Denise Duval obituary

Denise Duval, who has died aged 94, was one of the greatest French singers of the postwar era and the ideal interpreter of the operas of Francis Poulenc. “That’s the soprano I need!” shouted Poulenc the first time he heard Duval singing, during a rehearsal at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1947. Duval created all his operas in France, singing the novice Blanche in Les Dialogues des Carmélites, as well as roles in demanding works that included Thérèse in Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Elle in La Voix Humaine and La Dame de Monte-Carlo.

Duval was born in Paris, but spent her childhood in Indochina, Senegal and China, where her father was posted with the French army. Eventually the family returned to France, where Duval studied singing at the Conservatoire de Bordeaux, making her debut at the Opéra National and singing the standard repertory – Marguerite in Faust, Mimi in La Bohème, the title role in Madama Butterfly, and Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana. At an audition in Paris in 1946 at the Opéra, she was spotted by a theatrical agent who sent her to sing for Paul Derval, the impresario of the Folies Bergère.

Derval engaged her for the first postwar revue at the theatre, and Duval made her Paris debut on 5 April 1946, not in an opera but in the variety show C’est de la Folie. In an interview in the 1970s, Duval recalled: “My poor parents were thunderstruck, and my teacher nearly had a stroke.” She was not appearing naked, however, like some of those around her, but wore a pale pink crinoline designed by Michel Gyarmathy, for a tableau entitled Le Chant du Cygne, in which she sang an arrangement of a Chopin waltz.

In 1947, Duval made her first appearances in opera in Paris in the title role of Massenet’s Hérodiade at the Opéra, and then as Butterfly at the Opéra Comique, where Poulenc discovered her.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Poulenc’s first opera, based on the surrealist play by Guillaume Apollinaire, was first given at the Opéra-Comique in June 1947. Duval, costumed by Erté, played the role of the frustrated housewife who wants to enjoy the privileges and careers available to men and abandons her breasts – a pair of red balloons that float away. “I have an unbelievable Thérèse who is stunning Paris with her beauty, her acting talent and her voice,” wrote Poulenc in a letter to his contemporary and fellow composer Darius Milhaud. Although the experimental opera was greeted with hostility by the conservative section of the public, it caught on eventually. “You cannot imagine what happened at the premiere,” said Duval. “We were booed, insulted, and hissed ... it was a theme far too advanced for those times.”

Duval went on to create several more roles in new operas at the Opéra Comique – Francesca in Reynaldo Hahn’s Le Oui des Jeunes Filles, first performed after the composer’s death, in 1949, Valentine in Germaine Tailleferre’s Il Etait un Petit Navire (1951) and the title role in Michel-Maurice Levy’s Dolorés (1952) – also singing Massenet, Offenbach and Puccini.

Poulenc’s Les Dialogues des Carmelites was commissioned by La Scala, Milan, where it was given its world premiere in Italian in January 1957, with the Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani as Blanche. The first performance in French was at the Paris Opéra the following June. “Milan was superb, but Paris will be overwhelming,” wrote Poulenc. “Denise in the role of Blanche is superb. She is really a great actress.”

The role of Blanche de la Force calls for a mixture of religious hysteria and iron determination. Poulenc said of Duval’s interpretation: “Blanche, so much a part of me for so long, is at last springing to life.” Duval sang the role of Blanche in several productions in France, and at the opera’s first, concert performance in the US in 1964, the year after Poulenc’s death.

In 1958 he had composed for Duval the opera with which she was most closely identified, La Voix Humaine, the agonised last phone call of Elle, abandoned by her lover for another woman. Based on Jean Cocteau’s play, this “concerto for soprano” was a triumph for the singer. She gave its first performance in Paris at the Opéra Comique in 1959, and subsequently sang it in Milan, Edinburgh, Buenos Aires and New York.

The American diarist and composer Ned Rorem accompanied Poulenc to the 50th performance at the Opéra Comique in 1961, and wrote: “Duval was a vulnerable cobra, striking our hearts while her own heart broke.” He noted that the composer himself wept and that Poulenc told him: “Tonight is the 50th performance. At every one she interjects something new. You saw how she tore open that pack of Gitanes, took out the cigarette, lit it, inhaled, all the time singing into the receiver crooked under her chin. Never has she smoked before.”

When she sang La Voix Humaine in Edinburgh in 1960, the critic Andrew Porter wrote: “Everyone has noted how well she performs; it should also be said how well she sings — in the ‘French style’ certainly, but with sure, solid, well-projected notes, and a tone freed from the shrillness of some years back.” Duval herself said that La Voix Humaine was “a killer, not only because you have the stage to yourself for its entire length, but because the phrasing is sometimes long, sometimes short, always in a low key, half singing half parlando”.

Thus established as a reliable and expressive interpreter of avant-garde music, Duval also appeared in Nicolas Nabokov’s Rasputin’s End (Cologne, 1959), Jean-Pierre Rivière’s Pour un Don Quichotte (Milan, 1961), Milhaud’s Le Pauvre Matelot and Dallapiccola’s Volo di Notte (Paris, 1960), based on Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit, in which the striking Duval, chic in a Chanel suit as the pilot’s wife, Madame Fabien, was likened to a model for Vogue. Another role that became a favourite of Duval’s, somewhat to her own surprise, was that of Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande at Glyndebourne in 1962 and 1963. She was at first said by one critic to be “too knowing”, but the following season she was described as “somehow, younger more fragile”.

Although the theatre was Duval’s natural habitat, Poulenc persuaded her to undertake recitals, the pair often appearing together to great acclaim. His final song cycle, La Courte Paille, settings of children’s verse by the Belgian poet Maurice Carême was meant for Duval to sing to her little boy, the son of her marriage to Richard Schilling, but she gave no full public performance of the sequence. He also dedicated his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1950) to Duval as well as to his chauffeur and lover Raymond Destouches, both of whom he liked to call his “children”.

Duval’s stage career did not last much longer after Poulenc’s death in January 1963. The week before they had given their last concert together, at Maastricht, and he had sent her flowers with a note: “Ma Denise, Je te dois ma dernière joie.” (“My Denise, I owe to you the last of my joys.”)

After a performance of Carmélites in Buenos Aires in 1965, she was taken ill as a result of an overdose of cortisone administered incorrectly by a doctor. “I decided not to resume my career when I was finally cured,” she said. “I knew I had had the best and couldn’t see the point of facing a series of disappointment.” She continued to teach, and also directed.

“For me, Duval was the Garbo of opera with a wild touch of vaudeville,” Rorem wrote. “She had clarity, intelligence, diction, beauty – with those eyes the size of eagle eggs.” For his part, Poulenc said of his muse: “This girl is pure sunlight.”

She is survived by her son, Richard.

• Denise Duval, soprano, born 23 October 1921; died 25 January 2016

• Patrick O’Connor died in 2010