Dialogues des Carmelites by Francis Poulenc is an opera for those who hate the French Revolution. I am among them. As I discovered during my journeys through France over the past thirty years, the destruction still most present to the modern-day traveler resulted from neither world war, nor from any of the calamities of the 19th century. It dates from the Revolution.
These 18th-century wounds are still fresh. Sign after sign proclaims that what one might otherwise have expected to see is no longer there, because it was “destroyed in the Revolution.”
During one of my anti-Jacobin pilgrimages through Paris, I came across one of the many poignant sites of loss and remembrance, a church called St. Joseph des Carmes. Until the French Revolution it had been a convent. The Jacobins transformed it into a prison. There, in 1792, they slaughtered one hundred and fourteen priests. Voltaire had said, “Ecrasez l’infame” and the revolutionaries obeyed.
Two years later, the prayer police caught a group of Carmelite nuns from Compiegne still secretly practicing their vows. They had been expelled from their convent two years earlier. Declared enemies of the state, the sisters were marched to the scaffold and guillotined on July 17th, 1794. Upon this episode, George Bernanos, the famous French novelist, based his one and only screenplay. Sadly, the movie was never made. After his death, however, Bernanos’ literary executor fashioned it into a successful play. Poulenc took a version of the text as the libretto for his opera.
Bernanos and Poulenc avoid the melodrama and typical verisimo hysterics that would be normally associated with an opera on a subject such as this. They seek neither to sensationalize nor sentimentalize the events of the Revolution. Those events are depicted only in so far as they impinge upon the lives of the nuns, and serve only as background to their interior spiritual drama, which is the real subject of the opera. The opera aims at a high level of spiritual realism, and achieves it with profound psychological and spiritual complexity.
Fear, faith, death, and providence are the subjects of this opera. The story revolves around Blanche de la Force, who, out of her fears of both life and death, enters the convent with an idealized notion of the joys of detachment. The Prioress warns her: “what does it avail a nun to be detached from everything if she is not also set free from herself—that is to say, from her own detachment?” Sister Blanche soon witnesses the agonizing death of the Prioress, who exclaims: “God has become a shadow. . . I have been thinking of death each day of my life, and now it does not help me at all….” Moments before death, she foresees the desecration of the chapel and cries out, “God has abandoned us!” The shocked Sister Marie, who attends her, keeps the other sisters out of range so they will not be scandalized.
The Prioress’s difficult death disturbs the community, except for young Sister Constance who suggests, somewhat blithely, “at fifty-nine, is it not high time to die?” Yet it is also Sister Constance who grasps how providential the difficult death may be. She proposes to the puzzled Blanche that the troubled death of the Prioress belonged to someone else: “One would say that in giving her this kind of death, our good Lord had made an error; as in a cloakroom they give you one coat for another.” She suggests that, because of this, someone who least expects it will be surprised by how easy death is. Constance further upsets Blanche by telling her that they will die young. Blanche spends the rest of the opera resisting this notion. When her own death approaches in the last act, after the nuns have taken the vow of martyrdom, Blanche flees in terror. Only at the last moment, when the guillotine has begun to fall (off stage), does Blanche reappear “incredibly calm” to take her place by her sisters. They die singing the Salve Regina. Blanche joyfully sings the four last verses from the Veni Creator Spiritus as she submits to the blade.
One could easily argue that Blanche’s last minute arrival at the scaffold, composed and ready to die, is, dramaturgically-speaking, a deus ex machina. How is it that she suddenly receives the grace for her peaceful, though violent death? It is not a development we observe. It simply happens. Yet, in this case, the deus ex machina adds to, rather than detracts from, the drama of the work because it operates on the same plane of grace that is the premise of the whole work. The Prioress’s deathbed cry that God had abandoned her echoed Christ’s cry from the cross. Yet, mysteriously, Christ’s cry was salvific. What of the Prioress’s ugly death? Did it share in that salvific work? How? The working out of this mystery and the spiritual tensions within it drive the opera. Providentially, the Prioress’s agonizing death in a peaceful setting makes possible Blanche’s peaceful death in an agonized setting.
One could well have wondered whether Poulenc, a master of the song, could have pulled off a full-scale opera like this. Yet it is Poulenc’s extraordinary feel for setting words that makes this work such a direct and moving experience. Poulenc’s music for this opera also reflects the general attitude expressed in his more explicitly religious works, such as the Stabat Mater (reviewed in this space earlier). He said: “I am religious by deep instinct and by heredity. . . I am a Catholic. That is my greatest freedom. My conception of religious music is essentially direct, often informal. I try to give an impression of fervor and especially of humility, which to me is the most beautiful aspect of prayer.”
This translates into a relatively conservative, though rich operatic style that is part recitative and part lyrical. The opera is without set arias or “big numbers.” Poulenc does not deploy his full orchestral resources, familiar to those who know the Stabat Mater or the Gloria, until the very end, at the scaffold scene, where he does so to glorious effect. At whatever volume, the music is charged with the same level of energy as its spiritual subject.
There are two recordings of Dialogues de Carmelites available on CD. They are both excellent. One, from 1958 on EMI-7493312 MONO, is the premiere production under conductor Pierre Dervaux. Not surprisingly, it has a special magic.
The other, from Virgin Classics 07777-59227-21, has the advantage of digital sound and a fine French cast under American conductor Kent Nagano. Nagano takes only an extra ten minutes with this two and a half hour opera. Yet that slight difference tells in the dramatic edge the original performance maintains.
Neither CD booklet bothers to inform us that the events of the opera are based on history; the sisters actually did mount the scaffold singing the Salve Regina and the Veni Creator Spiritus. The good sisters of Compiegne were beatified by Pope Pius X in 1907.