One singer in two contrasting operas 

La Voix humaine, a tour de force concocted by Poulenc on Jean Cocteau's monologue for his muse Denise Duval, is known by the public of the Salle Favart where it was first performed. 

A woman facing absence and a telephone by way of dramatic structure establish the portrayal of a quasi-expressionistic pain, far from operatic devices. “You set once and for all the way of saying my text,” Cocteau admitted. 

More uncommon, Le Secret de Suzanne depicts the beginnings of women's liberation in a delectable comedy. With a Goldoni-like wit, German-Italian Wolf-Ferrari scoffs at another accessory of men's domination in the early 20th century: the cigarette. Proof that opéra comique, of which Wolf-Ferrari was an ardent advocate, had remained essentially a genre destined to embrace the themes and issues of modernity

With the support of:

Il segreto di Susanna

All would be going beautifully between the dashing Count Gil and his wife Susanna were it not for a dubious smell of Turkish tobacco at their home as soon as the husband is away for too long… Could the young woman, however obedient and attributed with every virtue, conceal a lover with the complicity of Sante, the servant? 

La Voix humaine

The scene, small, framed with red painted draperies, depicts the uneven corner of a woman’s bedroom; a dark bluish room with an untidy bed on the left, and a door, ajar, leading to a brightly lit white bathroom on the right. In the middle, on the wall, the photographic enlargement of some crooked masterpiece or a family portrait: anyway, an evil-looking picture. […] The curtain unveils a murder bedroom. In front of the bed, on the floor, a woman in a long shirt is lying, as if killed. Silence. The woman sits up, changes her pose and stays still again. Finally, she makes up her mind, stands up, takes a coat from the bed, goes toward the door after stopping in front of the telephone. When she touches the door, there is a ringing. She drops the coat and rushes forward. […] From this minute, she will speak standing, sitting, showing her back, her front, her profile, kneeling behind the back of the armchair, her head cut off, resting on the chair back, she will pace round the room trailing the wire till the end when she falls flat on her face. Then her head will hang down and she will drop the receiver like a stone. […] The style of this act excluding anything akin to brilliance, the author advises the actress who will perform it without his supervision not to show any irony from a hurt woman or any bitterness. The character is a mediocre victim, in love throughout; she tries but one ruse: throw the man a line so that he admits to lying, so that he does not leave her with this petty memory. He wants the actress to give the impression of bleeding, like a limping animal, of ending the act in a room full of blood.  Jean Cocteau

With the support of: