La Voix humaine - Opéra national de Paris (2015) - La Voix humaine - Opéra national de Paris (2015)

Description

New production, in coproduction with Teatro Real Madrid

Double performance with Bluebeard's Castle in first part

Two dialogues which in reality are simply monologues. Because Judith, the sombre shadow-like fourth wife who appears “out of the heart of a star-studded night”, cannot be anything other than the wounded voice of Bluebeard’s subconscious, shut away in the windowless castle which is indissociable from his own psyche. And because She – but who is She and to whom is She speaking? – responds to the silence of the man who, at the other end of a broken telephone line, is perhaps not even there. Almost five decades separate the conception of Bluebeard’s Castle and that of La Voix humaine – even though Jean Cocteau’s stage play – used without adaptation in the libretto – in fact dates from 1930. In between lies half a century of profound soul-searching that saw the creation of Berg’s Wozzeck and then Lulu as well as Schonberg’s Moses und Aron. Nevertheless, the echo of Debussy’s Pelléas & Mélisande and his spoken-language-like prosody can be heard in the utterly different musical idioms of Bartok and Poulenc – the former composer propelled by the founding impetus of still infant Hungarian opera and the latter who, describing his monodrama as a lyric tragedy, traces its ancestry back to Lully. Working together for the first time, Esa-Pekka Salonen and K rzysztof Warlikowski lift “the veil of our eyelashes” to pierce the shadows in which the seventh door closes on a room overflowing with tears of blood. 

More information is available on the opera house's official website.