Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites

Francis Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites

Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris 2013

Jérémie Rhorer, Olivier Py, Sophie Koch, Patricia Petibon, Véronique Gens, Sandrine Piau, Rosalind Plowright, Topi Lehtipuu, Philippe Rouillon, Annie Vavrille, Sophie Pondjiclis, François Piolino, Jérémy Duffau, Yuri Kissin, Matthieu Lécroart

France TV Culturebox, ARTE Live Web Internet Streaming - 21 December 2013

Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites seems to be a work almost made for Olivier Py. The French actor and director's profile is high at the moment, featuring prominently at the Paris Opéra this season and most recently having directed Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet for La Monnaie as part of a series of productions of the major French works of the 19th century - a project that is now on hold while he takes up the running of the Avignon Festival. Based on a drama by Georges Bernanos relating the martyrdom of 16 nuns executed during the French revolution, Poulenc's 20th century masterpiece would however seem to fit more closely with Py's very public profile in France as a Catholic and as something of a controversial figure or revolutionary in the opera world.

The two elements of course don't fit all that well together, but they do provide much of the conflict of opposing ideals that lie at the heart of the work and provide fertile ground for this particular director to work with. Common to both however is the idea of 'Liberté' and it's the manner in which this freedom is explored and eventually found by Blanche de la Force that is central to the work.  The idea of 'Liberté' consequently features prominently in the production, the word scrawled on a wall by one of the revolutionaries (one of the servants of the De la Force house) who are becoming more present on the streets, and it is transformed into 'Liberté en Dieu' (Freedom in God) by the time of Poulenc's incredible musical 'Salve Regina' setting of the execution of the nuns. There is some distance that has to be covered between those two points, but Py's direction and the superb casting for the production cover those well.

One of the main motivating factors that drive Blanche to this revelation, a subject that is at the heart of many of the dialogues in the opera, is fear. Blanche is a timid creature, not made for the real world, suffering from an almost pathological fear of death. Yet death and fear seems to surround her, first through the death of her mother as a young girl, and with the upsurge of revolutionary violence on the streets of Paris that waylays her carriage at the start of the opera on her way home to her brother and father. The outside world holds too many horrors for the young woman, so Blanche decides to withdraw from it and enter a Carmelite convent. She envisages some kind of "heroic life" as a Carmelite nun, but her ideas are soon dispelled by the Mother Superior, even more so when the old woman dies an agonising, blaspheming death soon afterwards.

Olivier Py's direction of this important scene is characteristic of the simplicity suggested by the setting, but also the underlying force of the highly-charged crises of faith and personal weaknesses that each of the women overcome over the course of events that lead to their eventual martyrdom. Madame de Croissy is pinned vertically high on the wall in her bed, beyond the reach of Blanche and the nuns in attendance on her, the harsh lighting from below the stage casting long terrifying shadows mark her bitterness at the nature of her painful, agonising death. Elsewhere the stage is similarly plainly adorned, the lighting depicting a world of stark black and white, with separating walls reflecting the reality of the convent's walls, as well as being symbolic of Blanche's retreat from the world.

Significantly, the walls open, separate and rise and at one stage to create the form of a cross, and it's in such moments - and in the little tableaux scenes - that Olivier Py makes his mark in his consideration of the work's religious significance. One doesn't need to be a Christian believer to recognise that Dialogues des Carmélites deals with more fundamental issues beyond those of questions of religious faith.  The director's own personal faith does at least encourage him to follow through the essential questions of freedom, equality and brotherhood (or sisterhood in this case) that relate to the Revolutionary setting and in how they pertain to religious belief - freedom from fear, freedom of expression, freedom to practise one's faith, freedom from the tyranny of death in the promise of an afterlife.

Where one stands on such questions no doubt determines the staging of the all-important finale, as can be seen from Nikolaus Lehnhoff's starkly final extinguishing of the light in Hamburg marked by each fall of the guillotine, or indeed in Dmitri Tcherniakov's complete subversion of the message in the hugely controversial Paris production where all the nuns incredibly remain alive at the conclusion. Olivier Py's creation of the final scene for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées is as plain and simply dressed as it the production is elsewhere, with no additional dramatic effects. At the fall of the guillotine, each Carmelite nun, dressed in a plain white robe, simply drops her head and walks towards the light of the stars at the back of the stage. This more clearly responds to the religious message of the work, and - as one of the greatest coups de théâtre in all of opera - Py's staging of it is unquestionably just as effective as the scene ought to be.

Poulenc's score for the opera is also filled with the same kind of religious fervour and conductor Jérémie Rhorer consequently takes the orchestra through a robust musical performance of the work. In contrast to Kent Nagano's interpretation, there's less of the shimmering Debussy here and more of the muscular Mussorgsky that form part of the work's musical influences. There's almost a strident romanticism about the performance here, one that also hints at film-music type composition with dramatic underscoring, but Poulenc's score isn't so easy to pin down and Rhorer also manages to bring out moments of beauty in its expressionistic touches.

More than anything however, the score to Dialogues des Carmélites is attuned to the voices, to the dialogues, to conveying the words and their underlying sentiments with maximum expression. The outstanding cast assembled here are certainly capable of achieving that. It's not so much the variety of voices - although they combine and interrelate wonderfully across the whole female range - but it's particularly fine when it's sung by such a distinguished cast of distinctive singers like Patricia Petibon (Blanche), Sophie Koch (Mère Marie), Véronique Gens (Madame Lidoine), Sandrine Piau (Sister Constance) and Rosalind Plowright (Madame de Croissy). It's a rare treat to have such singers all together in one production and they each bring considerable personality to the work. The male singers also have an important role to play and those are capably performed by Topi Lehtipuu (Chevalier de La Force), Philippe Rouillon (the Marquis) and François Piolino (the Convent Priest).

This production of Dialogues des Carmélites can be viewed on-line from the Culturebox website or on ARTE Live Web.  Subtitles on both sites are in French only.

Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites

Francis Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites

Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich 2010

Kent Nagano, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Alain Vernhes, Susan Gritton, Bernard Richter, Sylvie Brunet, Soile Isokoski, Susanne Resmark, Hélène Guilmette, Heike Grötzinger, Anaïk Morel, Kevin Conners

Bel Air Classiques

Clever modern concept stagings of opera are all very well in the right place and with the right kind of opera. Sometimes however, it just seems perverse to take them out of their original context, particularly when the opera applies to a specific historical period or event that is explicitly referred to in the libretto. There seems little value then in “updating” Poulenc’s 1956 opera Dialogues des Carmélites away from its French Revolutionary setting or the historical incident in 1794 where sixteen nuns from a Carmelite convent in Compiègne were executed for resisting the confiscation of the church’s assets and the dissolution of the order.

You just know however that a controversial director like Dmitri Tcherniakov is never going to go down a conventional route, or even find an intermediary space (like the fine 2008 Nikolaus Lehnhoff production in Hamburg), where the actual themes of the opera beyond the historical setting can be examined, themes relating to the question of life in the face of death, fear of death and the nature of martyrdom for a cause. No, Tcherniakov doesn’t follow any expected route, but what clearly is his intention – as it is in all his productions, whether they actually work for an audience or not – is to attempt to cut the distance between the themes that are sometimes obscured by an overly elaborate and literal period setting, and strip back the staging in order to give the music and the singing the necessary environment that will allow provoke a reaction in the viewer towards the subtext. In the right kind of opera, it’s not so much about imposing a concept or an interpretation or being deliberately obscure for the sake of it, as allowing the audience the space to relate to the themes in their own personal way.

Whether that is achieved in this production of Dialogues des Carmélites recorded at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich is however debatable, as the staging seems to do its utmost to actually distance itself from the audience and box it into its own little world (the box within a box idea is also used in Tcherniakov’s staging for Verdi’s Macbeth, released by Bel Air alongside this). The period is non-specific but modern (even though the De la Force family still have a servant and chauffeur-driven coach), and Blanche de la Force certainly doesn’t enter any traditional kind of convent where the nuns wear habits. Perhaps reflecting Blanche’s fear of the world outside – and despite the Prioress Madame de Croissy’s insistence that it is not a refuge – the convent does resemble a women’s refuge, with all the sisters wearing heavy woollen cardigans and sensible skirts, all nursing mugs of hot tea.

There is no reason however why the questions that arise in the opera – making sense of life in the face of approaching death, finding order and meaning in it, and examining how each person individually comes to terms with their mortality – can’t be examined outside of the historical context of the French revolution. Poulenc based the opera on a play by Georges Bernanos, which in turn was based on an original 1931 novel by Gertrud von le Fort (’Die Letzte am Schafott‘), which itself used the subject as a means of commenting on German social disorder following the fall of the Weimar Republic – so it’s certainly artistically valid for Tcherniakov to update the work if it’s in the service of throwing a new light on the themes. What is rather more controversial is that the director radically changes the original ending – which is a really powerful conclusion. Tchernaikov’s finale, which practically turns the original on its head, is just as powerful and dramatic in its own right, but whether it “improves” or casts any further light on the actions of Blanche de la Force is debatable. It could just be that it’s the complete disregard of the traditional approach that is what is really shocking about the ending here, and it results in an equal amount of audible booing and cheers at the director’s curtain call.

At the very least however, Tcherniakov’s staging forces the audience to think about the subject again in a different way, and it’s an opera that really does have a lot of deeper subtexts to be drawn out of it. What makes this production even more worthwhile in this respect is the conducting of Kent Nagano. The music in Dialogues des Carmélites can be a little strange and unsettling, even with some hauntingly beautiful melodies that evoke Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélissande, but Nagano seems to bring out those ambiguous qualities of the opera and its similarities to Debussy even more strongly, with a greater sense of warmth and harmony than, for example the Hamburg production. That harmony and warmth is also more evident in the singing – although not in every case – so I wouldn’t necessarily say that one is better than the other, but I certainly find the interpretation here much more intriguing, creating new resonances and opening up the opera in an unexpected way.

Whether the staging works or not in a live context, it certainly doesn’t come across well on DVD or Blu-ray. The majority of the opera takes place (as you can see from the cover) within a boxed room on the stage. This means that crossbeams frequently get in the way, obscuring the view of the singers, which is further hampered by a gauze screen that softens the image, desaturates the colours and causes hazy netting effects. The HD reproduction of this consequently isn’t good, and the encoding doesn’t really help matters, looking rather blurry in movements. Between the net effect and the encoding, this does appear to be a visually substandard release. (Although the cover states it’s a BD25 disc it is however, as you would expect, BD50 – ie. dual-layer). The audio tracks are better, the singing mostly clear, the orchestration warm and enveloping, but also revealing a good amount of colour and detail. It’s no match for the precise crystalline clarity of the DTS HD-MA 7.1 mix on the Hamburg Staatsoper production, and if you would prefer a more faithful version of the opera I would highly recommend that release, but there are enough intriguing elements in the Nagano/Tcherniakov production to make this certainly worth your time.

Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites

Francis Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites

Staatsoper Hamburg, 2008

Nikolaus Lehnhoff, Andreas Morell, Simone Young, Anne Schwanewilms, Alexia Voulgaridou, Nikolai Schukoff, Wolfgang Schöne

Arthaus Musik

Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera, for which he both composed the music and wrote the libretto (from a play by Georges Bernanos), has many distinct and individualistic qualities that set it apart, not least of which is the unique subject matter of the execution of Carmelite nuns by French Revolutionaries in 1794. The treatment however is just as fascinating, the subject of death ominously present not only through the novice nun Blanche’s pathological fear of death, through the suffering of ailing Mother Superior and the eventual martyrdom of the nuns, but also in the delicacy of the musical accompaniments that evoke an almost romantic relationship or fascination with the idea of death.

One other notable and unusual aspect of Dialogues des Carmélites is the dominance and importance of female voices, in recitative dialogue and in relation to one another. The opera really is a celebration of the female voice, ranging from soprano to mezzo-soprano and contralto, all used marvellously and, it has to be said, sung magnificently in this production. There are male roles in the opera and they are not insignificant, lending a welcome variety of colour and tone to the overpowering predominance of female singing that could otherwise become a little tiring at such length.

The staging of this Hamburg production is a masterpiece of the minimalist style, well suited to the dark subject matter and achieving incredible intensity and drama mainly from its use of light and shade and some subtle colouration. It’s perhaps a little too intense and austere when the opera is more lyrically varied in its score and libretto, but it’s true that the sense of death is omnipresent, the questions of faith and life discussed by the nuns all coloured by consideration of death. When combined with the remarkable singing, the power of the denouement is simply shattering. A truly unique opera experience.

The Blu-ray quality is superb, certainly in terms of the audio - an exceptional DTS HD Master Audio 7.1 mix - although, as noted elsewhere, there are issues with the image. Rather than being a flaw with the recording or the transfer, the mosquito noise dots actually seem to be part of the staging, caused by a fine gauze screen at the front of the stage. This is often used in stage productions for light diffusion, but rarely throughout a whole opera. Although it seems a strange decision to film the opera with a screen in-between, it’s presumably part of the production design to soften the otherwise harsh direct lighting. The dots are not always noticeable - only when performers are filmed in close-up and when they are towards the front of the stage. There’s little here however that spoils the enjoyment of this beautifully staged and fascinating opera.