Telephone Opera

Alone beside the double bed, the Parisian beauty stares in agony at the silent telephone. Why did her lover leave her? How can she live without him? At last the phone rings. She swoops it up--wrong number. Then it rings again--it is he. She answers gaily, full of chatter, only to be crushed by the news that he is about to marry. "This is the last line that still connects me to us," she sobs. But he is unmoved. After 45 shattering minutes, she hangs up, crying, "I love you, I love you, I love you."

The grand'mere of telephone dramas, Jean Cocteau's one-act, one-character play The Human Voice (1930) returned last week in a fine musical version by French Composer Francis (Dialogues of the Carmelites) Poulenc. Staged in Milan's La Piccola Scala, with shimmering Soprano Denise Duval as the distraught mistress, Poulenc's opera lifted the play again to the lyric tragedy that Cocteau intended: "The worst tragedy that can happen to us all--love and abandon."

Composer Poulenc produced a clean, clear score for a small orchestra that avoided sonoric effects, used no percussion instruments. He dramatized the woman's breathless silences, when her man speaks at the other end of the line, by surrounding them with tautly suspenseful music. Instead of using leitmotifs to represent love, abandonment, jealousy, he wrote separate sequences for each of the woman's pathetic appeals--her story of a suicide attempt, her memories of a trip, the pet dog that misses its master. Said Poulenc: "I tried to give the music an erotic flavor to show that the woman aches for the body of the man, that she wants this body once more in her bed."

Slim, attractive, fortyish Denise Duval, who once sang (fully clothed) at the Folies-Bergere, repeated the triumph she scored in the opera's debut early this month in Paris. Says Singer Duval: "This is a true role. I don't have to invent attitudes. It's happened to me."

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