NEW YORK — Francis Poulenc’s 1959 one-act operatic monodrama La Voix humaine arrived at the New York Philharmonic’s April 23-25 concerts amid seemingly intractable odds. The painfully intimate scenario of a woman breaking up with her lover by telephone has a single soprano pitted against full orchestra with plot points hinging on long-outdated technology. Does anybody remember party lines?
Barbara Hannigan upped the risk factor by doubling as singer and conductor. Paired with Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, the Poulenc turned out to be a success beyond any expectations: Hannigan and orchestra were cheered long and loud, though video artist Clemens Malinowski and sound designer Etienne Démoulin also deserved credit for creating an essential bridge between art and audience.
How it all worked: Thanks to three strategically-positioned video cameras, Hannigan could face the orchestra while also being writ large on video screen; her conducting gestures and histrionic portrayal of the character (simply named Elle) worked out to be one and the same. No telephone was seen, but the ring was heard as part of the orchestration. Thanks to amplification, Hannigan’s voice could achieve the up-close quality of a desperate phone call, translated into opera (or lyric tragedy, as the composer put it) by masterful, naturalistic vocal lines. At one point, her mic slipped off her ear (April 24), and though she remained perfectly audible, she must have lost emotional intelligibility without sound reinforcement.
Initially, the photogenic Hannigan was seen ghostly and unfocused — and again at the end, when Elle possibly succumbed to suicide. When her character was lying, her face went into triplicate, sometimes with images facing each other with the symmetry of a Rorschach inkblot test. Later, her face went multiple when her personality seemed to disintegrate in grief and exhaustion. When envisioning her lover at the other end of the phone, the screen had an eerie tight closeup of her eyes.
While acknowledging the practical advantages of lying, the screen showed only Hannigan’s mouth (and superb dental work). Her screen image froze in an upward, diagonal pose as Elle recounted being between life and death during her suicide attempt. It’s possible that Hannigan the conductor could’ve gotten more out of this rich, astringent, and psychologically probing orchestration had she not been multi-tasking. Though Hannigan has lived with La Voix humaine for a while, her vocal performance — in which she emphasized the light, agile sides of her voice — might’ve explored more dramatic undercurrents.
As it was, the performance (thanks to Hannigan’s considerable cinematic acting technique) had great moment-to-moment power, though many questions remained up in the air, starting with why urbane artists such as Jean Cocteau, who wrote the play upon which the opera is based, and Poulenc would lavish so much attention on such a tawdry, one-dimensional enterprise. In interviews, Hannigan floated the idea that Elle is delusional — an interesting dimension. In some interpretations of the story, the phone turns out to be disconnected the whole time.
In Cocteau’s version, the phone call is concretely motivated by his marriage to someone else the following day. Poulenc is more ambiguous. Maybe she doesn’t die at the end. When the pair negotiates the disposal of their love letters, it’s like a business transaction. There’s talk of having been in seedy locales, including Marseilles — historically a sketchy town for shady people. Might Elle be extracting herself from a dangerous relationship, playing up her obsequiousness to make a non-threatening break? The piece’s vagueness allows such possibilities — aiding in its durability in our very different me-too era.
The pairing with Strauss’ Metamorphosen has a certain logic: Both pieces lament loss. Whatever that juxtaposition did or did not reveal, Metamorphosen had a good performance, sticking to the original 23 string-instrument conception and played more as an exercise in textures than a requiem for a destroyed Europe. Bass entrances were particularly arresting. Shifts in density were also strongly felt. With clean, low-vibrato texture, the New York Philharmonic played the piece the way Hannigan might have sung it.
