La voix humaine (English: The Human Voice) is a forty-minute, one-act opera for soprano and orchestra composed by Francis Poulenc in 1958.

Poulenc's tragédie lyrique was first performed at the Théâtre National de l'Opéra-Comique in Paris on 6 February 1959, with Duval as the solo singer and Georges Prêtre conducting; the scenery, costumes and direction were by Cocteau.

Hervé Dugardin, the Paris director of Ricordi Publishers, suggested that Poulenc set Cocteau's monodrama to music, with Maria Callas singing the role of Elle.

[3] Poulenc, however, wrote the opera specifically for Denise Duval, who had starred as Blanche de la Force in the Paris Opéra premiere of Dialogues.

The two maintained a close friendship throughout their lives, but Poulenc did not set many of Cocteau's texts prior the composition of La voix humaine, about forty years after their first encounter.

[a] Poulenc himself explained that he waited so many years to set Cocteau's play because he felt that he needed a great deal of experience to perfectly construct such a work.

[c] Upon the opera's completion, Poulenc and Duval visited Cocteau, who was responsible for directing and designing costumes and stage décor for the premiere.

[11] Poulenc finished his score for voice and piano on 2 June 1958[12] and spent the next two months orchestrating the work, completing the version for full orchestra on 7 August 1958.

He calls her back, and Elle reveals that she has lied during their conversation; instead of going out with Marthe the previous night, she took twelve sleeping pills in an attempted suicide.

[16] La voix humaine is scored for full symphony orchestra with reduced dimensions, so that the sung text is easily understandable.

[20] Poulenc's writing for the voice is recitative-like in style, representing the natural inflections of speech and, in the case of this particular drama, imitating a phone conversation through its frequent pauses and silences.

"[21] Keith W. Daniel notes that out of the 780 measures of music in Poulenc's work, 186 are for solo voice without orchestral accompaniment, adding to the impression of a real telephone conversation.

Poulenc strays from the recitative in highly dramatic passages, including when Elle sings of her suicide attempt of the previous night.

Here, the vocal line more resembles an aria, especially as it builds toward its high point in the nine-eight measure, and the orchestra accompanies the voice in a waltz.

[23] Unlike his treatment of the soprano voice, Poulenc gives the orchestra many lyrical motifs, writing in the preface his score, "L'œuvre entière doit baigner dans la plus grande sensualité orchestrale" ("The entire work must bathe in the largest orchestral sensuality").

[27] Perhaps the most important orchestral function other than unifying the overall work is the portrayal of the telephone ringing through repeated sixteenth notes on the xylophone, shown in Example 5.

[27] The phone cutting off and re-ringing divides the opera into natural sections and creates a comprehensible structure through which the audience understands the drama.

Poulenc achieves this sensation through the avoidance of traditional harmonic functions and the preponderance of unresolved dissonances, diminished structures, and progressions of chromatically-related chords.