Poulenc’s ‘Dialogues of the Carmelites’

The same held true in Spain in the 1930s, when the Catholic Church sided with Franco’s fascists after the Spanish Republic curtailed ecclesiastical privileges. The Vatican never explicitly supported Hitler, but it did take Hitler’s side in the Spanish Civil War, and the Vatican never opposed Germany’s Nazi regime as forcibly as it resisted Soviet Communism.

In her 1933 novel, Song at the Scaffold, the German Catholic writer Gertrud von Le Fort discussed what she called “a profound threat to our Christian acquisitions arising...from Russian godlessness.” Her book inspired Francis Poulenc, a devout Catholic, to write Dialogues of the Carmelites.

Off with their heads

In Carmelites we are asked to view the French Revolution as evil while the Church people are the heroes. Poulenc composed jarring, uneven music for the proletariat, in contrast to sweet, lyrical music for the religiously faithful. The first two acts are crammed with fearful complaints about those awful, dangerous mobs. Blanche de la Force, the most prominent nun, is the daughter of a marquis and consequently terrified by the peasants who surrounded her carriage.

Carmelites reflects the era in which it was written. Nowadays even Pope Francis — especially Pope Francis — would find it embarrassing. You’ll find a fuller-dimensional view of the French Revolution in Giordano’s Andrea Chénier.

Cheap furnishings

Still, no one wants to see nuns guillotined, and the final scene of Carmelites is gut wrenching. This month’s revival also offered the sublime sound of Curtis Institute’s gifted student orchestra under the baton of Corrado Rovaris. But that benefit failed to compensate for a drab set and cheap furnishings, like folding TV-dinner tables. When the Mother Superior lay down to die in Act I, no bed was provided for her to expire.

Poulenc’s Impressionistic Debussian score calls for clean vocal production, but these young women sang with excessive heaving and throbbing that ill suited the music.

At the end of Carmelites we’re expected to feel sad over the death of those Carmelite nuns; instead, what I felt most was regret that this production failed to reach the high level of other recent Curtis productions, such as Berg’s Wozzeck and Ullmann‘s Emperor of Atlantis.