Dialogues des Carmélites

in original language with Italian and English surtitles
La Fenice staging
with Teatro dell’Opera di Roma

Puccini’s opera In Dialogues des carmélites, Francis Poulenc intones the original literary text, foregoing any modifications to the libretto. Like Berg’s Wozzeck and Weill’s Der Protagonist, it is therefore a work in which music and words are equal in dignity. In an epigraph in his score Poulenc writes: “To the memory of my mother who revealed music to me, to Debussy who gave me the taste for writing it, to Monteverdi, Verdi and Mussorgsky who have been my models here,” quoting these four musicians perhaps precisely because of the common respect they show in their works towards both text and music, first and foremost the great Cremonese composer with his recitar cantando. The subject – taken from the homonymous pièce by Georges Bernanos – is inspired by an event that really happened during the French Revolution at the end of the Terror in 1794: the beheading of sixteen Carmelites who had refused to withdraw from their vows in a public square in Compiègne. The music seems to come from the rhythm of the verbal text itself, modelling itself on its peculiar prosody: an aspect that Poulenc rightly placed in the noblest tradition of mélodie française.