Heroic effort to portray unhinged diva
Opera doesn’t come much more archly high-concept than “La Voix humaine.” In Poulenc’s 1959 monodrama — one act, one character, one unvarying premise — we hear one side of a phone conversation between a woman and her former lover.
For 40 minutes, the unnamed and increasingly unhinged protagonist wheedles, carps and makes fitful attempts at magnanimity. She offers small, self-justifying lies and catches her lover out in others. She fights an uphill battle against self-pity and the spotty phone service of midcentury Paris. Lord, is she a mess. The Italian soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci has made a specialty of this difficult work, and on Saturday, March 11, she came to the Taube Atrium Theatre for the first of three performances under the auspices of SF Opera Lab.
It was hard not to admire the raw energy and expressive urgency she brought to the task. But it was equally hard to feel that the effort was worthwhile, or that this jangly bit of lurid misogyny has anything very pressing to tell a modern audience.
The protagonist of “La Voix humaine” (based on a stage play by Cocteau) lacks not only a name, but any glimmer of personal agency as well. She’s a bundle of raw nerves connected to a voice box, and Poulenc’s score — an endless stretch of angular rhythms and jabbing melodic phrases punctuated by the relentless ringing of the telephone — only underscores the brittle quality of the setup.
The effect is to dehumanize the main character, turning her into some kind of disembodied avatar of the abandoned woman. This is, of course, an age-old operatic conceit, but at least Dido (in some tellings) and Madama Butterfly take some kind of action aside from merely offering up their suffering for the audience’s voyeuristic delectation.
Antonacci took some steps to correct the balance. She cloaked Poulenc’s vocal lines in an expressive sheen that never militated against the foundational premises of the score. She found and explored minute gradations in the character’s pain, from wounded pride to pitiable self-loathing.
But nothing did much to alleviate the emotional ugliness or, to be frank, the monotony of the work. Poulenc is too faithful to his concept to allow for that.
There were far more rewards during the short first of the program, in which Antonacci — accompanied with delicate suavity by pianist Donald Sulzen — offered vocal selections by Berlioz, Debussy and Poulenc. Berlioz’s brief dramatic scene “The Death of Ophelia” emerged as a wondrous portrait of grief and tenderness, conveyed through the composer’s most elegiac writing.
Debussy’s “Chansons de Bilitis” got a sensuous rendition, all sinuous melody and shimmery vocal color. And the seven compact songs of Poulenc’s set “La fraîcheur et le feu” (“The Coolness and the Fire”) proved an exquisitely deft prelude to the histrionics yet to come.
Antonacci explored gradations in the character’s pain, from wounded pride to pitiable self-loathing.