“For me, Duval was the Garbo of opera with a wild touch of vaudeville,” (Ned) 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.”’
Combining supreme Parisian chic not only with a gift for tragedy, but also the ability to carry off vaudeville-style comedy without sinking into vulgar slapstick, she was in that sense a kind of female counterpart to Poulenc himself, famously dubbed ‘moine et voyou’ – both monk and rogue. It’s little wonder he took to her.
In April’s Talk of the Town, Lou Ann Darras commented, ‘Thanks to Elly Ameling, I made it through college.’ As the first Thérèse on stage and on disc, Denise Duval actually helped me get in. I was introduced to Les Mamelles de Tirésias as a teenager, by enthusiastic, arty friends in Lausanne. It was the first ever opera I owned on vinyl and the first, as a result, I knew by heart, from beginning to end. I could (and did) sing it – all parts – on long car journeys, even imitating Duval’s distinctive ‘period’ pronunciation. It was also one of the first – perhaps the very first – I saw in a ‘proper’ opera house, at the Coliseum in the 70s, and Duval was thus probably the first opera singer, beyond a handful of household names such as Caruso, familiar to me.
Knowing the text to the play (which of course I’d bought and read, comparing it with Poulenc’s libretto), as well as teaching me useful words like ‘combine harvester’ and ‘incubator’ in French, helped me get into university: during my entrance interview (in those days, for Oxbridge, there were entrance exams followed, if successful, by interviews at the targeted college) I had to talk about Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve, and was able to compare it, apparently convincingly enough, with the Apollinaire.
