The Call of the Human Voice in Poulenc's La Voix Humaine 1

Opera in the twentieth century has largely been characterized by a preoccupation with rethinking the quality, and redefining the limits, of the operatic: what can be considered as opera, what determines it as such, and how does opera relate to other twentieth-century multimedia works? ² One of the main areas of experimentation has concerned the possibilities provided by the medium for admitting and containing voices that have not traditionally been considered “operatic”: voices that challenge opera's vocal artificiality and stylization, its exaggerated range, its strained production, its bordering on the inhuman in an impossible quest for the divine. ³