Program booklet »Dialogues des Carmélites«

FRANCIS POULENC

DIALOGUES DES CARMÉLITES

CONTENTS

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SYNOPSIS P.

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THE STORY OF MY OPERA FRANCIS POULENC P.

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“FEAR IS IN THIS WORLD” MAGDALENA FUCHSBERGER IN AN INTERVIEW

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GROWING INTO THE DRAMA BERTRAND DE BILLY P.

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MONK AND TRAMP UWE SCHWEIKERT P.

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IMPRINT

FRANCIS POULENC

DIALOGUES DES CARMÉLITES OPERA in three acts (twelve scenes) Music & Text FRANCIS POULENC Text of the drama by George Bernanos, adapted to a lyric opera with the authorization of Emmett Lavery; the drama inspired by a novel of Gertrud von le Fort and by a scenario of Rev. Father Bruckberger and Philippe Agostini.

ORCHESTRA

Piccolo / 2 flutes / 2 oboes cor anglais / 2 clarinets / bass clarinet 3 bassoons (3. also contrabassoon) 4 horns / 3 trumpets / 3 trombones bass tuba / timpani / percussion (snare drum, bass drum, shell tambourine, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, glockenspiel, crotales, xylophone, wood block, whip, bells, bells) celesta / piano / 2 harps / strings STAGE MUSIC Bells

AUTOGRAPH Bibliothèque de l'Opéra Paris WORLD PREMIÈRE (ITALIAN VERSION) 26 JAN 1957 Teatro alla Scala, Milan WORLD PREMIÈRE (ORIGINAL FRENCH VERSION)

21 JUN 1957 Théâtre National de l'Opéra, Paris FIRST PERFORMANCE 14 FEB 1959 Vienna State Opera (German Version) FIRST PERFORMANCE (FRENCH VERSION)

21 MAY 2023 Vienna State Opera DURATION

3H

INCL. 1 INTERMISSION

DIALOGUES DES CARMÉLITES

SYNOPSIS ACT 1 Scene 1 April 1789, Paris, the library of the Marquis de la Force The young Chevalier de la Force is asking about his sister Blanche, worried. A friend of the family had seen her coach surrounded by an angry crowd.

The Marquis de la Force, father of the Chevalier and Blanche, is horrified by the parallels to the circumstances in which his wife died. The Chevalier explains he isn’t worried about Blanche’s safety, but about the mental state of his notoriously fearful sister. Shortly after this, Blanche surprises her father by telling him she wants to enter the Carmelite convent in Compiègne.

Scene 2 Parlour of the Carmelite convent in Compiègne, several weeks later Blanche tells the Carmelite mother superior, Madame de Croissy, that she wants to lead a “heroic life”. The mother superior replies bluntly that the sole purpose of the convent was prayer. Blanche still wishes to enter the convent. Asked by the mother superior for her religious name, she replies Sister Blanche of the Agony of Christ.

Scene 3 The young novice Sister Constance reveals to Blanche her wish to die young. Now, she believes that both she and Blanche will suffer this fate, and on the same day.

Scene 4 The mother superior is dying. She obtains a promise from her deputy, the novice mistress Mother Marie of the Incarnation, to take Blanche under her care. With increasing pain, the prioress begins wrangle with God. She has a vision, the Carmelite chapel is destroyed. Shortly before she dies, the mother superior calls Blanche to her and whispers something to her.

Previous pages: MARIA NAZAROVA as SŒUR CONSTANCE

MONIKA BOHINEC as MÈRE JEANNE ALMA NEUHAUS as SŒUR MATHILDE

MARIA MOTOLYGINA as MADAME LIDOINE CHORKARMELITINNEN*

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SYNOPSIS

ACT 2 Scene 5 Blanche and Constance are keeping vigil over the body. When Constance goes for their relief, Blanche is afraid, and also leaves the chapel. She is caught by Mother Marie and sent to her cell.

First Interlude Blanche and Constance weave a cross from flowers and think about the difficult death of the mother superior. Constance wonders if the mother superior had died the “wrong” death, which she explains as, “You don’t die for yourself, but for someone else, or even instead of someone else, who knows?”

Scene 6 The new mother superior, Madame Lidoine, gives a vivid sermon on her arrival. She describes the coming challenges, and warns against arrogance and obstinacy, particularly with regard to martyrdom. The temptation of this could divert the sisters from their real duty, which is prayer. On Mother Marie’s instruction the sister say the Hail Mary together.

INTERMISSION

Second Interlude The Chevalier de la Force asks to be admitted to see his sister before he leaves the country. The new mother superior orders Mother Marie to be present at the meeting.

Scene 7 The Chevalier tries to persuade Blanche to leave the convent, arguing that the Revolution is turning against religion, so she will not be safe there. Blanche defends her place in the convent.

Brother and sister part, estranged.

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SYNOPSIS

Scene 8 The convent’s chaplain tells the Carmelites that he has been removed from office. Mother Marie tries to interpret a statement by the mother superior as a call to martyrdom, which the mother superior strictly rejects, saying that only God can choose martyrs. Two commissars appear and announce that the convent will be closed. Mother Jeanne of the Infant Jesus claims that the mother superior must go to Paris. To help Blanche overcome her fear, she gives her the “Infant King”, a figurine of the Infant Christ. There is noise outside, and Blanche drops the figure. The head breaks off. In despair, Blanche claims that after the “death” of the Infant King, all that is left to the sisters is the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God).

ACT 3 Scene 9 In the mother superior’s absence Mother Marie takes a vote on whether the Carmelites should take a vow committing to martyr­dom in the cause of the continuing existence of the Carmelite convent and the salvation of France. The chaplain, who has returned, organises the secret vote. There is one vote against. The Carmelites look at Blanche, but Constance hurries to explain that it was her vote, and that she is withdrawing it.

The sisters rush to the altar to make their vow. Blanche vanishes in the confusion.

First Interlude An official declares that the convent has been dissolved, and that the nuns are now normal citizens. Madame Lidoine wants to cancel the chaplain’s planned visit as it would put him and the nuns in danger. While Mother Marie questions whether an excess of caution is contrary to the spirit of the vow, Madame Lidoine counters this, noting her responsibility for the sisters entrusted to her care.

Scene 10 The library of the Marquis de la Force Mother Marie visits Blanche, who has returned to her father’s house in Paris, where she lives as a maid to the new owners.

Mother Marie asks Blanche to come with her. Blanche refuses, all that matters to her now is the safety she sought refuge in. She laments her life with fear and contempt. Mother Marie gives Blanche the address where she will expect her.

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DIALOGUES DES CARMÉLITES

Second Interlude (Dialogues) On the street in the Bastille district, Blanche hears that the Carmelites have been condemned to death. When they ask her if she comes from the Compiègne area, she denies knowing the place.

Scene 11 In prison The mother superior encourages the sisters. She assumes responsibility for the vow, although it was decided in her absence, and she never made it. When Blanche is mentioned in connection with fear, Constance assures them that she will return. She has seen it in a dream. The jailer reads the death sentence.

Third Interlude The chaplain brings Mother Marie the news of the death sentence. She wants to go to the sisters, but the chaplain restrains her, saying that God decides who He will preserve, and who not.

Mother Marie is desperate at the loss of her honour.

Scene 12 The sisters go to the scaffold singing the Salve Regina. The choir is reduced one by one every time the guillotine falls. Blanche appears in the crowd and is recognised by Constance. Blanche joins in the hymn. She is the last one to go to the scaffold.

Next pages: EVE-MAUD HUBEAUX as MÈRE MARIE

MICHAELA SCHUSTER as MADAME DE CROISSY PANAJOTIS PRATSOS as JAVELINOT

MARIA NAZAROVA as SŒUR CONSTANCE CHORKARMELITINNEN* SUPERNUMERARIES of the VIENNA STATE OPERA

FRANCIS POULENC

THE STORY

OF MY OPERA You’re asking me for the most difficult thing of all, to tell your readers something about the Dialogues des Carmé­ lites. With this sort of thing there’s the risk of self-conceit on the one hand and false modesty on the other hand.

I think the only way to avoid this is for me to simply tell the story of this opera.

Singing has always been the greatest thing for me, and my first great impres­ sions are of Don Giovanni, Pelléas et Mélisande, Boris Godunov and Rigo­ letto. So it’s natural to find the names Debussy, Mussorgsky and Verdi on the dedications page of the Carmélites.

And if the name Mozart is missing, it’s because it’s not easy to dedicate something to God the Father.

My parents took me to the Opéra and the Opéra Comique from a very early age. You might say I grew up on the knees of the tenor Edmond Clément, and by the time I was ten, Carmen, La bohème and Manon had no further secrets from me.

Ever since I started composing, it’s been my dream to write an opera.

But alas, there was always the terrible question of the libretto! And remember that I’m terribly spoiled in literary terms. I have been inspired to set pieces

by Eluard, Max Jacob, Aragon, Louise de Vilmorin and Apollinaire to music, I have been able to write Les mamelles de Tirésias, which I confess I particularly treasure, and it took a real piece of luck, a strange encounter for me to find the libretto I’d been dreaming of for years.

Around 1953 I was supposed to write a ballet for the Scala in Milan.

I’d thought far off of writing a half profane, half sacred plot – St Margareta of Cortona – but I never got to give the plan shape (I’ve always written the story of my ballets myself ).

That’s how things stood when I came to Milan in March 1953 during a tour with the cellist Pierre Fournier. I explained to Signor Valcarenghi, director of the Ricordi publishing house, who had commissioned the ballet from me, how unenthusiastic I was about the project.

“Oh,” I added during a pleasant lunch, “why don’t you ask me for an opera?” “If that’s what it takes, then I’ll order one right away,” my host replied. “And the libretto?” “As you’re looking for a mystical story, why don’t you do an opera on the Dialogues des Carmélites by Bernanos?”

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THE STORY OF MY OPERA

I was surprised by this suggestion.

What would people say about an opera without a love story? But because I always trusted the Italians’ inborn sense of theatre, I ignored this objection, but asked for time to think… Oh, so much!

Naturally, I knew the Bernanos piece, had read it and read it again, and seen it twice, but I had no sense of the rhythm of his language, an essential point for me.

I’d decided to think about it later, when I was back in Paris, when two days later I discovered the Dialogues in the middle of the display window of a bookshop in Rome, where they seemed to be waiting for me. I’d left the hotel early to walk from church to church, as I like to do when I’m in Rome.

It was such beautiful weather that I had nothing more in mind than to enjoy the magic of a spring morning, and there I saw myself – unwillingly – facing the great adventure that would keep me busy for three years.

I bought the book and decided to read it again. To do this, I went to the Piazza Navona and sat on the terrace of the Tre Scalini. That was at ten in the morning, and I was still there at noon.

Half an hour later I was intoxicated with enthusiasm, but the decisive test was still ahead of me. Would I find the music for such a text? I opened the book at random and forced myself to put the first sentences I read to music.

The “random” idea was merciless.

Judge for yourself: La Prieure: N’allez pas croire que ce fauteuil soit un privilège de ma charge comme le tabouret des duchesses! Hélas, par charité pour mes chères filles qui en prennent si grand soin, je voudrais m’y sentir à mon aise mais il n’est pas facile

de retrouver d’anciennes habitudes depu­ is trop longtemps perdues et je vois bien que ce qui devait être un agrément ne sera jamais plus pour moi qu’une humil­ itante nécessité.

(Prioress: Don’t think that this chair is a privilege of my office, like a duchess’s footstool! Not at all! For the love of all my daughters who surround me with their care, I would love to feel comfortable in it. It isn’t easy to get used to things again that used to be familiar but which you’ve long since lost. I see how something that was originally meant as a comfort will never again be anything for me but a humiliating necessity.)

It might seem incredible, but I immediately found the melody for this long passage. So that decided it. At two o’clock I telegraphed Signor Valcarenghi, this rich source of information, to tell him I’d write the Dialogues.

I struggled with writing the libretto for some time, but then in July 1953 I finished it in one go, between Paris and Brive. I started on the score in August 1953, and completed it at the end of June 1956. Many people were surprised by my choice of material. It’s a long way from the Mamelles to the Carmélites, but anyone surprised by my collaboration with Bernanos doesn’t know me very well. His spiritual views exactly match mine, and his forcefulness coincides with a trait in my own being, of wholeheartedness where either pleasure or asceticism is involved.

I’ve placed the fiery words of Saint Teresa of Avila as a motto on the first page of the orchestral score, “Lord, save us from bleak saints.” This sets the tone I tried to maintain throughout the work. This tragic and true story is rooted in feelings of a frightfully

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THE STORY OF MY OPERA

human nature – fear, pride. Starting from this, Bernanos had the brilliant idea of creating the exchange of mercy between the first prioress and Blanche, the heroine, that community of the saints, which suddenly elevates the story so much.

The major technical difficulty is to maintain the uniformity of the tone without becoming monotonous. This is why my five major female roles are each written for clearly defined individual fächer. All lined up, in a manner of speaking, they’re Amneris, Desde­ mona, Kundry, Thaïs and Zerlina. With the exception of Blanche’s brother, a Mozart tenor, the male roles are only

brief and unconnected, although depicted in very strong colours. Choruses only appear in the last scene (execution of the Carmelites).

As Bernanos has not given any words to the mob, I’ve treated the chorus entirely instrumentally. The sound of the Salve Regina rises above the noise, sung by the Carmelites on the way to the scaffold. This Salve is original, not the liturgical Salve. The orchestration is entirely normal, for a Verdi orchestra. Almost no percussion, no special instruments.

And that’s all I would have to tell you. Now, it’s up to the audience to discover the rest.

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EVE-MAUD HUBEAUX

as MÈRE MARIE MICHAELA SCHUSTER as MADAME DE CROISSY

DIRECTOR MAGDALENA FUCHSBERGER TALKS TO NIKOLAUS STENITZER

“FEAR IS

IN THIS WORLD” ns

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of fear? mf Fear is being paralysed. Fear is when nothing more flows. It means stand­ing in your own way. Fear is perhaps one of the greatest blockades but also one of the greatest emotions in the world. ns Dialogues des Carmélites is a piece about fear. Conceptually, Søren Kierkegaard introduced a distinction which perhaps is not so familiar to us today. Fear relates to a concrete threat, while anxiety is more general, ambiguous, all-embracing, omnipresent.

Dialogues des Carmélites deals with this anxiety in the main figure, Blanche de la Force, the only really fictional character in the piece. mf Blanche represents this maximum emotion. Its magnitude consists in the fact that behind the ambiguity is the all-embracing anxiety, the fear of death. I’d go so far as to say that fear of death ultimately drives everything in the world. As far as Blanche’s anxiety

is concerned, we’re all familiar with it in some way. I remember a phase in my childhood after my grandfather died.

I had trouble sleeping for two or three years, because I was so afraid of death, fear of not being. Naturally, I couldn’t imagine this, just as none of us can imag­ine it. I experienced real existential needs in this way. And I think that a lot of people have these experiences, which ultimately makes Dialogue des Carmélites incredibly accessible. ns This brings us to the different points of view we can have on this work. Dialogues des Carmélites has with Die Letzte am Schafott by Gertrud von le Fort and Georges Bernanos’ play Dialogues des Carmélites two originals which see fear of death from a distinctly Christian perspective as the original fear of meeting God, meeting the absolute. You just described fear from the existential perspective, fear of not being. Do you think of this kind of fear with Blanche as well?

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“FEAR IS IN THIS WORLD”

mf The more I’ve worked on the piece and the more we’ve rehearsed, the more I’ve concluded that Blanche’s fear is nothing unusual. I wouldn’t see her fear as pathological or rendering her incapable of living. The decisive thing for me is that everyone in this piece is fearful, and there is fear in everybody.

I always say that fear is in this world.

Every character in this piece acts out of fear. Blanche’s greater sensibility, due to the circumstances of her birth, when her mother died, and growing up without a mother – all this increases her fear.

However, in the piece fear is also instrumentalised, exaggerated in various directions. On the one hand it has to be martially overcome, on the other hand it is presented by figures like Madame de Croissy or Madame Lidoine, the new prioress, as the greatest of God’s gifts, as the way to come closest to God or Christ. Blanche also becomes the shuttlecock between the interests of the two rivals Madame Lidoine and Mère Marie. ns Blanche also describes a personal motivation for entering the convent in a conversation with the old prioress Madame de Croissy. She wants to lead a “heroic life.” mf This ambition, which Blanche actually expresses in these words, can be interpreted in various ways. We all speak very vaguely, even if we’re often not aware of the fact. Where Blanche is concerned, we should first remember that she’s very young. She’s a teenager.

Leading a heroic life is related to “I want to be a pop star”, “I want to be immortal”, with a certain youthful overconfidence… ns …which could perhaps have been directed at something else?

mf Perhaps. On the other hand, Blanche has also learned to say what people expect. She’s a very adaptable person. She doesn’t want to stick out, she’d also like to please people. This is a certain protective mechanism and she also says the things in the admission interview that she thinks the prioress wants to hear from her. However, Madame de Croissy is clever enough to recognise this, and she tries to interrupt and break up this desire to please. ns The piece depits the characters with great precision, also due to Francis Poulenc’s composition. Did you find differentiated characters in the libretto and score for your staging, or did you sometimes have the feeling that certain characters are presented too simplistically, and you wanted to develop more facets for them? mf For me, the characters are already shown differentiated by Poulenc.

I’ve worked very intensively on the piece and the material, and read a lot about it, Gertrude von le Fort’s short story helped a lot to bring in additional facets. Personal interpretations also play a great role, but I think the figures as presented by Poulenc are complex, not simplistic. There’s plenty of scope, for example to show Mère Marie break down once, have her show weakness.

The inner struggles of the protagoists are tremendous. Basically, it’s one of the most interesting things about this opera to be dealing with female characters who are shown as so incredibly different, all living together in the convent. In this narrow, protected space.

It’s very important that they’re not able to get away from each other. They have a common fate, and they have to deal

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MAGDALENA FUCHSBERGER IN AN INTERVIEW

with each other, whether they want to or not. They can’t escape. This is very hard. ns You make the community particularly strong in your ideas – you’ve taken an interest in it as a community of individuals. Apart from the inability to escape and being stuck with each other, what else is interesting about the community as it’s presented in the piece? mf I’ve often said that we should not imagine that the sisters all entered the convent only to devote themselves to God. Each of them has a personal reason, just as each of them has their own story. But there’s also something interesting about the community in this special situation which the title itself tells you, Dialogues des Carmélites. Generally, it is customary in a monastery to remain silent. But here we’re looking at arguments, discussion, about wanting to convince each other of something.

Doubt has entered the picture. I’ve expressed it to myself as the convent is really only united in prayer. When it becomes abstract, but also ecstatic, the convent acts as a community, a single body. Otherwise it’s all about individual struggles. Everybody struggles to live their reality. We’re talking about infighting, about loyalty to yourself, about your own importance. What purpose does my life have left in these new circumstances? How should I decide, what can I give the world? These are all the thoughts which concern everybody day and night. From the start, it’s an uncanny struggle, total despair. This is why we never see the convent silent. ns The prerequisite for the action is a state of exception. Is it this

that first poses the questions which are interesting and understandable for us as an audience? mf The state of exception brings questions to a head, which is why it was important to me to show it clearly in the staging. But there are also major and general issues in the admission interview between Blanche and Madame de Croissy in Act 1 scene 2, which concern us just as much today. For example, the old prioress says that you can only dispel your illusions yourself, that nobody can do that for you. Or the description of the attempt to “free yourself from yourself”, to go beyond external failure. These words are still of the utmost importance for us today, whether you’re religious or not. You have the feeling that spirituality in the convent is dying along with this character. In the extreme state of exception, there’s hardly any scope for this any more. God is then referenced in a way to convince something of something, intimidate or manipulate them. ns Things get political. mf It’s just political at this point.

The death scene of Madame de Croissy is the breaking point, when she says, “God has abandoned me.” There is no longer any room in the convent for peace, God and love, only for war, hate and strife. ns Now that we’ve talked about the state of exception, we need to talk about the reason for it – the French Revolution.

You’ve frequently pointed out that modern democracy owes much to this revolution, that the emphasis here is on the grande terreur, the Reign of

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“FEAR IS IN THIS WORLD”

Terror at the end of it. In the piece, however, the distinction is vague, following the originals the uprisings at the start are presented as a report from the Chevalier de La Force, as a threatening uprising by the “foule”, the “mob.” It is imaginable that the conservative author Gertrud von le Fort deliberately identified the Revolution with the Terror. mf We’ve talked about how you can also understand her work as propaganda.

I’ve kept that very much in mind for the production. In Dialogue des Carmélites the Revolution or later the Terror appears as a sinister mob in the form of the chorus, and again in the form of the commissioners and the jailer, shown as threatening or caricatured, including musically. ns The production strengthens this element, including the costumes. What were the ideas behind this? mf For us, the decisive thing was to emphasise the individuality of the Carmelites – and we also claim that these Carmelites had expected a lot from the Revolution. Perhaps a certain degree of emancipation, progress, more gender equality. This is why we decided to make the individual women visible in the costumes. The convent is also a women’s refuge, and women put a lot of hope in the Revolution. And it’s true, the Revolution is also represented by a kind of mob in contrast to many other pieces, where it’s shown very positively, which is also true. Here, it appears in the age of the Terror – perverted. We decided then to have the relevant characters appear without faces.

They’re hidden behind masks – and you can also see this in very modern terms,

such as social media, where as soon as you put on a metaphorical mask, you can’t see your face, your name isn’t recognisable, and the inhibitions and filters disappear. The corresponding characters in the piece have no names, they’re simply called “the jailer” or “the commissioner.” And in this context these characters also sadistically enjoy the humiliation of others. However, the further development is decisive. ns To what extent? mf I’m always being asked what the piece can still tell us today. My answer, it’s also about radicalisation. Terror begets terror, and the answer is the radicalisation of the Carmelites as martyrs.

When we get to the scaffold at the end, it’s the community standing there. It’s no longer the individual women struggling for their personal fate, but a faceless mass of Carmelites who have been radicalised and go to their death as representatives of the sins of humanity, to save France, Christianity, and the monarchy. This is why I don’t want so much sympathy with this group at the end, even if several have been manipulated.

But we shouldn’t necessarily feel sympathy for martyrs. We should feel sympathy with a Blanche, who’s actually been overlooked. You could start here, with the emphasis on compassion. At the end, ideology and fanaticism triumph.

The abstraction, the idea. The people are struck down. The people bleed. ns In her admission interview with the prioress, Blanche says that she’s attracted by the “strictness of the rule”, the regulations governing the Carmelites’ beliefs and lifestyle.

Can you understand that? mf Quite independently of religion and purely psychologically, it can be

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MAGDALENA FUCHSBERGER IN AN INTERVIEW

very attractive to live a disciplined life.

Discipline helps in crises, and I think that as artists you know what discipline can do. A certain control, self-command – I don’t think that’s negative, I think it’s strong. ns The key to the discipline we’re dealing with here is the impossibility of questioning it. mf And that’s naturally dangerous, because it makes manipulation possible and leads to fanaticism. Blind trust, the exact opposite of the doubt which Voltaire promoted. Doubt, instead of blind optimism. And Voltaire, who I would feel personally closer to, was one of the strongest critics of the church at the time we’re dealing with in the piece. I think that we’re fascinated nevertheless by this controlled ritual life with its dictated order. I’ve always been fascinated by it. I think it’s appealing, as Blanche says. However, it’s independent of specific religions. Many young people are fascinated by the control in Buddhism, meditating, controlling the breath. Not identifying with yourself. These are topics which are incredibly important today. ns And which perhaps leads back again to what you said, that Blanche is still very young.

When you’re very young, discipline as an extreme is often just as fascinating as excess. mf I think this is a timeless issue.

Ultimately, it’s Dionysus and Apollo, frenzy and asceticism. Perhaps all this is simply cultural history – but it’s incredibly fascinating. ns The public is confronted with a very diverse world in your production. The set design by Monika Biegler consists of numerous rooms, is translu-

cent and therefore allows for parallel scenes, a simultaneity on stage. Aron Klitzing’s video work is also more narrative than illustration. And Valentin Köhler’s costumes combine realistic and surrealist elements. This means there’s a lot to be seen at once, the production has multiple perspectives, if you will, which is always a challenge.

How would you yourself approach this experience as an audience member? mf Intuitively. You have to let it act on you. To me, the beauty and the benefit of what you describe as having multiple perspective is that often one does not presuppose the other. I lost interest long ago in the principle of cause and effect on stage. Even if I’m only pulling on one thread. Because I think that the interesting thing is what’s irrational. I always say the body is much quicker than the head. We know from our daily life, we act completely irrationally a thousand times a day. And I often find its very exciting to see what’s all happening at once. Not in the sense of parallel universes, but there are so many worlds directly side by side – sometimes they touch briefly, then they drift apart again and go their different ways. This is one theme in my work, and I think you should simply lean back and let it have its effect on you. I don’t like telling people where to look so much, I prefer working with a rich sensual environment, and in this case the subject, Catholi­cism, with its overflowing wealth of images, is a real gift.

I’m generally someone who thinks a lot in images, and images as we all know are always subject to interpretation.

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“FEAR IS IN THIS WORLD”

Certainly, different audience members will see things differently, and I have no problem with that – quite the opposite.

There must be freedom in reception. It frequently happens to me that I discover details in the course of working and think, oh, that fits together well. These are beautiful coincidences. And these are actually my favourite moments. This is when magic happens.

Next pages: MICHAEL KRAUS as MARQUIS DE LA FORCE NICOLE CAR as BLANCHE MARIA NAZAROVA as SŒUR CONSTANCE

BERTRAND DE BILLY

GROWING

INTO THE DRAMA With many pieces, you hesitate to touch them. With others, you know you’ll only work on them once, and then there are the pieces you know immediately, this is something which is going to be with me all my life. For me, Dialogues des Carmélites is just such a masterpiece. I regard this score as Poulenc’s musical testament, and every time I work on it I find new facets of its richness.

Not the least of these is that the piece cannot be exclusively assigned to a single genre. It allows a very wide range of approaches. Dialogues des Car­ mélites is definitely not just a political opera, a historical opera, or just a psychological or religious opera. The fascinating enigma of the central character, Blanche, emphasises the complexity of the piece. This is why I believe it would be absolutely wrong to try and unpick Blanche, this young woman, as a nun with the banal tools of analysis. You can relate to her life in part, you can follow her thoughts and emotions, but she will always surprise you. Poulenc said, “I am Blanche.” So it goes far beyond the character in the drama.

The other characters, such as the old prioress, Madame Lidoine, Mère

Marie or Sister Constance, only gradually reveal their inner selves, and never completely. Very often, the key thing, the truth is never spoken, but only told by the orchestra, sometimes it’s just one or two bars, a motif hinted at, which lets us see behind the scenes in their souls, and sometimes a beautiful, intimately sweet surge in deliberate counterpoint to the ominous, sorrowful, terrible world that threatens to break in – a desperate attempt to drown out the darkness that the singers have to raise their voices against. The cheerful beginning of the opera, this almost operetta-like, light-hearted gio­ coso seems to try and deny the impending tragedy, which with the sudden first orchestral blow of the guillotine in bar 10 creates its own world, all the more brutally and mercilessly.

One factor which Dialogues des Carmélites has in common with Bizet’s Carmen is an absent mother. In Poulenc’s work, the death of the mother is made an issue in the first scene, in connection with Blanche’s birth.

A child who knows: my mother died during my birth. My father lost his wife through my birth. My brother lost his mother through my birth. Her

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GROWING INTO THE DRAMA

brother lost his mother with the child’s birth. This burden right from the start is something to bear in mind. You can’t really understand it.

If you try to analyse Blanche, you can easily reduce this complex personality. There are moments in which you can’t rationally determine where she is. As on her first entrance, when her father says her name. At this point, the double harmony in Poulenc’s score shows how he can’t place her, although he loves her dearly.

You could compare Blanche as a character with the irregular pearls known as “baroque”, or with the Japanese kintsugi technique, where broken pottery is repaired with lacquer dusted with precious metal, making it all the more valuable. It’s the same with people. People who have suffered and “repaired” themselves know what life is. Although young, Blanche experiences this. You can see how she struggles, how heroic she is in the sense of doing something, changing something. She leaves her old baggage behind. Fear. Taking this first step, which is the hardest. This is incredibly courageous.

It would be a pity to see Dialogues des Carmélites only to rush to the spectacular ending. The regular quiet moments before this, the many touching little sequences, the beautiful chamber music passages – in short, the audience is supposed to experience the full course of the Dialogues so that it can grow together into the last dramatic quarter-hour, all the more since the funeral march theme at the end repeatedly appears or is hinted at from the start. This means it is always present unconsciously until it emerges as the main motif at the end of the opera.

The challenge for the interpreters is to make the path to the scaffold perceptible in all its meaning. The structure of the piece is extremely difficult in that all those involved are equally responsible for keeping all the small and precious moments showing important facets under a single arc. Dialogues des Carmélites is not set to music throughout, it also lives from the essential pauses rich in meaning – we’re looking at dialogue in the most literal sense of the word. If we lose sight of the soul of this opera, the whole shatters into many individual parts.

There’s a technique in advertising that involves inserting a sequence into a video which is so short that it is only perceived subliminally. This is what we find in Dialogues des Carmélites. For example, when the funeral march is played at the end, it isn’t new. We hear the sequence in A minor very subtly early on, for example when Constance is talking to Blanche in the third scene.

The motif emerges repeatedly over the course of the evening. By the end, we certainly won’t remember it as the motif from the third scene. We’re much more likely to remember the mood unconsciously and feel uneasy. Poulenc is a master of this technique, preparing the end in advance so that it’s completely shattering.

The musical motifs which Poulenc has composed bring us closer to the characters, for example the father motif which also shows us the warmth of the man. “Leitmotif” is possibly not the right term for Poulenc’s thematic work. A leitmotif is tied to one figure, here motifs are linked to characters and then attached to other characters – Madame Lidoine takes over Blanche’s motif, and so does Constance. Mère

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GROWING INTO THE DRAMA

Marie has the same music as Madame de Croissy when she’s being strict with Blanche. Each uses the weapons of the others, to some extent. The figure of the priest, the confessor, is particularly interesting. He always uses the music of the character he’s talking to, like a chameleon.

At first glance, there’s nothing revolutionary about the orchestration, Poulenc doesn’t introduce any new instruments, but he does develop sounds which are unique and fantastic, to the point of bitonality. Occasionally he takes it to a form of noise music which directly portrays the threat and fear of the Terror. Conversely, Poulenc works with traditional attributions of instruments – for example, the cor anglais symbolises desire, the brass imitate organ sounds.

Brilliant composers, painters, authors and also interpreters are distinguished by their unmistakability.

Poulenc had such a unique personal style, within which he occasionally borrowed from musical history. Sometimes there is a glint of Puccini’s Tosca, then Wagner’s Tristan, Johann Sebastian Bach, Verdi, Gregorian chant or Gershwin, and naturally Debussy and Ravel. Poulenc had no fears about admitting influences. There are even references in Dialogues des Carmélites to his own works. For example, we find Poulenc’s flute sonata, written around the same time, in connection with the new prioress, Madame Lidoine. By contrast, Poulenc had little interest in twelve-tone music.

Poulenc’s markings in the score are very precise. For a contemporary performance, however, slight corrections

are repeatedly needed, particularly where tempo and dynamic markings are concerned. At some points, for example, I deliberately disregard Poulenc’s metronome markings. Why? Because the actual flow of the music is dictated by the poetry of the libretto, based on Georges Bernanos. Now, we have moved on a long way from the original standard of pathetic declamation in the manner of Sarah Bernhardt, which underlies these metronome markings. The pace of speech has accelerated, and this requires picking up the pace of song. The second aspect is the dynamics. Poulenc did not write much for music theatre, but he wrote a lot of concert literature for singer friends. He was well versed in the human voice, but less familiar with the balance between pit and stage. Without changing the instrumentation, the conductor must make adjustments in the Carmélites, depending on the acoustic of the performance venue, and ensure that the singers are not ruthlessly drowned out by the sound of the orchestra. For example, a fortissimo may need to be a mezzoforte, or a mezzoforte a piano.

The new production also includes a passage which I’ve never performed before, despite years of experience with the piece. This is a small spoken scene, a dialogue between three passers-by which expresses essential aspects of the situation of the condemned nuns, which are only mentioned here.

We’re also performing the additional intermezzi which Poulenc added for the Paris première. So we’re presenting this masterpiece in its complete form, as the composer intended.

Next pages: EVE-MAUD HUBEAUX as MÈRE MARIE

BERNARD RICHTER as CHEVALIER DE LA FORCE NICOLE CAR as BLANCHE MARIA MOTOLYGINA as MADAME LIDOINE

FRANCIS POULENC / TO PIERRE BERNAC, 22 AUGUST, 1953

I’ve started on the Carmélites and I literally cannot sleep.

I think it will work out, but there are so many problems…

If I can pull this piece off, it will only be through the total identification of the music with the spirit of Bernanos.

UWE SCHWEIKERT

MONK AND TRAMP THE MUSICAL FACES

OF FRANCIS POULENC “Moine et voyou” – “monk and tramp” – is the bon mot which French music critic Claude Rostand coined to capture the contradictory aspects of people like the composer Francis Poulenc.

Rostand was marvelling at the facility with which Poulenc reconciled the measured courtly tradition of Versailles with the bustle of the multicultural Paris inner city district of Belleville, the aristocratic Baroque music with the trivial sounds of the “bals musettes”.

For Poulenc, there were no contrasts between the banal and serious, inner city atmosphere and religiousness. He spoke of himself as “PoulencJanus”, playing on the two faces of the Roman god Janus, looking in opposite directions like doors. We can take this as a challenge to follow his music either meditatively to its core, or cartwheel and track it in the alleys.

Often, he proves a real Janus, as in the cheerful “Laudamus te” of the Gloria composed in 1959, where by his own account he was inspired by soccerplaying Benedictine monks and the memory of a cheeky angel sticking out

their tongue in a Renaissance painting. Irony and gloom, triviality and poetry, twisted humour and gravity, play and confession always appear as contrasts in Poulenc. But behind all the masks that his music puts on, the muse of his art is melancholy.

The same mix of happiness and gloom, deep insight and superficiality, triviality, and dignity – according to his long-standing musical partner Pierre Bernac – distinguishes Poulenc as a human being. “He could be the poster boy for the bon vivant who loves life and all the beautiful things it has to offer, but he could also fall into deep depressions. His mood changed from one day to the next, even from one moment to the next, because he was extremely sensitive and mentally ex­ citable. At heart he was a fearful person.”

Poulenc grew up in a politically agitated and even revolutionary period. The overthrow of all relationships and values extended to the arts as well.

The Paris of the wartime and postwar eras was a melting pot in which genius and talents, hangers-on and charlatans

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turned everything on its head. Cubism, Surrealism, Neoclassicism – Expressionism played no role in France – were the buzzwords of the time, and Picasso, the prematurely deceased Apollinaire and Stravinsky were helping to birth them in painting, poetry and music.

People turned against everything involved in Academicism, Romanticism and Wagner’s dominant influence, even in France. “We need a music for the earth, A MUSIC FOR EVERY DAY”, Jean Cockteau proclaimed in Cock and Harlecin (1918).

Cocteau was calling here for an “Ars Gallica”, a French art, whose stylistic ideal he described as simplicity, clarity, moderation, and intellect, and which he saw embodied in the works of the outsider Erik Satie – “Music to walk on.” Satie’s music with its brevity, laconicism, sarcastic self-irony and minimalism was of great influence on the young Poulenc. He dedicated his first piece, Rapsodie nègre, which had its world première in 1917, to Satie.

The piece, with its simplistic style and rhythm, is characteristic of the early works of this self-taught composer, who Satie promptly recommended to take composition lessons from Charles Koechlin. Here again, Poulenc showed his Janus nature – the farcical clowning of the middle movement, a sung intermezzo whose dadaistic nonsense text he took from a collection of pseudoAfrican poetry, and the poetic restraint of the following pastorale with its plain Post-Impressionism rejecting all emotion. Equally provocative are the Chansons populaires of the Cocar­ des cycle from 1919, in which song is associated with the most bizarre combination ever to accompany the voice – violins, key bugle, trombone, kettle-

drum and triangle. The songs are dedicated to Raymonde Linossier who “like me loves potato chips, mechanical pianos, barrel organs, kitschy prints, bags decorated with shells, and Paris.” It’s understandable that his contemporaries thought of Poulenc as a composing clown!

The young Poulenc had eagerly seized on whatever he could get his hands on. His knowledge of music, painting and literature was intimidating. Above all – and this gives his compositions their special colour which distinguishes them from models, contemporaries and even friends like the rivals Honegger and Milhaud from Les Six – he was an enthusiastic visitor to the café concerts, music halls, revues and carnival. There, he enjoyed the impudence, liberty and sensuality. The frivolous, appealing intonation of the chansons repeatedly shines through in his songs. He later jested that he would love to have been a Maurice Chevalier.

Of Les Six, only Georges Auric followed him in this love of amusement and popular Parisian entertainment, while his interest in jazz and the tango was shared by Darius Milhaud and others.

Where the influences of carnival music and the chansons are most obvious, in the Cocardes or the Chan­ sons gaillardes (1925/26) with their obscene texts, he insists on a performance which avoids all irony, and goes even further. “My music must be sung like Schumann or Fauré.” Only once, among the over 150 songs in the Fêtes galantes (1942) do we find the marking “dans le style des chansons-scies de café-concert.”

Like many of his contemporaries, a major influence on his musical social­ isa­ tion was the encounter with the

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UWE SCHWEIKERT

ballet troupe of the Russian impresario Sergei Diagilev, resident in Paris since 1909. He experienced the shock of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps at the Ballets Russes in 1913, and the triumph in 1917 of Parade, the manifesto of the French avantgarde created in collaboration between Cocteau, Picasso and Satie, in which instrumental sounds were supplemented by the sound of typewriters, ships’ horns and pistols.

Poulenc left his traces in all genres.

In terms of numbers, instrumental and vocal compositions dominated, with vocal works taking the lead in terms of importance. Poulenc was primarily a lyricist, a melodist rather than a harmonist. It is indicative that he himself said that the piano accompaniments to the songs were his best piano music.

His over 150 mélodies have taken the French song to an ultimate pinnacle and end. Anyone reading his Journal de mes mélodies (Diary of my songs), which appeared posthumously, and reports on his song compositions in the style of a diary, cannot help but marvel. What often sounds to the listener like easily thrown together and even unintentional, is the result of intensive labour and precise calculation.

Poulenc’s art is an art of allusion which perfects what he learned from predecessors like Duparc, Chabrier, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. Like Debussy, he sought and found his lyrics in the works of great poets, and like Debussy, he was a master of Frenchdeclamation. His own recordings, above all the recordings with his preferred interpreter and partner Pierre Bernac show clearly that for him, language was the basis of both composition and singing. Melody follows the prosody of the language and

the articulation of the vowels and consonants in a way which is unmatched in German, except for the one example of Hugo Wolf. While the Schönberg school subordinates the declamation of texts to the musical material, Poulenc takes the opposite position. For him, the musical gesture arises directly from the word, as in the chansons or the songs of Kurt Weill. “If they wrote on my headstone ‘Here lies Francis Poulenc, the musician of Apollinaire and Éluard’, that would be my ultimate accolade.”

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Paul Éluard (1895–1952) were not his preferred lyricists by accident. His first song cycle, the 1919 Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée, on poems by Apollinaire, already shows Poulenc’s somnambulistic certainty in the sound of emotionless magic, even sober trance, which is the key contributor to the impact of his music. In contrast to Milhaud’s Machines agricoles (1919) or Catalogue de fleurs (1920) – songs on advertising copy at an agricultural exhibition and the catalogue of a flower shop – Poulenc hides behind the tenderness of irony or the mockery of nostalgia. This is why he warns, “Singing Le Bestiaire with irony would be a complete misunderstanding.”

What distinguishes the appeal of these and other Apollinaire settings in Poulenc’s oeuvre is that they walk the narrow line between triviality and magic.

For all their deliberate banality, they are always still mysterious. Éluard’s lyrics, like Apollinaire’s, are an interpretation of reality through poetry, using bold visual associations and metaphors. Their central theme is sensual love transcending all conventions. This relates to Poulenc’s acknowledged homosexuality in a par-

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MONK AND TRAMP

ticular way. He has never responded with music more personally, intimately, or directly than to Éluard’s poems.

“The hand is ruled by the heart” – these lines from a poem of Éluard’s also apply to the cycle Telle jour, telle nuit (1936). The link between words and music is so complete here that you no longer know “whether the poem was written for the mélodie or the mélodie for the poem” (Henri Hell).

The love glorified by poet and composer reaches depths which can also be considered devotion. During the Second World War Éluard joined the Resistance. Poulenc summarised examples of his political poems, including the most famous Resistance poem Liberté, in his cantata Figure humaine, created in 1943 and spread through the Underground, in a “semi-religious mood” as he himself emphasised. The erotic twist to the concept of freedom manifests itself overwhelmingly here in the captivating double chorus setting, as the tempo increasingly accelerates, returning to the initial tempo in the triumphant last verse. “And through the power of a word, I begin my life anew, I was born to know you, to express you – freedom.”

The new seriousness which characterises Telle jour, telle nuit, defines the spirit and style of his music after his return to the Catholic faith. The first sacred piece was Litanies à la Vierge Noire for women’s chorus and organ, under the direct impression of his conversion experience in Rocamadour in August 1936. The pronounced turn to Catholicism was not unusual in France, where the Catholic renewal had attracted prominent supporters such as Paul Claudel and Georges Bernanos among the authors, but further increased the

suspicion of the postwar avantgardists towards Poulenc’s conservatism. The trigger was the death of a friend.

Sacred music took a central place in Poulenc’s oeuvre until the end of his life – plain devotional music for the mass which was also accessible to lay choirs, a cappella compositions such as the Mass in G Major (1937), the choral setting of Salve Regina (1941), Ave verum corpus (1952) or Quatre pe­ tites prières de Saint François d’Assise (1948). Then there were demanding pieces composed more for the concert hall than the church, such as the popular Gloria (1959), written in the style of Vivaldi, Stabat mater (1950), an intensely spiritual piece in the style of a grand motet by Lully or Charpentier, and not least the stirring and even shattering responsories for the three days of Holy Week, Sept Répons des Ténèbres (1962), where Poulenc for the first and last time tackled twelve-tone composition.

Poulenc’s style also clarified with the sacred works. His model for the powerful linearity and largely un­ broken major-minor harmony of his music is Romanesque art. “I like it when the spirit of religion is expressed as clearly and realistically in the sun, as we see it in the Romanesque capitals.” Among the contemporary artists he honours Picasso (who he dedicated Figure hu­ maine to), although the graphic clarity of his conduct of the voices is more reminiscent of Matisse or Dufy. Of the ancients, he honours Mantegna with his crystalline asceticism, while naming the Spanish Baroque painter Zurbarán the patron saint of his mystic contemplation.

Unlike Stravinsky, who is constantly changing his skin, Poulenc has a con-

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sistent personal style from the early days at the end of the First World War to his death in 1963 with only minimal changes, and with a preference for woodwind and the human voice – music which perhaps will not always and in every case arouse enthusiasm, but which has its very own, even unique fascination. The reason is the additive form, as with the otherwise entirely different Leoš Janáček. Short phrases are assembled like sentence elements in a mosaic, by repetition or sequencing, but making use of sharp contrasts in the tightest space. The sentence itself is uncompromisingly objective.

After initial experiments with polytonality, Poulenc favours a linear diatonic Neoclassicism, as also represented

by Stravinsky in the 1920s. Since the mid-1930s he increasingly utilises Re­ naissance a cappella techniques, particularly in his choral works. Even where he adopts the sonata form in his instrumental works, he avoids thematic work.

He mockingly derided the organisation of musical material in serialist form as “dodecaca.” Even counterpoint appears rarely in his choral works, where chordal homophony dominates.

It’s no accident that he revered Bach with a dancing waltz improvisation on the theme B-A-C-H, as his hero Chabrier once did (“I love him like you love a father”), and showed his enthusiasm for Wagner with Quadrille Souvenirs de Munich for piano for four hands, on themes from Tristan and Isolde.

Poulenc only came to opera late. He was familiar with the stage from his youth, as his ballets and numerous music for stage show. After the first opera plans – including Rabelais (Gargantua), Shakespeare (The Tempest, Pericles) and

Apollinaire (Casanova) – remained incomplete, in 1944 he set Apollinaire’s surrealist play Les mamelles de Tirésias as an opera buffa. The clownish style – he himself compares it with pulp magazines – is already evident in the 1932 secular cantata Le bal masqué based on poems by Max Jacob, a work which in its turn follows Stravinsky’s burlesque short operas Renard and Mavra.

In contrast to this masterpiece of the “tramp” Poulenc – although not irreconcilable – is the masterpiece of the “monk” Poulenc, Dialogues des Carmélites. The sardonic jest is followed by the tragedy. In the programme booklet for the French première at the Paris Opéra, Poulenc himself described the history of his opera – how he came to choose the story, what emotions moved him, what aesthetic principles guided him. He did not offer an interpretation, but left that to us, the audience.

Dialogues des Carmélites is by far Poulenc’s most extensive piece – Les mamelles de Tirésias and La voix humaine both last less than an hour – and a full opera. Previously completely inexperienced as a librettist, the composer compressed the play with great aplomb into a dramatically consistent libretto, which – like the Verdi operas he admired – filters psychologically clearly depicted characters from Bernanos’ wordy dialogues, leads to situations which can be set to music, and – particularly important for this material – provides dramatic variety. Bernanos’ Dialogues followed the plan of a film script, and are indeed conversations, confessions in which the female main characters constantly oscillate around death and its overcoming in the promised salvation of God’s mercy.

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This is what Soeur Constance, the youngest, means when she says, ” You don’t die for yourself, but for someone else; or even instead of someone else, who knows?“ Poulenc leaves the weight of confession in the dialogues, but breaks them up in dramatic action.

In this way he both creates space for the music, from the almost naturalistic death of Madame de Croissy to Constance’s childlike naïve garrulity.

Poulenc had to dispose of two prej­ u­dices which could have prevented at least the acceptance and effect of the work – first, that the plot has no love interest, and second, that the dramatic balance is lacking by virtue of the setting in a convent, with its predominance of female voices. We cannot prove if Poulenc knew Puccini‘s oneact Suor Angelica, which is also set in a convent, but we can suspect it.

Like Puccini, Poulenc establishes a uniform intonation, but he goes much further in the musical differentiation of the nuns, because he is concerned with the fate of an entire convent, rather than of a single figure. While his drama also impinges on the secular – particularly through the ending in the revolutionary violence of the story – it is not exclusively determined by individual earlier circumstances, like Angelica, hidden away in the convent because of her shame. The martyr’s death of the 16 Carmelites of Compiègne on the scaffold is an example, taking it into a dimension which the individual tragedy of Angela as shaped by Puccini never touches on.

Poulenc gives great scope in his music for ritual aspects right from the start, for example in the hard, striking orchestral chords or in the gloomily dragging sarabande rhythm, preparing the

oratorical end with the “Salve Regina” sung by the sisters going to their death.

The dwindling of the singers with the inexorable drop of the guillotine until only Blanche’s voice is left at the end, has great dramatic impact. Unlike Bernanos in his reading drama, Poulenc did not ignore the theatre in his composition. Another dramatic feature is the vocal assignment of the five main female roles, which Poulenc made on the basis not only of the five clearly defined models (Amneris, Desdemona, Kundry, Thaïs and Zerlina), but also of the five lead singers at the Paris Opéra (including Denise Duval as Blanche).

Dialogues des Carmélites is a vocal opera, the voices always dominate the orchestra. In the process, Poulenc succeeded in finding a uniform lyrical intonation for the whole, while at the same time giving an individual colour to the individual characters, as prosody needs to be treated with the accuracy of a lieder composer. This goes even beyond the vocal diction of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, despite all the things that connect them, not least the diaphonous gloom which dominates both scores. The strongest contrasts, as already indicated, are between Madame de Croissy and the young novice Constance.

The old prioress, who cannot overcome her fear of death, suffers a difficult death (in Gertrude le Fort’s short story, this is only hinted at). In Poulenc, following Bernanos, it becomes a central and also musically emphasised event in the first act. Her successor, Madame Lidoine, is by contrast characterised by sober linearity, including vocally, as her address shows in Act 2, scene 2. The dry rigour of Mère Marie with her aristocratic origins differs in

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this. She cannot conceal pride, and even arrogance. She is the one who, in Madame Lidoine’s absence, forces her fellow sisters to take the vow of martyrdom, which she then is unable to fulfill. The lively young Constance finally enlivens the dragging seriousness of the music and its gloomy basis, hauling it back into the light and even cheerfulness.

“I am Blanche” is Poulenc’s claim, echoing Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, that’s me!” This statement gives Blanche’s declaration of faith the status of an artistic creed. There is an osmosis produced by the music between the character and her creator.

Blanche only overcomes her fear of life from her childhood in the face of her freely chosen death, showing herself worthy with this step to bear her chosen religious name “de l’agonie du Christ” (“from Christ’s agony” in the garden of Gethsemane).

The fact that Poulenc identifies with his heroine is repeated, with the nameless “Elle”, the young woman in his monodrama La voix humaine (1959). In this one-act opera he shows the nightmarish monologue of a woman left by her loved one, who has attempted suicide and is now talking to him for the last time on the phone. Poulenc himself wrote (in a letter to Louis Aragon) that the spiritual and even metaphysical fear in the Dialogues was needed to present the animal terror in

Cocteau’s tragedy. The overwhelming musical setting of this dialogue with the absent partner, whose statements and behaviour we only see from the reactions of the woman on the phone shows not only how perfectly Poulenc now masters the nuances and transitions between recitative and arioso, but how keenly he understands how to enter into the female psyche.

Where Britten revolves around mas­culine masks in his operas, from Peter Grimes to Aschenbach in Death in Venice, Poulenc’s interest is in facets of femininity. He had composed ballets for women in Les Biches and Aubade, Les mamelles de Tirésias revolve around gender change, the focus is on a group of women in Dialogue des Carmélites and a single woman in La voix humaine – all as if his stage works were about musically imagining and acting out his own share of femininity.

How else should we understand it when he writes to his friend Rose Dercourt-Plaut after completing La voix humaine, “I’m sending you the music for this painful tragedy (my own). It’s a musical confession.” Words which lead to a common creaturely foundation for the confession of Blanche and Elle, the spiritual fear of death in Dialogues des Carmélites and the human despair of La voix humaine – the isolation of the individual in the face of their own death. Poulenc shows us here for the last time the head of Janus.

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MICHAELA SCHUSTER as MADAME DE CROISSY SUPERNUMERARIES of the

VIENNA STATE OPERA Next page: NICOLE CAR as BLANCHE

FRANCIS POULENC / TO HENRI HELL, 14 FEBRUARY, 1954

Definitely this atmosphere of fear was necessary for my ladies.

You’ll see, it’s a fearful atmosphere, and I think that people will have cold chills running down their spines in the intermission. I’ve absolutely hit the mood in the duet between brother and sister to a T. A mixture of anxiety and tenderness.

I’d never have thought that I could write a piece in this tone. I thank God for it, despite the sufferings involved.

And afterwards people will talk about “charming Poulenc” again.

IMPRINT FRANCIS POULENC

DIALOGUES DES CARMÉLITES SEASON 2023/24 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 21 MAY 2023 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors SERGIO MORABITO, NIKOLAUS STENITZER Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Image concept: MARTIN CONRADS, BERLIN (Cover) All performance photos MICHAEL PÖHN Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES All texts were taken from the première programme of the Vienna State Opera. COVER IMAGE Noell Ozvald Unitled #2, 2014 © Noell Oszvald / Courtesy the Hulett Collection. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Andrew Smith.

Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Abbreviations are not marked. Holders of rights who were unavailable are requested to make contact regarding retrospect compensation.

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