Paris, 1794, at the height of the Reign of Terror.
Blanche de la Force, a young aristocrat consumed by a pathological and existential fear, enters the Carmelite convent in Compiègne as a novice. Not to seek refuge, but to wage an inner battle that has haunted her since birth.
The agonising and desolate death of the first Mother Superior, Madame de Croissy, introduces the central theological question into the drama: the transfer of grace between souls. The young novice Constance senses that Croissy’s ‘wrong’ death will pave the way for the ‘right’ death of another – a premonition that echoes the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints. When the convent is dissolved by the revolutionary authorities and the nuns choose martyrdom, Blanche flees in terror. In the final tableau, however—one of the most sublime in the entire history of opera—she returns serenely amongst the crowd and joins the Sisters as they ascend, one by one, to the scaffold, chanting the Salve Regina. Fear has been overcome and the ‘transfert de la grâce’ is complete.
Poulenc always prioritised the intelligibility of Bernanos’s text over any orchestral exuberance, creating a work in which word and sound merge with an intimacy rarely achieved in the 20th-century repertoire.
Diálogos das Carmelitas
Thursday 22 April, 8.00 pm, Teatro São Luiz
Saturday 24 April, 5.30 pm, Teatro São Luiz
Orquestra Académica Metropolitana
Francis Poulenc Dialogues of the Carmelites
(A semi-staged opera in three acts with a libretto by the composer based on the play of the same name by Georges Bernanos)
Conductor: Jean-Marc Burfin
Singers: Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra / Academia de Música da Universidade de Zagreb
