Review of the production of the opera “The Human Voice” by Poulenc at the Perm Opera House

The Perm Opera hosted the first opera premiere of the season. In Francis Poulenc’s mono-opera “The Human Voice” (1958), staged by Dmitry Volkostrelov, Nadezhda Pavlova sang the title role, and Vladimir Tkachenko took over the conductor’s stand. I watched the twists and turns of the heroine’s painful love drama with interest and sympathy. Gulara Sadikh-zade.

We don’t know who the heroine of “The Human Voice” is, what her past is, we can only assume that she is quite wealthy, since she has a telephone in her apartment: in 1928, when Cocteau wrote his play, which became the basis for the libretto of Poulenc’s opera, home the telephone was still a rarity. A woman talks on the phone with her nameless lover: they say goodbye forever, he marries someone else and asks her to return the letters. The heroine’s heart is bleeding, but the ending is uncertain: we still won’t understand whether she is going to commit suicide or will still find the strength to live on.

The part fit Nadezhda Pavlova like a glove, and it’s not just the luxurious sound of her strong and at the same time gentle soprano; the main thing is how she conveys the subtlest psychological nuances of the role. Pavlova’s heroine seems to be swinging on an emotional swing with a monstrous amplitude of scope, flying from insane hope to the horror of future loneliness and, moreover, trying to hide her condition from a selfish man who is happy to be deceived, because she voluntarily relieves him of the burden of guilt for the breakup that occurred. Assuring her former lover that everything is fine, repeating “Mon cher” as usual, the heroine tries to smooth out the situation and bring it to the usual norm. But he cannot free himself from the obsessive thought: what if everything can still be fixed?

Getting used to the role occurs gradually and stage by stage. At the beginning of the performance, Pavlova comes out from the back of the stage, smiles and sits down on a high chair behind a music stand, opens the notes: judging by the microphones and cameras placed, she is in a recording studio located on the right side of the stage. Gradually getting involved in the drama, she appropriates the life of her heroine: what was declared as a convention turns into reality. The singer increasingly masters the space, moving step by step to the left side of the stage, where from the very beginning there was a cinema with a large screen hanging above a row of wooden chairs. There are five silent men sitting there watching a movie that could be called “One Evening in the Life of a Lonely Woman.”

With all the merits and powerful artistic individuality of Pavlova, in the complex composition of Dmitry Volkostrelov’s play, she is only one of the supporting elements. And she performs in the play in two guises: an opera singer and an actress who played a silent role in a film specially made for the premiere. In fact, Volkostrelov uses the usual “theater within a theater” technique, only he produces a “cinema within a cinema”: a film from the heroine’s life is watched by five men, as if in a cinema hall, but being on the opera stage; The continuation of the cinema hall turns out to be the entire opera hall, full of spectators. And in the film itself, the heroine watches TV; mindlessly switching channels, she stumbles upon a broadcast of a concert performance of an opera, her gaze gains meaning – and then the same Pavlova appears on the big screen, but in the guise of an opera singer singing about love.

The film is based on Franz Xaver Krötz’s play “Concert on Requests” (1972), in which we are shown a tired, faded woman returning from work in the evening. The question remains open – is this the same heroine who sings in the studio and lives in a modest one-room apartment, mechanically and slowly going through all the nightly rituals: dinner, washing dishes, tea with cookies, watching TV shows, knitting, sleep? Or are they two different women?

Kroetz’s play, meanwhile, is quite remarkable: it is written as one long remark, describing the simplest everyday actions that are familiar to everyone. There is not a single line for the heroine. But her character in the film, shot by Volkostrelov and his team, is clearly outlined: she is a lonely middle-aged woman, in whose life everything is routine and ordinary. She probably experienced disappointment in love, lost faith in everything and is now pulling the burden of everyday responsibilities at work and at home – resignedly, indifferently, dispassionately, demonstrating the futility of existence with all her appearance and habits. Behind the stingy gestures one can see such frightening loneliness, such hopeless melancholy, such fierce existential horror that the heart skips a beat with the realization that “… everything will be like this. There is no way out.”

As for the performance, the Perm Opera Orchestra, led by guest conductor Vladimir Tkachenko, sounded quite authentic, stylish and clear. The sensitivity with which the conductor and orchestra interacted with the singer testified to a carefully calibrated pre-premiere work. But “catching” Nadezhda Pavlova, who was unpredictable in articulation, was not an easy task. The Woman’s part in Poulenc’s opera is written entirely in ragged, hysterical recitative, periodically sliding towards Spreschstimme: it is dotted with exclamations, suppressed sobs, pauses during which the Woman listens to the interlocutor’s answers. Sometimes her speech becomes completely confused, switching to the mode of a delusional monologue, for example, when she talks about her dream, and at this time a waltz rhythm appears in the orchestra, like some kind of memory of a bygone happiness. In general, Poulenc’s orchestra is a full-fledged participant in the drama; here the author pays tribute to impressionism, which gives the sound a special timbre beauty.

Winner of various composer awards, Vladimir Gorlinsky, who received a creative task from the theater – to compose an orchestral Prologue and Epilogue for Poulenc’s opera – also appeals to the powerful impressionistic tradition of French music with its sonority, timbre play and transparency of orchestral colors. The Prologue became, as it were, an “entry point” from modernity to French music of the middle of the last century; The epilogue, accordingly, is the point of exit from it to our time and the current composer’s language.

The order turned out, by Gorlinsky’s own admission, to be a great temptation and even a challenge: it’s not often today that composers have the opportunity to write music for a traditional paired symphony orchestra with a guarantee that it will be performed. How subtly and delicately the author absorbed and melted a style that was essentially alien to him became clear almost immediately. First, the music of the Prologue sets a high mode of excitement: blasts of brass, active gliding, fragments of jazz turns – a clear reference to Poulenc’s score, where echoes of jazz are clearly audible. However, the excitement subsides quite quickly; the pulse of the music calms down, and obvious “debussisms” begin to surface. The influence of “Pelléas” in Poulenc’s opera is obvious; it is also present in the music of the Prologue, but there are much more references to the instrumental works of Debussy. Many small solos here and there cut through the layered textured fabric; Here flute solos and harp shimmers appear in a quasi-antique style – like the opening in “The Afternoon of a Faun”; the color either brightens or darkens, long pedals build up tension; in the second section of the Prologue, female and then male voices are woven into the sound of the orchestra as additional timbre color: exactly like Debussy in the third part of his Nocturnes – “Sirens”.

In the Epilogue – a lyrical postlude – the music becomes completely detached and meditative; on the screen, meanwhile, paragraphs from Samuel Beckett’s late story “The Ceiling” are gradually formed from chaotically scattered letters: “Something has come for someone. It came somewhere. Somehow it came. At first there is only consciousness. Just some kind of consciousness. Later, what’s worse, the body came too. Something about the body too…” With the words about awakening, the measured tread of cellos enters the muddy whiteness and endlessly drying breath.

References to Beckett’s 1981 story, to Chantal Akerman’s cult film “Jeanne Dielman” from 1975, and finally, Gorlinsky’s 2023 opus itself create some semantic connections in time: almost a hundred years have passed since 1928, when Cocteau’s play was written; a whole era. During this time, the optics have changed, the values ​​have been revised, and today the behavior of the opera heroine, dissolving in a man, in her love for him, essentially renouncing subjectivity, selfhood, seems overly exalted, strange and a little shameful; It’s somehow awkward to watch her suffer. But the problem of total loneliness, the separation of people, the generally well-worn idea that gadgets, the ancestor of which was the wired telephone, turned out to be a means of separation – this is what is truly shocking and even frightening in the play: we suddenly acutely experience some kind of insight about ourselves yourself and your life. Heidegger’s notorious “being in itself” has almost completely swallowed up “being for itself.”