Dame de Monte Carlo

La Dame de Monte-Carlo (1961)

La Dame de Monte-Carlo is in a class by itself. Far from being a mélodie – it was originally scored for voice and orchestra – it is actually nearer, by virtue of its resemblance to La voix humaine, to opera. Like La voix humaine, which was written only three years earlier, it is based on a monodrama by Jean Cocteau and is focused on a woman on the edge of a breakdown, though a much older one in this case. In the composer’s words, “it is the story of an old adventuress at Monte-Carlo who, having lost everything, throws herself in the sea.” Coming across the text in a copy of Cocteau’s Théâtre de poche, quite by chance in Cannes in 1961, he was “delighted,” he said, “because it brought back to me the years 1923–1925 when I was living in Monte-Carlo, in the imperial shadow of Diaghilev… I have often enough seen at close quarters those old wrecks of women, light-fingered ladies of the gaming tables.”

He must have been delighted too to find in Cocteau’s “chanson parlée” another monologue for Denise Duval, who had been such a success in La voix humaine. In La Dame de Monte-Carlo, however, there is no scenic element, which is one reason, along with the need to avoid monotony, why Poulenc tried, as he said, “to give a different colour to each verse of the poem. Sadness, pride, lyricism, violence and sarcasm. In the end miserable tenderness and a splash into the sea.” Even so, in spite of stylistic allusions ranging from popular song to the Dialogues des Carmélites, one of the most emotive sounds in it is the dry piano dissonance that marks the end of the last of all Poulenc’s solo vocal works.

La Dame de Monte-Carlo was first performed by Denise Duval in Monte-Carlo in November 1961 and in Paris a few days later.