Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites has one of the most heart-stopping endings in all opera. Sixteen Carmelite nuns, refusing to abandon their faith, mount the scaffold to be guillotined one by one, singing the Salve Regina as they go.
Poulenc’s action, based on a true story, is set during the ferment of the French Revolution, the nuns unequivocally representing the persecution of the church during the Reign of Terror. Barrie Kosky’s enthralling new production begins in 18th-century costume but ends in the modern era. In between, the nuns wear timeless black tunics and religious iconography is absent. He thus universalises the issues, doing no violence to the original, but extrapolating themes that chime again and again with our own experience.
Vast tracts of the first two acts are more theological debate than dramatic unfolding. But these “dialogues” about faith, death, sacrifice and fear have never seemed more up-to-date. The traumas faced by Blanche (Sally Matthews superbly reprising the role she took at Covent Garden in 2014), the young aristocrat-turned-nun, go back many years. A modern psychiatrist would doubtless point to the death of her mother in childbirth, with no one to soothe the baby, as the primary cause.
The agonising death of the Old Prioress (graphically enacted by Katarina Dalayman) leads to an arcane debate about the transferability of deaths: perhaps God gave her the wrong death “as a cloakroom attendant might give you the wrong coat”. But then there’s Blanche’s acute and topical observation that “perhaps fear is an illness”.
Given the dramatic inertness of the first two acts, it’s brave of Kosky (aided by Alessandro Carletti’s lighting) to draw things out further with protracted fades that leave a character in silent, transfigured contemplation. It works though: we’re gripped emotionally, even while we’re unsure about some of the theological subtleties.
Katrin Lea Tag’s bleak, unitary set, its sides tapering to a narrow opening at the rear, serves for the nine different locations of the various scenes. Black blood oozes ominously down the walls as the threat approaches. After the interval, introspection and dialogue give way to horrific violence.
The stage directions may stipulate knocks at the door of the convent (“ouvrez la porte!”) and the entry of four commissars. But here, in a tremendous coup de théâtre, a wall caves in terrifyingly as though a bomb has ripped through the building. A brutal, leering mob, wearing caps, hoods and riot gear (like the nuns all in black) burst in, hatred etched into their faces, and the tribunal subsequently accuses the nuns in Orwellian, or perhaps Trumpian, terms to the effect that these upholders of conscience are “enemies of freedom”.
The executions take place offstage, but with each heavily magnified swish of the guillotine blade, a pair of shoes is chillingly flung against the opposite wall of the stage. Parallels with more modern atrocities were not, and did not need to be, spelled out.
In this last act, too, Poulenc’s score takes on a new, weightier dimension and Robin Ticciati was as alert to its Stravinsky-tinged modernism as he had been to the more tender bittersweet dissonances of the earlier acts.
Other vocal standouts in a uniformly strong cast were Karen Cargill (Mother Marie) and Golda Schultz, who brought exceptional warmth of tone and sensitivity of phrasing to the role of the New Prioress.
Never, in my experience, has Poulenc’s masterpiece seemed so searingly a work of our time.
Glyndebourne, to August 27; glyndebourne.com
