Poulenc’s ‘Dialogues des Carmelites’ at Glyndebourne
Photo: Hubert Smith
Silently, each nun leaves the stage. The swish of the guillotine is heard, and a pair of shoes comes flying across to hit the opposite stage wall. The little group of nuns slowly dwindles, and the pairs of shoes are a reminder of the Holocaust. Glyndebourne’s director of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites, Barrie Kosky, has created a production with overtones far beyond the French Revolution.
The “cleansing” of society during the Terror produced an orgy of bloodlust that looked only for further victims. The nuns’ intention that their martyrdom might bring peace to France was no vain hope. The public could no longer support such ferocious intimidation and killing, and the reign of terror soon came to an end. Robespierre himself was executed the following month.
The Catholic Church, as a mainstay of the Ancien Régime, became a target of revolutionary ardour, but everything went much too far. The Directory of the new republic even got rid of the seven day week and dramatically changed the calendar, defying a tradition of timekeeping that everyone understood. This was only abandoned at the start of 1806, by which time Napoleon was fully in command.
The murder of the nuns was symptomatic of tearing down everything. After the Second World War the French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos was hired to write a movie script based on this iniquity (following a novella by the German Gertrud von le Fort) and it was staged as a play in 1952. The composer Francis Poulenc saw this stage version, seized upon it and completed his opera in 1955.
The action begins with the admittance of a new novice to the convent, Blanche de la Force, and the agonising death of the old Prioress. Her suffering is too much for her, and Mother Marie tells the Sisters to ignore her words as their Prioress rails against God. As the other young novice Sister Constance says, it is as if she has been handed the wrong death, like someone given the wrong overcoat in a cloakroom; another person will have the gentle death that the Prioress deserved.
Poulenc himself, a devout Catholic, became completely absorbed by the story of the nuns. He delivers his most emotional punch in the calming recitation of the old Marian hymn Salve Regina at the end, but Kosky has been at pains to avoid sentimentality. He finds Blanche a wonderful character, “very articulate … a heroine who’s not in love, who isn’t sick and who isn’t mad, a character showing us her fears and desires and dreams and nightmares and paranoia about life and death and God”. This almost devotional work, he says, was the one that first made him want to be an opera director.
In this timeless production, Katarina Dalayman gives a moving portrayal of the old Prioress. Sally Matthews is a superb Blanche, beautifully attired at home in a splendid lemon yellow dress before donning the black habit of the Carmelite order, with Florie Valiquette as the other novice Constance. As Blanche’s aristocratic father, Paul Gay showed suitable gravitas, and Valentin Thill, as her brother who tries to persuade her to escape, was an unusually forceful presence. Karen Cargill made a splendid Mother Marie, who must hold things together after the death of the old Prioress, and Golda Schutz an imposing figure as the new one. The cast is of course predominantly female, but Vincent Ordonneau showed great presence as the Father Confessor, whose visits will no longer be permitted under the new political regime.
Seeing this opera is a draining experience whose musical clarity from the London Philharmonic, under the baton of Robin Ticciati, draws us into the reality of death. Kosky’s production detaches us from Revolutionary France to grasp the universality of man’s inhumanity to man. A coup de theâtre in Act 2 reminds us of the present day, to make this an unforgettable evening at Glyndebourne.
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