Hello – and goodbye

Poulenc’s La voix humaine is a brief, powerful piece, and it’s a matter for gratitude that Opera North has staged a new production of it. It’s a matter for ingratitude, though, that it’s been put on by itself: not just because at 45 minutes it makes for a short evening, but because it would have been so satisfying to couple it with Poulenc’s first opera, Les mamelles de Tirésias, which is only slightly longer, and which is even less well known. It’s not as if La voix humaine is so shattering that one wouldn’t have any resources for anything else, though the other thing would clearly have to precede it. In fact one of the things that makes Voix a striking work is that it’s only moderately upsetting. Those critics who have called it silly, camp, OTT and really a work to be performed by a drag queen have failed to realise that Poulenc keeps us at some distance from the desperate woman making her endlessly interrupted call to the lover who has deserted her. It’s not as if it’s her last throw — Cocteau specified that she is a young woman, so there’s no reason to think that things are worse for her than for anyone else of a tender age who has been abandoned by the person they feel is the only one in the world for them.

Poulenc’s idiom, here as in all his best works, is one which alternates between severity or anyway neo-classicism and voluptuousness, so we spend some of the time feeling with this woman, but more of it observing her. The flexibility of idiom is extraordinary, as if in the middle of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms one suddenly had a brief passage from Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. The results would be wildly incongruous if it weren’t for the varying perspectives Poulenc gives us, and his fidelity to Cocteau’s text, in which passages of comparative calm and reflectiveness give way to renewed onsets of anguish.

Deborah Warner’s production is straightforward, if mildly anachronistic.