Opera "Human Voice": content, video, interesting facts, history

F. Poulenc Opera "The Human Voice"

"Little masterpiece" - so described by contemporaries of the French composer Francis Poulenc his mono-opera "The Human Voice" is a musical creation that amazes with extraordinary emotionality and beauty. The author in this exciting work so realistic reflected the despair and pain of the main character, that he showed himself to be a true connoisseur of the female soul, her inner world. The opera is based on the play of the same name by French playwright Jean Cocteau, in which, through a telephone conversation between a woman and her beloved who left her, the deepest life drama of the heroine reveals in sympathy. “The human voice” is one of the most insightful compositions on loneliness and love, which Poulenc called nothing other than lyrical tragedy.

Summary of the opera Poulenc "Human voice"and many interesting facts about this work read on our page.

Summary of the "Human Voice"

The action of monoopera occurs in the middle of the last century in France, in a house with a rather gloomy room, on one side there is an inaccurately made bed, in the other side of the bedroom there is a slightly open door to the bathroom, with bright light penetrating from it. In the center there is a small armchair and a small coffee table with books, a telephone and a desk lamp that radiates a dazzling - poisonous light. Near the bed, on the floor, in a long nightgown, a young woman lies motionless. She seems dead. The woman makes the first movement: rises and freezes again numbly. Finally, she gets up, takes the coat, carelessly lying on the bed, for a moment stops his gaze on the phone and goes to the bathroom. As soon as she touches the door handle, a sharp bell rings. A woman quickly rushes to the phone, in a rush tossing her coat. After picking up the phone, she begins a long conversation with her lover. They talk to each other for the last time, since the day before she found out that her beloved man was marrying another.

The dialogue is interrupted several times due to problems at the telephone exchange, but then the call resumes and the conversation continues. The woman does not blame the beloved for anything, says that she will bear it all with courage, recalls the wonderful moments spent together, then asks the servant Joseph to pick up letters and forgotten things.

In the middle of the conversation, she does not stand up and still says that she made an attempt to commit suicide by taking a lot of sleeping pills, but a friend, Martha, came to help, who brought a doctor who lived nearby. Next, the woman told about how she learned that he is crowned with another. She does not blame and does not even want to believe that she was deceived, but only all the time talking about her love. He says goodbye to the interlocutor, goes to the bed, carrying the phone with him, and falls down on pastels as the shambles.

A photo

Interesting Facts

• Francis Poulenc insisted that the performer of the monoper "The human voice" was necessarily a young, beautiful and elegant woman, since the work is in its essence purely "French" and is thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Paris.
• In gratitude for the interesting idea of ​​the opera on the plot of the play by G. Cocteau, the composer dedicated his creation to the author of the idea, Herve Dugardin and his wife Desi.
• In the Soviet Union, the monoper "The Human Voice" was first heard in a concert version performed by the wonderful singer Nadezhda Yureneva in 1965, six years after the premiere performance held in Paris in 1959. Then the opera was staged a bit later on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater with the participation of the outstanding Galina Vishnevskaya. In our country, with its communist ideology, the staging of such a "western" performance was a rather rare event.

• Poulenc was not the only composer who was interested in the plot of J. Cocteau's play “The Human Voice”. Nevertheless, he was luckier than others, because it was his work that became popular and was put on the stages of many theaters in the world.
• Jean Cocteau created the play "The Human Voice" for the wonderful French actress of Belgian origin Bert Bovi. The premiere performance was held on the stage of the Comedie Francaise theater in 1930.
• At various times, such wonderful singers as C. Armstrong, D. Card, C. Maltifano, O. MacDonald, D. Migens, D. Norman (USA), D. Barstow, G. Jones , F. Lott (England), M. Olivero, R. Scotto (Italy). G. Zeman, A. Silla (Germany), E. Söderström (Sweden), N. Yureneva, G. Vishnevskaya, V. Solovykh, O. Balashova (Russia).
• In the cinema, the plot of the play by J. Cocteau was addressed twice. For the first time in 1948, it was filmed by the outstanding Italian director Roberto Rossellini, having shot Anna Magnani as the heroine. The next time in 1966, Canadian Ted Kotcheff addressed the work, presenting the audience to Swedish and American actress Ingrid Bergman.
• "The human voice" is not the only essay by Poulenc, which was based on the work of composer friend, poet and playwright J. Cocteau. The first were three songs that had the common name "Cockades", then the music for the comedy "Incomprehensible Gendarme" and the mono-opera "Dame of Monte-Carlo".

The story of the creation of the "human voice"

The history of the mono-opera "The human voice" has an interesting beginning and is connected with the tour in the French capital of the Italian "La Scala". once Francis Poulenc attended a theater performance in which the eminent Maria Callas played one of the main roles. All evening the audience watched as the legendary singer overshadowed other performers, pushing them into the background. As a result, at the end of the performance, the "star" came out alone for the final applause of the public, as if it were the only performer. Noting such an extraordinary situation, present at the play with Poulenc Herve Dugardin, who was the representative in Paris of the major Milan music publisher Ricordi, suggested the composer to write the opera “The Human Voice” on the plot of Jean Cocteau.

With a smile, recalling this story, Poulenc noticed that DuGarden, while presenting the idea that had come to him, obviously took care of the time when the capricious singer quarreled with everyone so much that no performer would want to go on stage with her. However, writing a piece whose plot so fascinated the composer that the work on it proceeded very quickly, Poulenc thought not at all about Maria Callas. He wrote his monooper specifically for only one performer - the wonderful singer Denise Duval, who later performed at the premiere performance on February 8, 1959 on the stage of “Opera - Comic” with the orchestra conducted by Georges Pretre.

Music

"Human voice" is a work in which the composer reflected all the best features of his work. With the help of flexible melodic lines, simple but carefully selected intonations and means of musical expressiveness, he realistically revealed the whole drama of the heroine's inner world. Poulenc built the work so skillfully that the listeners who are very sympathetic to the heroine cannot relax for a moment and very closely follow the tragedy unfolding on the stage.

Mono-Opera "The Human Voice" is a vocal recitative which plays a decisive role in this work, but is very organically connected with the orchestral accompaniment. The orchestra is inseparable from the vocal part, it actively participates in the action, revealing the inner world of the heroine with emotional harmony, “completing” what she did not say in her short phrases. The composer, with the help of various methods of interaction between the orchestral and vocal parts, managed to achieve an amazing force of influence on the listeners, and to lucidly convey the whole drama of the heroine’s life situation.

Poulenc in his work "Human voice"showed the true mastery of the opera composer. To create a real musical masterpiece for prose, consisting of ordinary everyday phrases, and at the same time to really convey all the drama of the circumstances - it is not everyone’s power, but only true talent, with a real composer sense, which the wonderful French composer possessed Francis Poulenc.