Raising the Curtain on Your Computer Screen

While companies slowly return to in-person performances, online videos like ‘La Voix Humaine’ and ‘In Song’ continue to bring the opera house to your home. 

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 4, 2021 2:59 pm ETSAVEPRINTTEXTListen to articleLength 6 minutesQueue

While live, indoor opera has returned in cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, other opera companies are taking a more gradual approach. Some are waiting until November or even later to perform, and several are presenting concerts instead of staged operas. Opera Philadelphia is opting to wait until January for its indoor return and has announced a fall season of new offerings on its successful streaming channel. Although two of the planned projects fell through, the first, a film of Poulenc’s one act, one-woman opera, “La Voix Humaine,” is now available ($20 for a one-time rental or free with a $99 annual Channel Pass).

“La Voix Humaine” is well-suited to film treatment. Based on a monodrama by Jean Cocteau, the 1959 piece delves into the emotional state of Elle (She), whose lover of five years has left her. Over its 45 minutes, their telephone conversation—we hear only her side of it—gradually exposes the rawness of her loss and despair. With its ability to vary location, lighting, angle and focus, the film, directed by James Darrah and starring soprano Patricia Racette, provides an intimate, X-ray perspective into Elle’s internal turmoil.

Shot inside the Elkins Estate, a grand Gilded Age manor house in Elkins Park, Pa., the film opens in Elle’s sumptuous living room, with its grand piano and gold drapes. In a leopard-print fur coat over a dark satin negligée, Elle berates the wrong-number callers who keep ringing her rotary telephone. Finally, the call from her lover comes through. At first, she pretends that she is fine, she is pursuing her normal life, the breakup is all her fault; her tone is appeasing, trying to keep her lover from getting angry and hanging up. Then her fragile defenses start to crumble, and she admits that she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills but called a friend for help after deciding that she did not want to die alone. Elle ricochets between insisting that she is coping and revealing the depths of her sorrow. Each time the call is interrupted, her anxiety skyrockets. She is desperate to hold on to the telephone line, her last connection to her lover. It is, she says, wrapped around her neck.

The piece is mostly recitative, its French text replicating a real phone conversation, and Ms. Racette makes the phrases sing, their musical shapes articulating their emotional subtexts whether she is sharply chastising an interrupter, wheedling, pleading, or sinking into a reverie, all the while trying hard to retain her dignity. Mr. Darrah’s eloquent direction makes the most of her expressive face. The close-ups reveal, poignantly, that she is not young, adding the suggestion that this love affair may be Elle’s last. The camera’s changes of perspective follow the narrative’s dramatic arc. When she admits to her suicide attempt, it follows her into a coldly lighted bathroom, where she studies her face in a fogged-over mirror. The final shot of the empty living room—its floor strewn with crumpled letters, the phone left off the hook—suggests that the wreckage of Elle’s life is complete. Christopher Allen was the sympathetic pianist; Tony Fanning designed the production and Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko the costumes.

Film projects like “La Voix Humaine” represent a side benefit of the pandemic, as opera companies sought new ways to perform and disseminate their work. Several of them plan to continue their explorations in film and video even after live, in-person performance becomes more generally feasible. Boston Lyric Opera, for example, is shooting a dance-based film of Ana Sokolovíc’s “Svadba-Wedding” for later this season. Film has proved a fertile medium for small-scale commissions, pairing composers with visual artists to create unconventional operatic music videos—check out the haunting “The Island We Made” with music by Angélica Négron (Opera Philadelphia) ($10 rental or free with the annual Channel Pass) and the poignant “The First Bluebird in the Morning” with music by Carlos Simon (LA Opera) (free).

In another creative use of film, San Francisco Opera’s charming “In Song” series (free), produced and directed by Elena Park, takes opera singers on journeys back to their nonclassical roots. In a recent episode, mezzo Jamie Barton visits the rural Georgia valley in the foothills of the Appalachians where she grew up amid church, country and bluegrass music. We see the family’s trailer home and visit the church where her father taught her to sing harmony. She teams up with the banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck for a little Purcell and a traditional ballad, “Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow,” and talks about coming out as bisexual to her family; their unquestioning support is part of the story.

In another episode, the Mexican-born tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz goes home to Miami and visits a mariachi conservatory to experience the music that pervaded his youth. (“Your culture is your superpower,” he tells the students.) He sings Augustín Lara’s “Granada” with their band and, during a family scene, recalls how he once told his young son that life, and therefore singing, is all about giving love. His full-throated rendition of María Grever’s “Júrame” makes that abundantly clear. Such appealing portraits, offering insights into the artists we appreciate onstage, also help position opera as a part of a rich musical continuum, just as all these film projects offer a new level of accessibility to the art form.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).