A Night with the Carmelites

In the early morning of Sunday the 8th of December, I boarded the train to Paris to see the opera Dialogues des Carmélites that played at the Thêatre des Champs-Elysées at 5 o’clock that afternoon. At this moment, I am writing my Honours thesis on this opera by Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963), because I think it is one of the most philosophical and heartbreaking operas in the opera canon. With a libretto written in the aftermath of the Second World War by Georges Bernanos, and the music of Poulenc that was written between 1953-1956 during life-altering anxieties and grief, this opera provides interesting material for a study on the performance of trauma in music.

The Thêatre des Champs-Elysées is a square-shaped building, built between the years 1911-1913 in an Art Deco style. It has housed many famous premieres, like The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, and was this time yet again the home of a grandiose opera production with Olivier Py as stage director, Karina Canellakis as musical director, and two legendary sopranos: Patricia Petibon and Veronique Gens. My seat was in one of the balconies quite close to and in a straight line to the stage, a true privilege!

The opera is set in France during the Reign of Terror in 1794, the last phase of the French Revolution. At the beginning of the opera, the end of the opera is already present. Even if you’re not aware of the fact that all characters die in the end, any member of the audience will feel the tension in the atmosphere and the music. This tension is what makes a real life performance unique, that what theatre scholars name ‘presence’ or ‘immediacy’. Even though the performance of the Angers Nantes Opéra on YouTube (the performance that I’ve watched so many times for this research) is well done, it will never make you feel the emotions that are radiated through the theatre if they are truly felt by the singers, as was the case with this superstar cast.

The opera circles around a girl called Blanche de la Force, and her development from an anxious, young girl, to a martyr for her own country. In the story, Blanche joins the order of the Carmelites stationed in Compiègne, 80 km of Paris. Indeed it is there, where she has to face her existential fears. French soprano Vannina Santoni fitted this role extremely well, keeping a perfect balance between the fearful, restless and spiritual aspects of Blanche’s character.

One crucial moment in the opera is the death of the Prioress, the leader of the convent, at the end of Act 1. She dies slowly and painfully on stage, while pronouncing her last words to Blanche. Sophie Koch, who performed this role, was so much in character in this scene, that she lost her tone at one point. I enjoyed the fact that she made a ‘mistake’ very much, as it demonstrates her wonderful acting, the difficulty of the music, and the fact that she and the other singers are human.

During the course of the opera, the Reign of Terror rises up more heavily, with an especially cruel regime against religion. The nuns take a martyr vow that they will stay true to their faith and will sacrifice their lives for their country. After they are charged for conspiring against the revolution, they are brought to the Place de la Révolution in Paris, where they are beheaded by the guillotine. In the last scene, they ascend the scaffold while singing the Salve Regina, a last sacrament before facing their deaths. Sounds of the guillotine pierce through the music, reducing the amount of voices each time it strikes. The opera ends with the death, one after the other, of each nun, the last one being that of Blanche. These historic events have been handed down to us thanks to the accounts of one of the surviving nuns. In 1906, the 16 Carmelite nuns of Compiègne were beatified by the Catholic Church.

During the opera, I was constantly on the edge of my seat. I heard so many new things in the music, which (again) emphasises how special real live performances are. For example, the notable sounds of the piano often gets lost in most recordings. Now I heard how Poulenc, being primarily a pianist, gave the piano a thought-out place in the music, providing another layer on top of the orchestra. Suddenly, I also heard how Poulenc musically announces death throughout the opera with disquieting musical motives: an interesting discovery that partly explains how tension in the opera was consciously created.

The staging was very aesthetically pleasing, as iconographic references to the Catholic Church figured prominently in the opera. Symbols of the cross were in many ways integrated in the staging, and before their execution, the nuns sat at a table, as a tableau vivant, in the form of the Last Supper of Leonardo Da Vinci. Other staging choices were less obvious to me, such as the use of carton plants to depict a forest. For the scenes on the arrest of the nuns, the available space was brilliantly used to deliver a menacing ‘3D’ effect. From all sides of the theatre, threatening agents came running towards the stage, giving the audience almost the same anxiety-provoking experience as the nuns must have had.

As the ending is one of the most cruel opera endings in opera history, opera directors are faced with the question on how to direct this scene. Whereas the overall staging for this opera was relatively straightforward, its ending, however, was extremely poetic. Where most stagings have a literal scaffold placed in a city scenery, in this version, the nuns stood in a semicircle, with their arms next to their body, against a background of a starry night sky. When the guillotine hit, a nun would open their arms to form a cross with their body, and would walk to the back to become a star in the sky.

This sober yet poetic setting conveyed the emotionality and cruelty of the scene very well. The atmosphere of this setting evoked the feeling of ‘being alone before God’, stripped of anything but your character, which was extremely beautiful and hauntingly terrifying at the same time. The night sky was a brilliant metaphor for what this scene stands for: the nuns believed they were offering their lives for their country. They believed they became part of a bigger whole, under the protection of God, residing in the sky.

The opera ended and everyone in the audience immediately rose from their seat. More strikingly, the applause continued and everyone started clapping in the same rhythm. This rhythm went on and on for an extremely long time! I had never witnessed an audience more enthusiastic, but I, too, was overwhelmed by the incredible quality of the piece of art that we had all just witnessed. A huge thanks to the Humanities Honours Programme, that gave me this opportunity.

By Esmée Soetekouw