After a hiatus of sixty years, the return of Dialogues des Carmelites, written by Georges Bernanos, to the Vienna State Opera is a tour de force of musical brilliance. Bernanos was, in the words of German writer Ernst Eric Noth, a conservative. He wished to preserve what merits preserving: an organic society founded on justice and the sacred rights of the individual to liberty, dignity, and honor. Written in Tunisia in 1948 towards the end of his life, Dialogues is based on a true story from revolutionary France. It is both the history and harbinger of the attack on religious conscience which has recently manifested itself anew, as if lessons we can learn from our past are merely the stuff of historical anecdotes or footnotes. The opera premiered at the Vienna State Opera on February 14, 1959, and was performed 20 times, with Heinrich Hollreiser conducting and Irmgard Seefried as the protagonist Soeur Blanche. Performances were held until April 27, 1964. The current production premiered on Sunday, May 21, 2023.
Set to the music of Francis Poulenc, Dialogues offers an argument against the tyranny of a secularized world in which faith has been stripped bare, concluding with the death of 16 nuns belonging to the Carmel of Compiègne on July 17, 1794, at La Conciergerie in Paris. Each of them was guillotined while singing the Salve Regina, and the convent burned to the ground after the nuns were condemned by the General Assembly’s revolutionary tribunal for counterrevolutionary practices. Pope St. Pius X beatified the nuns on May 27, 1906. It is important to note that Gertrud von Le Fort’s novel, The Song at the Scaffold, served as the inspiration for the final act. She wrote it in 1932, the same year that the Nazi Party came to power in the German Reichstag.
While working on Dialogues, Poulenc wrote to the French baritone Pierre Bernac in August 1953: “If I am to succeed with this work it will only be through the music identifying absolutely with Bernanos’ spirit.” Writing some months later to another friend, Henri Hell, Poulenc stated, “Either (this opera) is my masterpiece, or else I want to die. For the moment, I’m inclined towards the former.” In the rendition I saw, conductor Bertrand de Billy’s tribute to this thought could not have evidenced itself more fully.
In The History of My Opera, Poulenc revealed that he modeled the five principal nuns’ roles on five important women in operatic literature: Amneris, Kundry, Desdemona, Thäis, and Zerlina. Thus he created the religious characters of Mère Marie, Madame de Croissy, Madame Lidoine, Soeur Blanche, and Soeur Constance, each with a singular rhythmic diction and melody weaving through the rich musical tapestry of Dialogues.
The musical cast of this year’s production reflected Poulenc’s intentions to a note. The cast included Nicole Car as Soeur Blanche, Michael Kraus as the Marquis de la Force, Bernard Richter as Chevalier de la Force, Michaela Schuster as Madame de Croissy, Eve-Maud Hubeaux as Mère Marie, and a brilliant Maria Nazarova as Soeur Constance.
Staging was novel and dynamic; the convent was seen from the inside out through windowless scaffolding, allowing for total transparency of view for all present. The set and dramaturgy produced a microcosm of dialogue and space yielding a marvelous denouement up to the final act depicting the nuns’ execution. Magdalena Fuchsberger, the production’s set designer, used vignettes—the view through the scaffolding—to allow for a vibrancy which Nikolaus Stenitzer’s dramaturgy brought to full expression.
Simplicity was the order of the evening. Even the costuming by Valentin Köhler was novel in that he employed almost futurist dress for the nuns, until they appeared in their Carmelite habits at their execution—a height of beauty and loss at the same time.
Compiègne’s Carmel is a sanctuary of the holy. The convent’s dialogues mirror a rich interior life. The Revolutionary Council’s open rebellion against the nuns is much akin to what is happening today, a resurgent secularism that is waging war on religion and tradition. The opera bears witness to the destruction of Compiegne’s microcosm of faith. What is striking is the totality of destruction, even up to the point of inflicting death. Bernanos understood that religious persecution is a constant throughout history. He witnessed this in his own life during the Spanish Civil War, particularly in the murder of the nuns of the Carmelite monastery in Barcelona and the 498 Spanish martyrs (who were later beatified by the late Pope Benedict XVI). Bernanos condemned the agnostic threat of fascism against spiritual life in A Diary of My Times, particularly noting the barbarity of random executions that took place in Palma, Majorca, where he stayed in 1938.
Dialogues serves as a warning to humanity that the barbarism of the totalitarian state calls for vigilance today as much as in any century past. Bernanos’ message is for the world. Fed by the flame of an ardent faith, it shines like a beacon in the night of confusion and violence. In a world polarized by a politics of exclusion and violence, one must consider if there is a possibility for a rebirth of the Carmel of Compiègne? An oasis of peace and order within the context of religious practice?
Bernanos’ words in A Diary of My Times in September 1938, a decade before he completed Dialogues, was almost a premonition of the apathy and excuses of our own time:
I am in no way out to create a scandal. But when so many (Christians) try to excuse, or even justify, one of the most atrocious civil wars that has ever been known, in the name of a lesser evil policy, it is not much to ask that a denunciation of cowards and rogues should be treated with the same indulgence. My reaction may have sounded violent, but at least it may have some chance of being effective against the kind of dishonorable re-shuffling of which we have now seen an example.
Bernanos and Poulenc dare us to ask why men of differing opinions would condemn their fellow men to death, leading to new waves of chaos and destruction. Dialogues is a firm reminder that the law and its application are not the sole arbiters of justice: the human heart still retains a moral conscience despite secular and progressive society. Dialogues takes center stage at the opera this season. The time is ripe for such a call on the international stage for a return to the values of liberty, dignity, and honor.