A Matter of Life and Death

Let’s get serious for a minute. This is an opera about death, with most of the cast thinking carefully about their own mortality. They also think and talk about their lives, and the things that are significant to them as they go along, but mostly they are facing what happens at the end. By the final curtain, they have all had their focused time to dialogue clearly about their imminent deaths, as their determined footsteps take them there.

Dialogues of the Carmelites is a rare opera that shows us no romance, no clash of armies, no dukes or kings, and no Greek mythology. It’s a solidly spiritual presentation, based on actual events that happened in France during the French revolution.

The story, when presented with Poulenc’s music as background, is as sobering as anything on the stage can be, and it’s not for the faint of heart. I can think of a few other operas which take religion very seriously – Verdi’s I Lombardi and Stiffelio, Rossini’s pair about Moses in Egypt, Massenet’s Thais, and I suppose we should include Wagner’s Parsifal as well. But while these succeed with strong and clear characterization of admirable spirituality, none left me so thoughtful, so changed, so reflective about the course of my own life, as did Dialogues.

Conviction

The Carmelite nuns in Compiègne (just northeast of Paris) make up almost the whole cast, and they are thoroughly devoted to each other, to their Mother Superior, to their religious order and vows, and to their god.

They experience the loss of their leader, who was played perfectly by Karita Mattila in the 2019 New York staging that I saw – it’s a painful, self-aware, and possibly undeserved sort of death. This drives a frank and somewhat surprising conversation between two young nuns, sung (in this production) by Isabel Leonard and Erin Morley, speaking openly about the meaning of death, and how they themselves expect to handle that experience.

They get their chance later, when they are challenged to give up their religious order, and their home, by the revolutionary forces; the alternative is martyrdom at the guillotine, and you already know which they’re going to choose.

The opera takes us right into their terrified yet faithful minds, and we feel very much at their side when they, one by one, walk out the door for the last time. It’s both macabre (because Poulenc delivers the sound of the guillotine as created by the orchestra) and uplifting (because by then, we understand that the nuns know to where and to whom they are going, and we admire their unwavering fortitude).

Questioning the Composer’s Role

What does Poulenc’s music contribute to this dreadful story? I worked hard, trying to decide if and how the orchestra was enhancing the stage play.

For me, the problem was that this music sounds like that of Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss – it is running in parallel behind the words, which are eloquently spoken as much as they are sung – and so there are no songs, no choruses, no soprano or tenor arias which I could identify and remember.

As always with this type of 20th-century opera music, I cannot even guess how the singers learn their lines. The music moves along, up and down, faster and slower, major and minor, without anything I can identify as coherence or structure. No doubt, this is my shortcoming more than Poulenc’s, but still, the entire opera left me wishing for at least one tune I could take away. But tunefulness had left the stage 100 years before.

I can easily imagine that the orchestral contributions are those of mood and emphasis, augmenting the emotional content of the spoken lines. But for me, it is very hard to pinpoint how (even if) that is working for me, so it remains a reasonable guess, and not a defendable conclusion.

So I found the music acceptable, but not enjoyable. I’m still puzzled by the question of what purpose Poulenc is serving. Is he merely adding tonal drama to every inflected word and phrase? Is that music, really?

Still, this is more than I expected, going in, because by 1957, advances in operatic music had rolled on ahead of even Puccini and Strauss, moving into a territory I myself cannot understand or tolerate. But Poulenc was behind the trend in this regard, even apologizing to his friends because Dialogues contains little atonal music, which was gaining strength among the pioneers of modern operas.

Good thing for me. No apology necessary.

Finding God

Francis Poulenc lived in Paris through the early 1900’s, energized by the companionship of many composers and poets near his age, who wrote with a great variety of skills and styles. Among this group, he was known as something of an outlier, less constrained than many by the conventions and trends in music of that era.

Partly, this was because his father, who ran a company that became the prominent pharmaceutical giant Rhône-Poulenc, guided young Francis into a mainstream educational track, rather than a specialized musical one. After his father died, Francis worked through his friends to acquire musical mentors and teachers of composition, but he remained an innovator.

At 37, the sudden tragic loss of a close friend, and a subsequent visit to a remarkable old monastery, turned Poulenc toward serious thoughts of religion, and this was the focus of much of his musical work for the rest of his life.

(The monastery, Rocamadour, is now a significant destination for religious pilgrims, and includes the spot where Roland threw his sword in the year 778. Roland, also known as Orlando, was a military leader who fought with Charlemagne, and is the subject of operas by Lully, Piccinni, Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Mermet, Leoncavallo, and probably others. However, I don’t think Poulenc was interested in Roland when he went to Rocamadour in 1936, and he never wrote an opera about that fellow.)

One Out of Three is Pretty Good

Poulenc wrote a huge volume of music for piano, voice, and orchestra, and this includes two ballets and three operas. Dialogues is performed with some frequency these days, but the other two, Les Mamelles de Tirésias and La Voix Humaine are much harder to find.

The first of these is a crazy farce about a woman who motivates her husband to give birth to 40,000 children. Medici.tv has a recording with English titling.

The latter consists of a 40-minute telephone call leading to the main character’s suicide. You can hear it in French on YouTube, both conducted and sung by Barbara Hannigan, a Canadian soprano and classical conductor.