine (Francis Poulenc) and L'Heure espagnole (Maurice Ravel), each lasting less than an hour, present themselves as two sides of the same coin united by the same longing for connection to another human being.

Running through Bartók’s disenchanted tale, whose haunting music was initially condemned as unplayable, and the expression of despair in Poulenc’s monologue, the director Krzysztof Warlikowski perceives a shared dramatic thread, a shared feminine consciousness and a shared sense of imprisonment and suffocation: for the woman who penetrates the confines of Bluebeard’s castle and Elle, the woman who clings to a telephone conversation with a man as the only thing worth living for, are condemned to share the same fate. And this man she speaks to, does he really exist? Unless the director has interpreted Cocteau’s words to the letter and the telephone has become a “terrifying weapon that leaves no trace, makes no noise”…

A woman watches time passing next to the suitcases of her ex-lover (who is supposed to come pick them up but never arrives) and a restless dog who doesn't understand that his master has abandoned him.