By Kathryn Olsen
In Salt Lake City‘s Capitol Theater, Utah Opera is bringing live opera back to the stage this upcoming week. Soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer plays Elle, the lovelorn protagonist of Francis Poulenc’s The Human Voice, and kindly spent some time discussing this one-act opera with us.
Kathryn: I understand that your piece is a one-act play called The Human Voice, in which you perform as Elle. Can you give us background on this opera as well as your involvement in the production?
Wendy: The opera is based on a play by Cocteau, called La Voix Humaine, or The Human Voice, and it’s a woman alone in her apartment on the phone with her lover. They’ve spent years together and it’s her questioning certain aspects of their relationship. The play has been used in several famous films– Ingrid Bergman, or Tilda Swinton just did one that was premiered in Venice–but regardless, there are several versions of the play that have been done live and on film and the Poulenc opera from the ’50s has been updated several times. This is updated in the sense that she’s using a cell phone. When the opera was written, part of the confusion for Elle is that it’s a party line. You don’t have that anymore. So someone keeps interjecting, looking for someone else. We don’t have those anymore, so it was updated a little to involve FaceTime on an iPad and how that gets in the way of communication. The whole point of the piece is that all these little devices that are meant to keep us together are driving us apart.
My involvement began just a couple of months ago at best. We in the opera world, we have our schedules set out a year or more in advance, but because of COVID-19.everything sort of turned on its head, so this was a very last-minute adjustments. This was meant to be Richard Wagner‘s The Flying Dutchman, about which I was very excited because I love that piece—it’s incredible. I was very excited because that’s a wonderful piece and I’ve sung Senta a lot and it’s really nice to revisit roles you know and love and have lived with and can re-explore. The firs time is a little tricky because you’re still learning. The third or fourth time I sing Elle, I’ll have a lot more to say about her, but right now, it’s almost just about survival.
Kathryn: As this is your first time performing Elle, do you have any insights on beginning your preparations for the role vs. now as you’re approaching the first performances?
Wendy: I think , at the beginning, a trap a lot of people fall into is assuming that she’s crazy. I fell into that same trap because she switches gears so quickly because she tries to placate Him. And Elle, the French pronoun is her. So Elle is potentially not her name. We call her Elle, but we don’t really know her name. It’s just “her” or “she.” And Him, he is sort of the antagonist. So she switches from trying to placate Him to being angry or annoyed at him to being very suspicious of him and it happens very quickly, and I think a lot of people think she’s crazy. She’s not. I don’t think she is. She’s not, she’s very lonely and isolated, and there’s a big difference between lonely isolation and crazy. The line between the two gets blurred a lot in this particular piece.
In the beginning it took my management some convincing, just because I didn’t feel like learning a new role really fast, but mainly, I really wanted to support Utah Opera doing anything. Most performing arts companies have just thrown up their hands or are only doing virtual The reason I did this is not only that I came to really like Elle, but to support Utah Opera’s imagination and innovation when so many companies are not doing either of those things. While I appreciate the technology that allows for online content in the classical music world, I hope we don’t get used to it. It’s just not the same and I’ve done a lot of those virtual [performances]. A lot of people are streaming the Hds from the Metropolitan Opera and I’m again thankful for the technology that allows us to do that, but it’s just not the same as being in the room when it’s happening.
Wendy: I think that it’s a very easy piece to relate to during COVID-19 and I think that, if I had learned this piece a year ago, I would look at her very differently from how I do now. My experience is that I live in New York and I was meant to be in Asia for most of the winter and working. The productions I was doing in Asia were shut down pretty early, so I ended up isolating in New York with my husband and children and having a very different experience than, say, a single person or a person in an unsafe situation would have. I was home with my husband and my kids and my sister happened to be quarantined with us for several months and it was, for lack of a better word, fun. Not to downplay the seriousness of the situation, particularly in New York, but we were safe and we have a home with plenty of room and a huge yard, so were fine. And Elle is in one of the many circumstances I’ve had to look at and my position is very different and I come from a very privileged position in terms of COVID, in that yes, I’m an artist whose entire livelihood has been ripped out from under her, but I have a spouse with a job, whose job didn’t really change much. I’m not alone. I have single friends who lived in one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan, who did not leave those four walls for weeks at a time. What that does to your mental and physical state is hard.
With Elle, it’s very clear in the original play—thought it’s less clear in the opera and some of the films—that Elle has been in her apartment for quite a long time and that she has isolated herself quite a bit. It has a lot to do with the way she interacts with Him on the phone.
Kathryn: For people coming to this who are not familiar with the work, do you see this as a good ending for the character, a bad, or somewhere in-between?
Wendy: Definitely in-between. The play is pretty clear that she commits suicide in the end and most films do that as well, but in the opera, it is not. She has attempted suicide—we know that—and she’s finally able to tell him about that. In the opera, it’s staged that sometimes, she commits suicide and sometimes, she doesn’t. In this, it’s kind of left up to the audience/ Martha is a friend she references frequently. In my version, Martha gets the phone out of Elle’s hands and takes her off social media for a while. In my version of Elle, she goes outside at the end of this phone call. She leaves her apartment. This is a very toxic relationship that has gone on for five years. And at the end of it, rather than commit suicide, I like to see Elle move on. There’s a point in this opera that the director and I have figured out; one of the lines in the text comes to mean, “I’m no longer ashamed of that suicide attempt. I’m maybe embarrassed because he isn’t worth it.” and that’s kind of a shift that happens with Elle. So Elle doesn’t have a happy ending or a tragic ending. She has an ending that most of us have, which is that she has to make the next choice.
This one-act opera is certainly an intriguing look at the effects of isolation and will be performed in conjunction with Joseph Horovitz‘s Gentleman’s Island. Get your tickets now for an unforgettable night of raw human vulnerability.
Utah Opera Presents The Human Voice and Gentleman’s Island; By Francis Poulenc
Janet Quinney Lawson Capitol Theatre
50 West 200 South, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
October 9-18, 2020 7:30 PM, Matinees on Saturday and Sunday at 1 PM
Tickets: $20-$110
www.usuo.org
Utah Opera Facebook Page
The Human Voice and Gentleman’s Island Facebook Event
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