Dialogues des Carmélites

Dialogues des Carmélites is the second, and undoubtedly most weighty, of Francis Poulenc’s three operas. The composer based the libretto on a screenplay by Georges Bernanos, a French Catholic writer of the first half of the 20th century, who had been hired in 1947 to pen the dialogues for a script inspired by the German Catholic author Gertrud von Le Fort’s novella Die Letzte am Schafott (The Song on the Scaffold). Yet the film was not made and, after Bernanos’s death, the screenplay was in 1949 published as a drama, titled Dialogues des Carmélites. Several years later, the play served as the basis of Poulenc’s libretto to his opera. The story draws upon a tragic event during the post-French Revolution Reign of Terror, when 16 innocent nuns of the Carmel of Compiègne were arrested, condemned to death and, a few days before Robespierre’s passing and the end of the Terror, guillotined. Just like Bernanos’s play, Poulenc’s opera focuses on the fate of Blanche de la Force, a shy, fearful girl who retreats from the world and enters a Carmelite convent so as to escape life’s travails. Paradoxically, taking this decision ultimately results in her being executed and thus becoming a martyr …

To what extent do we control our lives, and what role does fear play in our destiny? These are the main themes of Poulenc’s opera, whose music is extremely gentle on the ear, with its style akin to Impressionism and its tender lyricism gradating in the famous final scene, in which the song of the nuns approaching their death mingles with the dreadful sound of the guillotine dropping.