“Even when I made my Met debut when I was 19,” she explains, “there was an understanding that there was a tendency towards roles that require acting skill.” As she neared a more appropriate age for the role – she is now 42 – her management started seeking opportunities for her to do it in concert or a production. Then the pandemic struck. “My mother said to me, ‘You’re stuck in lockdown, it’s a one-woman show, why don’t you figure out a way to make a movie of it?’ I said, ‘Mum, genius.’”
The BBC, for whom she presented a documentary about unheralded female composers in 2018, connected her with director James Kent. One of the first things she wanted to do before production was work out what the man might be saying at the other end of the line. “I said, ‘I need to know who the man is. So we have to write a parallel play to Cocteau’s.’”
The score was recorded by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conducted by Antonio Pappano and played back quietly on set (which looks impeccably French despite being a house on the Thames in west London). De Niese initially imagined she could get away with not singing for every single take. “I just realised there’s no way I can do anything but sing this. We showed it in a screening and one person said to me, ‘The sync was amazing’ and I was like, ‘Well it would be because I sang the whole thing live.’”
According to his biographer Benjamin Ivry, Poulenc spurned the suggestion that Maria Callas sing the role, preferring Denise Duval, his collaborator and muse whose tempestuous love life was familiar to him. The creation of Elle was thus a joint venture – the composer throwing in his own knowledge of pill-popping. Did De Niese also draw on personal sorrows in order to look so very distraught?
“I know the method where you can think about your dead dog and it makes the tears come. It doesn’t really work for me. I can’t [find] emotions from recalling previous emotional traumas. I also haven’t had that many,” she adds sheepishly. “I’m quite lucky in life.”
That may be broadly true. As a single woman (she is now married to Gus Christie, the executive chairman of Glyndebourne) she says she avoided the worst excesses highlighted by #MeToo. But, in June last year she had an experience that would have tested anybody, however grounded. Seven months after giving birth to her second child and only one day before she was due to open as Musetta in La Bohème at the Royal Opera House, she was admitted to hospital suffering intense cramps from what she later learnt was an ectopic pregnancy. Incredibly, though, she went on with the show.
“The Royal Opera House were unbelievably supportive,” she says. “They could have thought of themselves and gone, ‘Danni, it’s fine, you go rest.’ But they knew I wanted to go on. I was in horrific pain but once the morphine went in I was like, ‘Ah, I feel fine.’ They were a bit surprised that my adrenalin just took me on. It was dramatic, but I’m very at peace with it. I’m not traumatised by it.”
