Interview, Véronique Gens on singing Poulenc's Elle

Poulenc's harrowing one-woman opera La voix humaine is a work which seems tailor-made for Véronique Gens - the French soprano has spent much of her career getting under the skin of abandoned and betrayed women in the operas of composers such as Gluck, Rameau and Lully, and her recent recording of the work (released on Alpha Classics, with Alexandre Bloch and the Ochestre National de Lille) certainly didn't disappoint, capturing Elle's warmth, wit and tenacity as well as her fragility and isolation.

In a phone-call which was thankfully rather less fraught than Elle's final fractured conversation with 'Monsieur', Véronique expounded on why she's waited until this stage in her career to tackle a role which she'd shied away from for decades, how she drew on her experience of singing the great Classical tragediennes in order to bring Elle to life, and the challenges of maintaining a certain emotional distance in a work which requires the singer to dig so deeply into their own personal experiences...

Was this a piece which you consciously bided your time before tackling?

Oh, absolutely! People have been asking me to sing La Voix Humaine for a long time, but I’d always said I wasn’t ready for it because it’s such a heavy piece - mentally, physically and vocally. It’s also unique in the whole history of music: I don’t think there’s any other opera, oratorio or orchestral song-cycle that involves a soprano singing for 45 minutes straight with no break. And emotionally it’s just horrible! You’re a changed person after you sing this work, even in rehearsal: you can’t just go home, shrug off your coat and forget about it. As you know, I sing a lot of big characters like Alceste and Circe, and I’m used to carrying them around inside of me, even dreaming of them long after I’ve finished work…But Elle really got under my skin: I don’t think I’ve ever sung anything so difficult or so powerful, in every sense.

It was my beloved Jean-Claude Malgoire who eventually persuaded me – he died just a day after I debuted the piece, and I’m so grateful to him for suggesting it. And I think my heart, my voice and my soul were all ready for the challenge: I’m a big girl now, and I can bear these kinds of situations!

You mentioned Alceste and Circe, and of course you have vast experience of bringing Classical tragic heroines to life - was that something that helped you to get to know Elle?

Definitely. These poor women who’ve been betrayed or rejected or abandoned aren’t just the bedrock of opera, they’re also the story of my life! My musical life, that is…of course there are my own personal experiences, although you do have to be careful there: you need to get up close and personal with these feelings, but not too close or it doesn’t work! You have to maintain a certain level of detachment so you don’t feel emotionally overwhelmed – you can’t sing this piece through actual tears! The challenge is becoming the character, but also keeping your distance; and you absolutely need to allow yourself time to recover afterwards, because there’s no space to do that while you’re actually performing.

And in a sense, some of the technical challenges of this piece aren’t so dissimilar from those in eighteenth-century French opera…

This piece is essentially one big recitative, one conversation with this imaginary man – just chatting about my hat and my coat at first, then lying, then touching on the most horrible things, then going back to talking casually about the dog in the next room. There are some little moments where you do have to really sing, like that high C, but everything else is in the middle of your voice, which is so comfortable for me: it’s like talking, just heightened, and this is why it’s so important for the text to be absolutely clear.

The first challenge is to make this monologue come alive, as one side of a dialogue: nobody – not even the singer – can hear what the guy’s saying on the other side of the line. The orchestra provides these big silences and strange chords, so everybody can imagine what he’s saying – but probably I imagine something different from you, and you probably imagine something different from the person sitting next to you! It’s a piece that really makes your imagination come alive, whether you’re performing it or listening.

That’s why I tried to approach it like an actress rather than a singer, but of course there are additional musical challenges as well. For instance, you have the string of ‘Allo? Allo!’s to remember, and making sure that you’re in the right key for each one is tricky because you don’t get much help from the orchestra with that!

You touched on the importance of imagination and silence – how much of a backstory have you created for Elle and her relationship? One recent television version suggested that she and ‘Monsieur’ had children together…

I never imagined they had kids together (I never imagined that for any of my Classical heroines either, now I come to think of it), but I do believe both of them were madly in love – although let’s face it, he’s actually not a very nice guy! It was important to me to show that they really were happy together: when she’s describing the time when they visited Versailles you get a sense of the genuinely lovely experiences and the intense mutual connection they shared, and I think she’s smiling when she remembers that rather than crying.

It’s so tempting to cry your way through this entire piece, but that doesn’t do justice to the range of emotions she goes through. Her anger when she believes he’s lying, her suspicion when she hears music playing and starts to imagine the other woman who may or not be there with him, her guilt when she admits that she’s been lying too…all of that comes across more powerfully if she’s standing tall rather than sobbing her heart out! It’s a challenge to channel all of that solely through your voice, but I loved it: there’s so much you can do through the way you use silence and breathing, and then when the tears do come at the very end it's all the more powerful.

Elle’s so honest and so distraught, and by the end she feels like she’s been knocked down forever – but I hope and believe that she can pick up her life again. In all the versions I’ve seen on stage, she kills herself. For me, this doesn’t happen: she’ll need time and space to recover, but she’s a strong woman and eventually she’ll be ready for another love-story…

It was certainly a strange experience to see it as the first half of Glyndebourne’s Poulenc double-bill last summer - I think we were all uncharacteristically subdued over our interval picnic afterwards!

Ah, with Stéphanie? [Stéphanie d’Oustrac, Poulenc’s great-grandniece]. She’s fantastic! And that kind of reaction is such good news for us as performers: it takes so much physical and mental strength to transmit these emotions, partly because it’s such a true-to-life story. Even in opera, where we deal with big emotions all the time, there aren’t so many pieces that can provoke that kind of response from an audience. Another one is Dialogues des Carmélites (which I’m singing again in Munich later this year) - even when it’s over it isn’t over, and it always feels very strange taking your curtain-call after that…

You have a live performance of La Voix Humaine coming up in Lille - is that going to be staged?

We’ll only have two days of rehearsals, so I think we’ll do a straightforward concert version with me standing behind my music-stand rather than any sort of semi-staging. I’ve been talking this morning with Alexandre and I think time’s too short to do anything else – maybe one day we’ll do a fully staged version, but I’m not keen on doing something in-between!

I think everybody brings their own experience to this piece – it’s a terrible situation and I wish it on nobody, but many of us have been there to some extent. Performing it with no staging or imagery leaves it wide open, and I really like that: it means that everybody can bring their own story. Staged productions make it a lot easier to communicate what’s going on in Elle’s head, sure, but I think one of the best ways to experience this piece is to listen to it alone in your bedroom: what mental images come up?

This is your second recording with Alexandre Bloch and the Orchestre National de Lille - do you have further projects in the works together?

We’ve been discussing that only this morning, actually - we have all sorts of ideas, but nothing’s confirmed just yet! I have a long history with this orchestra; we recorded Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne with Jean-Claude Casadesus many years ago, but the orchestra has been very much renovated since then! Jean-Claude conducted the orchestra from its foundation in 1976 until 2016, and when Alexandre came along it was a breath of fresh air – he’s young, he’s eager to try new things, and he wants to blow the dust off so many pieces.

He’s passionate about trying to play music with a new eye, getting very close to what’s in the actual score and getting rid of all those performance-traditions which I hate! When we did Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer together a few years ago I felt we had exactly the same approach towards this music and towards music in general, and it was the same with La Voix Humaine. Forget about tradition and just do what’s written - that’s the way it should always be done!