Northern Ireland Opera brings to The Everyman Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine, a highly charged one-act, one-woman opera based on a play of the same name written by Jean Cocteau, who directed the first production in 1959. Jane Hardy discusses how this opera came to be.

‘About La Voix Humaine’ by Jane Hardy

La Voix Humaine, or The Human Voice, is a highly charged short opera by French composer Francis Poulenc. It involves a young woman, Elle, hanging and talking (or rather singing) to her lover on the telephone. You can tell it’s the end of the affair, partly from the words but also from Poulenc’s deliberately jangled score. It starts with a crossed line. The woman’s opening phrase is an anxious “Hello, hello.” set against discordant music, with harsh rhythms on the piano.

We then eavesdrop on a relationship, from one side. Her mood moves from tenderness to neediness as she calls her ex-lover back whenever they’re cut off. She can’t resist a happy memory of lying with her head “pressed against his chest”. It’s revealing the composer called his opera “a musical confession”.

Jean Cocteau wrote the play from which The Human Voice grew and also produced the set and costume for the opening performance in Paris in 1959. It’s said a friend suggested to Poulenc this drama would make a great opera and showcase for a female soloist when they saw Maria Callas at La Scala push her male co-star back to take the final curtain call alone.

They needed a soprano who could believably bare her soul and hit the notes. Although Callas was in the frame, Poulenc wanted to cast his close friend, Denise Duval. He stuck to his choice, possibly because he knew of her telling fragility, and their shared tranquilliser habit. This is after all a modern opera, with bottles of pills on stage. Poulenc rightly sensed Duval, his “co-composer”, would help him pour “immense anguish” into the role. Both had suffered losses and Poulenc said they wept “page by page, bar by bar” while working on the opera. He added he was writing about “a woman (me) making a last telephone call to her lover who is getting married the next day”.

The woman behind this all too human voice belongs to our anxious age. She refers to a suicide attempt and undergoes a breakdown before our eyes. This inspires some beautiful but harrowing music. There is a howl of anguish midway through with top notes that have the power of one of Madam Butterfly’s arias of loss. The style may be arioso, less formal than opera’s big hitting numbers, but it brilliantly spells out the story of a broken heart.

It ends badly, as these things often do in opera. The woman learns her lover is with the woman he deserted her for, hearing music in the background. She winds the telephone wire round her neck.

Cocteau’s monologue inspired artworks including Almodovar’s famous film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The reason his 1930’s play reaches into the present is its universal account of the hope and hopelessness of love. At the end, the woman cradles the phone that links and separates her from the man, reciting the three word lover’s mantra “I love you…” four times into the void.

Jane Hardy is an arts journalist based in Belfast. She has reviewed music, visual art and theatre, co-presents a video podcast titled Robin & Jane in the Stalls, and used to play the oboe.