Dialogues of Poulenc

France's Composer Francis Poulenc, 58, built a solid reputation as the composer of sophisticated vocal works, frothy, impudent ballets and opera such as Les Mamelles de Tiresias* which gaily urged its audience to "make babies now as you never have before." Sobered by his wartime experience in the resistance, he turned increasingly to more austere works, three years ago undertook an opera based on the late Georges Bernanos' reverent drama The Dialogues of the Carmelites. In one of its rare premieres of modern opera, Milan's La Scala put Poulenc's Dialogues on display.

The Bernanos plot is based on the historical martyrdom of 16 Carmelite nuns during the revolutionary terror in Paris in 1789. The opera follows the spiritual struggles of a young noblewoman, Blanche de la Force, who has joined a Carmelite convent in Compiegne on the eve of the Revolution. Weak and fearful at first, she gradually gains spiritual strength. In a strange contrast, it is the doughty Mother Superior who dies in fear, while the once cowardly Blanche dies a glorious martyr's death; she twice spurns a chance to escape and, with other Carmelites, goes serenely to the guillotine.

To tell this somber-hued tale, Composer Poulenc abandoned surrealist shiftiness and the brassy pyrotechnics which once made him the rage of the Left Bank. The new work proved to be in the 19th century operatic tradition--full of flowing melody, dramatic action, swift scenic shifts from the quiet cloistered walls to the reverberating streets of revolutionary Paris. The opera's most touching scene occurs in Act I, when the Carmelite Mother Superior (movingly sung by Gianna Pederzini) reveals on her deathbed to the sorrowing nuns her fear that God has abandoned her. Aided by La Scala's magnificent sets, the opera builds from that point to a dramatic third-act climax in which Blanche's calm recitation of Deo Patri Sit Gloria is counterpoised against the offstage thuds of the guillotine and the screams of the hysterical mob. The reaction of first-night critics was divided. Some were charmed by the opera's lyricism and moved by its emotional power; others found its music imitative or thought they detected in the more elegant passages the old prewar Poulenc peeping through the sackcloth. "Fine theater, but mediocre music," said Corriere della Sera Music Critic Franco Abbiati. Said the widely read Socialist daily Avanti! chauvinistically: "A truly French poverty in the primary operatic materials." But the Scala opening-night audience, toughest opera audience in the world, rewarded beaming Composer Poulenc by giving the production 19 curtain calls.

*The original poem by Guillaume Apollinaire was a satirical commentary on the declining French birth rate and an exhortation to more fruitful unions.

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