Another spring (almost), another doctoral recital! Next week, on Friday, March 24th, I’ll perform my second program pairing Yaz Lancaster’s deixis (2022) and Francis Poulenc’s opera La voix humaine (1958). As I did last year, I’m sharing the program note I wrote for the occasion.
Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine sets a 1930 play of the same name by Jean Cocteau, who also provided the set design and direction in the 1959 premiere production. Intimate and heartbreaking, the one-act opera follows one woman (named only “Elle” in the score) alone onstage for the entire run, in a phone call with the lover who’s left her. We hear only her side of the conversation, her monologue interrupted by telephonic malfunctions, operator mistakes and silences as she awaits a response.
Poulenc underlines the woman’s inherent nobleness, stressing in his interpretation notes at the beginning of the score that she should be played “by a woman both young and elegant.” (1) And while we see her dart through a host of deep and extreme emotions throughout the opera, there remains a certain restraint that makes the work all the more heart-rending, keeping the character from becoming a caricature of a betrayed woman on the edge. Instead, the opera presents a microcosm of a life, a relationship, an undoing. Much is left for us to decipher in between the lines of the libretto: Neither the woman nor her lover are ever named, and the exact nature of their liaison or their breakup is left unspoken. There are few stage directions in the score, and the woman’s ultimate fate is never overtly stated.
A particularly notable and enigmatic absence, of course, is the other side of the conversation. The audience is instead forced to rely on the little morsels of concrete information scattered throughout the woman’s lines, from snatches of happy memories to small details about her setting, to form a picture of her habits and character. It’s a score that singularly shines a light on the communicative potential of both what’s said and what’s unsaid.
This is also true within the confines of the storyline, as the woman and man spend a substantial portion of their conversation hiding information from one another, omitting painful truths and trying to assuage each other. She expends a great deal of energy choosing her words carefully, flitting between a constructed narrative of trusting resilience and her visceral, anxious anguish. It’s only halfway through the opera that she exclaims, “Seulement, tu comprends, on parle, on parle…” (“You see, we’re talking, we’re talking…”) (reh. 52). She trails off, but a logical conclusion of her thought may be, “...and we’re not really saying anything.” At this turning point, she begins to unravel the constructed scene she’s painted for her lover since the start of their conversation. Yet, her impulse to be heard and loved – or in pragmatic terms, to keep him on the line – repeatedly holds her back from total frankness, always prepared to make conciliations. Because we only hear her side of the conversation, it’s impossible to know how much of her apologizing and backtracking are self-conscious, preventative measures, or whether her lover’s reactions actually demand them. Once again, even as we peer into this most intimate of moments, the exact nature of each character and their relationship, and who’s “right,” remains blurry.
As befits the premise of the opera and the theatrical origins of its libretto, the natural ebb and flow of human conversation reign supreme. As in most of his art song literature, Poulenc prioritizes the cadence and comprehension of the text, both in his vocal line and in the accompanying orchestral figures that underscore it. This constant stream of short, “quasi-parlando” fragments lies in a generally low tessitura, with repetitive pitches or motivic elements, while the accompaniment often plays a lucid, vertically chordal foundation underneath.
The emotional themes of La voix humaine are easily understandable even as Poulenc pares down the affective elements of opera. The scenery is “reduced,” as described in Cocteau’s introduction to the score, to “the corner of a woman’s room.” (2) The vocal lines eschew arioso impulses, and Poulenc largely refuses to feed listeners much luxuriant plaintiveness. He instead opts to strip his dramatization of melodrama, in favor of internal contemplation and a devastatingly direct approach to text setting. As in his art songs, Poulenc creates a series of self-contained miniatures, gems of context and connotation.
Every so often, a more overt lyricism emerges in snatches of reverie and nostalgia in both the orchestral and vocal lines. Here Poulenc dips into a compositional language redolent of chansons populaires and a café-concert aesthetic, and the typically sparse, chordal accompaniment becomes briefly sweeping and melodious. Amidst the clipped phrases of a synthetic telephone conversation, these short passages of lushness offer a warmer, more emotional underpinning in a score that runs the risk of coming off stagnant or unemotive in its dedication to prosodic simplicity and its cruelly realistic representation of an inorganic form of communication.
Because so much of the score is effectively récitatif, the conversations occur in more or less real time. The arioso stretches offer musical momentum and longer stretches of context that help to fill out the story narratively, but they also pause the temporal reality of the scene. These segments follow the operatic aria tradition – as well as that of the theatrical monologue – by blowing up time to explore an emotional reality. Fittingly, they’re almost exclusively memories. One of the most overtly melodic motives of the score is a descending melody in the accompaniment comprised of a half note and eighths cascading down an octave below in the treble and propelled by bass syncopation:
Piano reduction, reh. 26
The first occurrence of this figure is about seven or eight minutes into the opera and coincides with the woman’s first honest allusion to events past: “Souviens-toi du dimanche de Versailles…” (“Remember that Sunday in Versailles…”) (re. 26). The motive’s two other occurrences are less overtly or exclusively a warm, nostalgic memory, but always allude to connection and shared past. The woman sings:
Pardonne-moi. Je sais que cette scène est intolérable et que tu as bien de la patience, mais comprends-moi, je souffre, je souffre. Ce fil, c'est le dernier qui me rattache encore à nous…
Forgive me. I know that this scene is intolerable and that you have a lot of patience, but please understand, I’m suffering, I’m suffering. This cord, it’s the last thing still tying me back to us… (reh. 73)
Then, in a short echo of the theme close to the end of the opera, she asks her lover not to return to the same hotel in Marseille where the two of them used to stay (potentially with his new lover): “J'aimerais que tu ne descendes pas à l'hôtel où nous descendons d'habitude…” (reh. 104).
Departures into lyricism aren’t limited to a distant, happier past. The narrative keystone of the opera occurs at the midpoint of the work, when she recounts the true events of the previous night: her attempted suicide and the resulting dreams/nightmares of overdosing on sleeping pills. She relives the night in gruesome and almost fantastical detail in what comes closest to an aria in the piece.
The typical operatic interaction between naturalistic “récitatif time” (“story time”) and expanded “aria time” is complicated by the conspicuously repetitious nature of most of the score and dramatic material. These occurrences of lyrical, dilated time are in fact more propulsive than the real time action. The account of her suicide attempt mentioned above isn’t just the longest stretch of uninterrupted lyrical singing; it’s the longest stretch without interruptions – be they technical malfunctions or replies from the other side of the line – in general. Shifts in temporality – both the feeling of time passing and the chronological moment being lived or relived – are integral facets of the woman’s solitude and alienation. In her heartbreak, she’s unmoored in time, existing simultaneously in her present telephonic limbo, her technicolor memories, her uncertain and anxious future. Reaching out to the disembodied voice of her lover means reaching through layers of time as much as through the physical distance between them.
But the “real time” of the opera, in all its naturalistic unfolding, is as dilated as any dream monologue: the schema of the piece is built on a series of repetitions and interruptions. Over and over, we see the woman wait for his call, wait for others to get off the line, wait for the connection to clear up. Her “Allô!” is a punctuation mark that not only opens her conversations but interrupts them, reminders of the fragile link offered by the telephone and of her febrile state, “uneventful moments [that] mirror the general situation of obstructed agency.” (3) Despite – and indeed because of – the dramatic simplicity and directness of the piece, Poulenc and Cocteau plunge us into a narrative full of shadows, obstructions and bottlenecks. Representational time is expanded by malaise; supposedly simple statements are constantly undercut by elisions, silences or reprisals. And every “conversation” is as solitary as every supposed soliloquy.
In the opera, technology is a lifeline and a curse. The telephone is the woman’s only connection to the man she loves, a source of comfort and company through the sound of his voice, but it’s also an entirely insufficient avatar, and each reminder of its technical deficiencies and limitations – misdials, malfunctions, hang-ups – is a painful stab of solitude and anxiety. As the opera begins to wind down, the woman sums up the maddening paradox of intimacy and distance created by the telephone and the limited metonymy of having only a disembodied voice to hold onto:
On a l’illusion d’être l’un contre l’autre et brusquement on met des caves, des égouts, toute une ville entre soi. J’ai le fil autour de mon cou. J’ai ta voix autour de mon cou. Ta voix autour de mon cou.
We feel like we’re next to one another, and suddenly there are cellars, sewers, a whole city between us. I have the cord around my neck. I have your voice around my neck. Your voice around my neck. (reh. 100-101)
Over and over, the understandable “reality” of the opera’s plot – in all its supposed simplicity – is warped. Loss and loneliness can’t be cleanly defined, and the phone becomes symbolic of a false sense of legibility through the connection it supposedly offers. The chipper narrative the woman unspools at the beginning turns out to be a lie, as is the assumption that her lover is calling from his home. Supposedly direct conversation is weighed down with accidental or wilful misunderstandings, layers of memory, conflicting plans. In this exploration of the affective and cognitive grey areas of communication and narrative, and their interaction with technology, La voix humaine remains a fundamentally modern work. Even as the rotary telephone (in its strong supporting role to the lone singer) has become a museum curiosity, the scenario of Poulenc and Cocteau’s work is as emotionally probable and affecting as ever.
When I first read through the score of Yaz Lancaster’s deixis – which I premiered with Yoshi Weinberg in December 2022 – the piece immediately reminded me of La voix humaine. The text, by the composer themself, revolves around being and being perceived, with a strong parallel to the intersection of communication/connection and selfhood found in the Poulenc:
I am not here
I do not exist
no one can hear (me)
no one can see me (anymore)
nobody can see me
no one touches (me)
you can hear (me)
you cannot hear me
you can see me
you cannot see me
nobody touches me
you touch me
Additionally, much like the one-way dialogue of La voix humaine, the text is cut and repeated throughout the piece, and exists in a blurry space of meaning and understanding further emphasized by the way in which it’s deployed. The flute and vocal lines weave together in a conversational interaction, while the spare, glassy musical setting also keeps each instrument distinct.
In their program note for the premiere, Lancaster described the work as “[dealing] with the space between semantic and denoted meaning.” Within the original context of the commission, this pertains to their identity as a nonbinary composer, and the continuously shifting meaning that the term holds: “I continually examine the label and my relation to it as this context shifts. The text captures this feeling of translucence or vanishing, as the space/time/context(s) between these connotations grow.” But the ambiguity of being/vanishing and severing/attachment explored in the piece also resonate more generally. What particularly strikes me is the possibility of neutrality in ambiguity that the piece offers. Whereas solitude is unquestionably a curse in La voix humaine, “nobody touches me” is neither inherently positive nor negative in deixis. It’s neither, and it’s both. Fuzziness via elision and repetition are means of obfuscating any one ultimate affect. It’s able to hold and generate multiple, conflicting truths at once.
It can be tempting to jump to the most pathetic, tragic scenario and outcome in the Poulenc: a broken woman kills herself after a painful and protracted final conversation with the man who spurned her. It’s not my desire to argue in favor of a secret “happy ending” to La voix humaine. The conversation we witness for forty or forty-five minutes is undeniably one full of anguish and suffering, and it doesn’t end happily. But it does finally end in a catharsis that the woman and the audience have been denied for the entire run of the opera. And in that catharsis, there’s a possibility for reclaiming agency. Once again, I reiterate Poulenc and Cocteau’s specifications for their main character: she is young and elegant. She is not some abstract, unhinged woman lolling around the stage in hysterics. “Elle” is meant to evoke empathy, not pity, or its too-close relative, contempt.
Notes:
Poulenc, Francis. La Voix humaine (Paris: Ricordi, 2009), Notes pour l’interprétation musicale.
Poulenc, La voix humaine, Introduction to the score.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 13-14.