Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
The nuns, as they make their way to the scaffold, sing the hymn Salve Regina; the music, growing in religious ecstasy, is punctuated at unpredictable moments by the sickening thud of the blade of the guillotine as one by one their voices are silenced.
At last only the voice of one nun, Sister Constance, is left. Blanche de la Force, rejoining her fellow nuns in their last hour, makes her way through the crowd, her face now ‘free from any vestige of fear’. Constance catches sight of her friend and her face becomes radiant with happiness; then her voice, too, is silenced. Blanche steps forward and mounts the scaffold, singing the last four lines of the Veni Creator before a final thud stills her voice in mid-phrase.
The end of Poulenc’s opera is melodramatic in the best sense of the word: it could have come from a film, and indeed a film script lies at its origin. The novella that inspired the film script took shape in the mind of its author, the German novelist Gertrud von Le Fort, when she noticed a footnote, in a book about the Catholic religious orders, describing the execution of the Carmelite nuns of the convent at Compiègne in the last days of the French Revolution, who went singing to the scaffold.
Before investigating the origins of this libretto for Poulenc’s opera we should observe that it is a thoroughly unusual one, written for an almost entirely female cast of nuns in habit and consisting mainly of their sensitively rendered dialogues, or conversations, with little external action. The themes of these conversations are deep ones: spirituality, anguish, anxiety, fear, the condition of man. The nuns consciously identify their own with Christ’s sufferings; and, in their support for each other in grace, explore the meaning of the Communion of Saints.
There is an irony in the withdrawal from the world of the central character, the young aristocrat Blanche de la Force: her would-be refuge is thrown into the maelstrom of the French revolutionary upheaval, and her attempted detachment from the world becomes an engagement with suffering, even with death.
Poulenc’s operatic setting of this subject has been praised for its extreme faithfulness to the spirit of the libretto, and its success in opera houses testifies to its remarkable effectiveness. Poulenc himself would have been the first to admit this is due to the extraordinary depth and dramatic force of the text. The fascinating task of unravelling the complex literary origins of the Dialogues is, then, the main key to understanding this opera.
Gertrud von Le Fort made the story of the Carmelites executed in the Revolution the subject of her novella The Last at the Scaffold, published in 1931 and translated into English as The Song of the Scaffold. This takes the form of letters from a French nobleman to an aristocratic friend of pre-revolutionary days, describing an event he witnessed in Paris during the closing days of the Revolution. Le Fort’s real starting point was not the historical story, but her imaginary creation of the character of Blanche de la Force, born, as her creator said, of the profound horror of a time overshadowed in Germany by ‘forebodings of a marching destiny’, an incarnation of the mortal anguish of a dying era.
Blanche bears in her sensibility the marks of collective terror, and the book is aimed at the threat of Hitler and Nazism. The only child of the Marquis de la Force is almost pathologically fearful; at the age of 17 she determines to enter the convent of Compiègne, partly out of a genuine calling to the religious life and partly because she seeks protection from the strains, the noise, the excitement of the world, which she is unable to bear. In the convent she comes to terms with her fear, as the nuns go through a period of trial under the shadow of the guillotine.
Blanche is really a 20th century figure, and the author’s decision to transpose her from the present into the time of the French Revolution was a literary device common in most of her work: ‘to transpose present-day problems and personages to a previous age, so as to be able to shape and form them with more objectivity and calm’.
Le Fort’s theme is the working of divine grace, as the nuns find strength in weakness, possible only through grace, over which man has no control. Thus the surname ‘de la Force’ is chosen deliberately. Blanche’s discovery of strength in weakness is contrasted with the opposite experience of Mother Marie of the Incarnation, a forceful aristocratic personality who actively seeks a martyr’s death, but is denied it by the irony that she is absent from the convent when the nuns’ thoughts of martyrdom become a reality. The character of the new prioress, Madame Lidoine, represents a mean between the other two nuns.
The writer Gertrud von Le Fort was a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, a committed Christian writer who believed that Europe must revert to Christian values if peace, order, and justice were to prevail in the face of the threat of fascism.
Her novella struck a deep, responsive chord in another Catholic novelist of ideas, the Frenchman Georges Bernanos when in 1938 he was lent a copy of Le Fort’s book by his friend Father Bruckberger: Bernanos is the real author of Dialogues of the Carmelites. Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was a Catholic polemicist and a major contributor to the revival of novels inspired by Catholicism. He became involved with the Catholic Royalists in opposition to the non-Christian right wing movement Action Française, on the one hand, and left-wing Christian activists on the other.
Bernanos became famous for novels including La Joie (1929), and especially The Diary of a Country Priest (1936). He has been labeled ‘the novelist of holiness’ – although he was a layman himself, the central characters of most of his books are priests, and his personages live at the extreme of the choice between good and evil, disdaining the middle ground. Indeed, Bernanos regarded ‘the average man’ as either an imbecile or a coward. His high-tension, uncompromising spirituality is reflected in a claim that only children, heroes and martyrs are redeemable.
Bernanos was obsessed with the demons of anxiety, fear, the temptation to despair; most of his characters live in some form of isolation and misery, undergoing sometimes in their physical and spiritual suffering an identification with the passion of Christ. He saw true French Catholics as a minority, a view drawing him to examine the role of the Church in the French Revolutionary tradition, and he believed the Church must live closer to horror and fear.
Bernanos was appalled by the Church’s surrender to authority in the Europe of appeasement, and especially in Franco’s Spain, the object of his vitriolic anger and contempt in Les Grands Cimetières sous la Lune (1938). In disgust he went to live in Brazil during the war years, taking Le Fort’s novella with him, reading and re-reading it until he was soaked in its setting and meaning.
In the post-war years Bernanos was a sick man, and disillusioned by the failure of post-war Europe to live up to his expectations of spiritual and political renewal. This was his frame of mind when Father Bruckberger approached him with the scenario of a film he had devised with Philippe Agostini, based with Gertrud von Le Fort’s approval on her novella The Last at the Scaffold. The proposal was that Bernanos write the dialogue.
At first he hesitated, having never written dramatic dialogue before; but soon he became absorbed in the task, and the writing of the Dialogues resulted in what many consider Bernanos’ literary and spiritual testament. One of the most fascinating aspects of the genesis of the Dialogues is that in writing them Bernanos did not consult Le Fort’s novella: perhaps he had lost the book, but in any case his aim was not to dramatise this source but to work from the film scenario.
Le Fort said later that it was very regrettable that Bernanos did not have her book when he was writing the Dialogues; but the similarities are quite remarkable, though where there is wording in common it comes from the scenario. The true relationship is best explained by seeing that behind the film scenario Bernanos had rediscovered the spirit of Le Fort’s work: the two writers share a sympathy with the nuns’ Carmelite spirituality, but Bernanos has approached the story from a subtly different spiritual point of view.
Bernanos’ achievement rapidly transcended the purpose for which it was written, the film. He died before the film could be made, and his literary executors, recognising that he had left an extraordinary document, decided to publish the Dialogues, including the passages he himself had indicated should be retained for publication but omitted from the film.
The title Dialogues of the Carmelites was given by Bernanos’ literary executor on publication in 1949. Produced as a play in 1951 in Zurich, in 1952 in Paris, Bernanos’ text then became the basis for Poulenc’s opera, first produced in 1957 at La Scala, Milan, in Italian, then in Paris later in that year. The film had to wait until 1959, and even then owed more to the vision of Bruckberger than to Bernanos, keeping only 250 of Bernanos’ 1000 lines, and often putting them in a different context for cinematographic reasons. The opera, then, is much more faithful to Bernanos than the film.
The film scenario Bernanos was given to work from differed from Le Fort’s novella in a variety of ways. Whereas she had treated the experience of several of the nuns, the scenarists concentrated on Blanche and her fears; they also stressed the external conflicts, the threat of the Revolution to the nuns, to make the most of opportunities for cinematic effect. The death of the old prioress, to which Le Fort devoted only 10 lines, was treated in an almost melodramatic way – a feature retained by Bernanos for his own purposes. The scenario invented Blanche’s brother, the Chevalier de la Force, to dramatise the relationship between Blanche and the world she had left, as well as the contacts several of the nuns had had with the proscribed aristocratic party. In general the complexity of The Last at the Scaffold was greatly reduced, and this outline gave Bernanos the freedom to bring his characters to life in his own way.
It was not Bernanos’ intention to write a historical story – when Bruckberger sent him a file containing historical material about the nuns from the archives of Compiègne, he sent it back unopened. In his Dialogues Bernanos placed the emphasis principally on the interior and spiritual drama of the nuns. It may seem surprising that an avowed royalist should not have used the opportunity to make these victims of the Revolution mouthpieces for his ideological views. Instead his political inclination is seen, if at all, only in his sympathetic presentation of aristocratic characters such as Blanche’s father and brother, and Mother Marie of the Incarnation. Neither does he neglect the spiritual growth of all the Carmelites including those from a humbler background, like the new prioress Madame Lidoine, and Sister Constance.
This sympathy with Carmelite spirituality goes side by side with a startling frankness about the faults and virtues of the Carmelites, scandalising only to people with a false idea of the religious life and of spiritual life in general. Bernanos faithfully presents the detail of the ordinary life of the nuns, in their daily round of prayer and work: the faults of pride and obstinacy to be overcome, the moodiness, the petty jealousies, the inward trials to be faced.
I have it on good authority that Bernanos’ picture is a true one, and not just in the details of the convent life – the exploration of the characteristic Carmelite spirituality rings true. The Carmelite order is devoted to the strict contemplative life, a life of collective and individual solitude. Continuous prayer is emphasised, especially mental prayer; the mastery of the passions, self-government by perfect charity.
Bernanos’ insight no doubt comes from his admiration for St. Teresa of Avila, the great 16th century reformer of the Carmelite order, founder of the strict ‘discalced’ or ‘barefooted’ Carmelites. St. Teresa was noted for commonsense realism and practicality, allied to a mystical spirituality, a combination manifest in the questions put to Blanche by the old prioress during her interview for admission to the convent – in her understanding that detachment from the world is to be sought not for its own sake, that the justification of the order and its rule is not mortification or the safeguarding of virtue, but prayer; that it is Blanche’s weakness that will be tested, not her strength.
Blanche sees the Carmelites as going into battle – a view of the spiritual life shared with St. Teresa and with Bernanos, of whom it has been said that he would be more in place on a battlefield than at a lecturer’s desk.
Bernanos’ most crucial and daring theme is broached in the dialogues between Blanche and the simple, cheerful country girl Constance: the idea that, in the Communion of Saints ‘one does not die alone, one dies for others and even in the place of others’. Constance later tries to give herself sacrificially for Blanche by taking on responsibility for Blanche’s declining of the vow of martyrdom, and the idea is given a yet more profound meaning through the scene of the death of the old prioress. Bernanos’ other books show a virtual obsession with such scenes of death agony, and here, in the grimness of her own death – a death in her eyes ‘alone and helpless, without the slightest consolation’– the prioress seeks to pass grace to the most threatened of her charges, Blanche. Through her ‘bad death’ given for Blanche, this aristocratic nun undergoes an identification with the passion of Christ, including the sense of dereliction by God.
Bernanos’ literary and theological daring could only be acceptable in a writer of deep spiritual sensitivity. It is mainly in this emphasis on passing grace from one to another through redeeming self-sacrifice (characteristic, incidentally, of Carmelite spirituality) that Bernanos differs from Le Fort, who sees Blanche as receiving grace directly from God without human intermediary. This theme is the real core of the Dialogues.
The historical setting, while secondary, is nevertheless truthful – it is based on an account of the fate of the nuns of Compiègne written by Mother Marie of the Incarnation, she who by irony escaped the martyrdom she had encouraged among the nuns. She is the nuns’ main mouthpiece of opposition to the revolutionaries. The crisis for the nuns actually came less from the dissolution of the contemplative orders in 1790 than from the opposition of many clergy to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This opposition was ordered by the Pope, and through it the ‘non-juring’ clergy became associated with the aristocratic counter-revolution.
The scenes where these historical events impinge on the Carmelite community are among the most dramatic in the opera, and give Poulenc an opportunity to characterise the revolutionary mob in music, with their terrifying song ça ira.
Part of the immense impact of Bernanos’ Dialogues on publication was due to their combination of spiritual profundity with a clear, simple, serene style of writing, in contrast to Bernanos’ usual highly charged and rhetorical pamphlets and novels. The precision and directness of the lines no doubt owes much to being conceived for immediate impact on the screen. Here is a clue why a text apparently so unpromising for an opera should have appealed to Poulenc.
As the composer’s biographer Henri Hell observes, at first sight there was no aesthetic reason to provide the eloquent lines of Bernanos with music at all; nor do such subjects as the Communion of Saints and the transference of grace lend themselves to operatic treatment. But, Hell also says ‘the self-sufficiency of the work of Bernanos invited Poulenc to discover the music with which it should be ideally mated’, and Poulenc’s association with Bernanos was a marriage of kindred spirits.
Poulenc reacted with enthusiasm when (in 1953) the director of the Ricordi publishing house suggested to him an opera for La Scala on Bernanos’ text. The composer set to work immediately and the work was completed and orchestrated by June 1956. In the meantime a considerable difficulty had arisen over the rights to the Dialogues, threatening its use as an opera libretto. Tension over this drove Poulenc to the verge of a nervous breakdown, a sign how deeply he had invested himself in the subject.
French critic Claude Rostand said of Poulenc ‘there is in him something of the monk and something of the street urchin’. Poulenc’s early works, by which he became best known outside France, with their irreverence for tradition and their wit reinforced the street urchin image. But Poulenc, looking back over his career, said of his choral and religious music ‘I think, in fact, that I’ve put the best and most genuine part of myself into it…I have the feeling that in this sphere I’ve really produced something new’.
Poulenc’s father was deeply religious, in a very liberal way, but it was not until the 1930s that ‘the monk’ in his son Francis came to the surface, under the influence of the death in a car crash in 1935 of his very close friend the composer and critic Pierre-Octave Ferroud. Poulenc immediately set out on a pilgrimage to Rocomadour, where a virgin carved out of blackwood inspired his first religious work, the Litanies à la vierge noire (1936); this was followed by the Mass of 1937 and the Motets for a Time of Penitence (1938-9). Poulenc’s preoccupation with religious subjects continued with the Stabat Mater begun in 1949, and the Gloria of 1959, one of his last works.
Poulenc was also deeply involved in the problems and challenges of setting words to music; his friendship and artistic collaboration with the baritone Pierre Bernac helping to stimulate a rich literature of song, setting a wide variety of poetry. All these elements of Poulenc’s make-up came together in his response to the work of Bernanos, with whose obsession with fear and the temptation to despair he could identify as a man who understood all too well the terrors of depression.
Fidelity to the text was Poulenc’s main aim, and he set it as written, making only minor cuts to the Dialogues. Bernanos’ friend Albert Béguin paid tribute to Poulenc’s achievement: ‘You seem to me to have brought off a major tour de force in adapting the text of the Dialogues des Carmélites to the requirements of a musical work, by remaining nevertheless absolutely faithful to its spirit and to the main lines of a very delicate architecture…I rediscover all of Bernanos in your presentation’.
Roger Nichols (in the New Grove Dictionary) writes that Poulenc was forced by the brevity and number of the scenes in Dialogues of the Carmelites to discriminate painstakingly between types of vocal line, of rhythm, even of vowel sound – especially as he was writing for an almost all-female cast. In this he acknowledged as a model the work of Debussy, particularly in Pelléas et Mélisande where that composer had likewise found, in Maeterlinck, a kindred spirit. Poulenc’s aim, like Debussy’s, was to make the text heard through music. He had studied the work of Monteverdi, from whom he learnt to blend the lyrical and recitative styles, of which Monteverdi had written ‘The recitative style is when one speaks while singing, the lyrical style is when one sings while speaking’.
There is nothing ascetic about Poulenc’s style in this opera – on the contrary, he uses the full seductiveness, charm, and sentiment of which his music is capable, and a rich, almost voluptuous harmonic language at times, at first hearing seemingly removed from the spiritual mysteries of which he treats. The music has been described as ‘veering between the saccharine and a Stravinskyan austerity, but nevertheless hard to resist’.
The orchestra, a full one, is used discreetly, underlining sung speech in a way that owes something to Mussorgsky and coming into its own in the interludes linking the scenes, setting the mood for what is to come. The opera is dedicated to the memory of Poulenc’s mother, but also ‘to Debussy, Monteverdi, Verdi and Mussorgsky’, the keys to Poulenc’s own blend of recitative with a highly lyrical style.
But for all Poulenc’s achievement – unobtrusiveness perhaps its chief strength – the opera remains a humble tribute to the work of Bernanos: a most unconventional dramatic experience, as moving spiritually and emotionally as it is masterly from the literary point of view.
First published in Opera Australia 1984/2016