The Standard Repertoire: Dialogues des Carmélites

Neither exercises force nor submits to it

This post is part of an ongoing series about the operas of the standard repertoire. The most recent entries: Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Nixon in China, Rigoletto, Faust, The Marriage of Figaro. To see them all, check the “opera” tag.

A poster by François Berthoud for a 2022 Opernhaus Zürich production of Dialogues des Carmélites.

The scene everyone talks about is the one at the end. The nuns in Poulenc’s 1956 opera Dialogues des Carmélites, sentenced to death during the post-revolutionary Reign of Terror, sing Salve Regina while walking one by one to the guillotine¹. The music is interrupted at irregular intervals by the sound of the falling blade: the listener can’t quite predict when it’s coming, and each time we hear it, one voice drops from the chorus. At first all the nuns sing the melody in unison, but later, when only two voices remain, they harmonize. Finally, the last nun sings alone. La foule – the crowd – hums quietly in the background, watching. The orchestra plays a calm but relentless walking pulse underneath. Poulenc’s music directions indicate that it should be calm and peaceful, but it never fails to raise my heart rate. It’s the kind of scene that only opera can deliver.

Salve Regina, which aims above all to deliver a gut-punch, isn’t characteristic of the rest of the opera, which is sung mostly in recitative² and is, in structure, much closer to a play than musical theatre. It also paints a much more complicated and ambivalent picture of martyrdom than its famous final scene suggests.

The protagonist of Dialogues des Carmelites is Blanche de la Force, the daughter of a minor aristocrat in Compiègne. Blanche has suffered since childhood from what we would now call an anxiety disorder, and the revolution has made her anxiety nearly debilitating. After an incident where her carriage is surrounded by a mob, she asks her father for permission to become a nun. Although it’s transparent that she’s looking for an escape from her fears — fear of the world, fear of other people — she’s able to frame this decision to herself and her father as one of heroism and self-sacrifice, arguing that without the noise and strain of society, she’d be capable of great things.

When she arrives at the convent, the elder prioress immediately seeks to disabuse her of the idea that the Carmelite order is a refuge, a place to run away from the dangers of the world. The order does not protect us, she says. Blanche is undeterred. She is attracted to a life where she does not have to make any decisions, where she can submit to a greater authority. Blanche finds, unfortunately, that her fears follow her: when the old prioress dies in dread and agony, uncomforted by ideas of God or heaven, Blanche is deeply disturbed.

There’s another nun at the convent, Sister Constance, who is cheerful, friendly, and entirely fearless. She loves the idea of sacrificing her life for a greater cause — or even a smaller cause. She’s a born martyr, and a bit cringe, which I suspect is a necessary condition of same. She tells Blanche cheerfully about her premonition that the two of them will die together, on the same day; Blanche’s reaction is not a kind one.

In the opera’s second act, government agents come to inform the nuns that they are evicted from their convent and that their order must be disbanded. They are forbidden, on pain of death, from wearing religious garb and continuing to associate. Once the agents leave, one of the elder nuns proposes that the order take a vow of martyrdom, but only if agreement is unanimous. They vote in secret, and when it’s revealed that there was one vote against, everyone knows it was Blanche. But Constance forces Blanche’s hand: she speaks up, claims that she was the dissenting vote, but that she’s changed her mind and wants to take the vow. Blanche does not have the courage to die — but neither does she have the courage to risk the disapproval of the nuns by correcting Constance’s account. Instead, she flees in secret. Her fear of disapproval, of embarrassment and shame, may be greater even than her fear of death.

The opera is not very much about the French Revolution, or even about religion, but rather an exploration of Blanche’s fearfulness in the face of an indifferent, violent, and rapidly changing world. What is the nature of her weakness, and is it a moral failing? Surely it is not a failing simply to be afraid of a dark and uncertain future. But the opera does suggest that attempting to hide from upheaval is futile — history leaves few refuges intact — and that trying to dress up cowardice or passivity in the language of grace and detachment is not only futile, but dishonorable.

It also offers an austere version of Christianity and the duties of a nun, one where God cannot offer protection from harm, relief from fear, or even confidence that one’s life and work has value. Its vision reminds me most closely of Simone Weil’s in Gravity and Grace. The passive resistance of the nuns could be an example of a love that “neither exercises force nor submits to it”:

The love of Phaedrus. He neither exercises force nor submits to it. That constitutes the only purity. Contact with the sword causes the same defilement whether it be through the handle or the point. For him who loves, its metallic coldness will not destroy love, but will give the impression of being abandoned by God. Supernatural love has no contact with force, but at the same time it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection from the coldness of steel. Armour, like the sword, is made of metal. Murder freezes the soul of the man who loves only with a pure love, whether he be the author or the victim, so likewise does everything which, without going so far as actual death, constitutes violence. If we want to have a love which will protect the soul from wounds, we must love something other than God.

There’s a full Metropolitan Opera production of Dialogues des Carmelites available to watch on YouTube. Renée Fleming, in the introduction, describes it as “A story of women’s heroism that should inspire us all,” a characterization that’s almost laughable to me. On the surface, sure, it’s about being ready to die for your faith. The opera wants Blanche to overcome her fear, and perform her final act of self-sacrifice alongside the noble nuns. And, eventually, she does. But when I consider Carmélites, it’s an ambivalent opera, rather than a heroic one. Its narrative isn’t really about bravely standing up to power, or sticking by your principles, or even trusting in God. Blanche tells herself she’s following a heroic path in order to paper over faults in her character — too eager to sign on to a ready-made narrative about religious life, hoping she’s being offered a relief from her own weaknesses, without being prepared for the full consequences of her choice. In the beginning, she “sacrifices” her life to the convent because her anxieties have shrunk its value to next to nothing. It’s only in engagement with the things she fears that her life becomes valuable again.

1. The story is adapted from a novella by Gertrud von le Fort, based on the real-life Martyrs of Compiègne, who were guillotined only ten days before Robespierre. The novella was also adapted into a movie starring Jeanne Moreau, which you can watch on YouTube.

2. This is an operatic term referring to the “in between” sections of an opera that, while sung, aren’t musical numbers like arias or choruses. Usually the line of the music mimics the inflections of speech rather than sounding melodic. Full-throated opera singing often makes it difficult to understand the words being sung; the point of recitative, conventionally, is to make it possible to follow the opera’s plot.