Dialogues des Carmélites brings out the best in Poulenc – and the Royal Opera House

Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an audacious work, much more so than many others that advertise their audacity. It deals with Love and Death, the central topics of opera, but the love is that of God; and death, rather than being a romantic consummation or a stirring tragedy, is something to be terrified of. The central character, Blanche de la Force, is terrified of life too, and her determination to enter a convent is seen initially as an attempt to escape, so that in the powerful second scene of the opera, after being given a hard time by her father and brother, she is subjected to searching questions by the Old Prioress, herself very ill and shortly to face death. Blanche survives the questioning, only to find, first, that Sister Constance, one of her fellow nuns, is too cheerful for her taste, and then to have to witness the horrific final hours of the Prioress, deserted by her faith, in excruciating pain, her last experience being her dark night of the soul, a life of prayer ending in the terror for which she reproached Blanche.

That is Act I, up to the interval in the Royal Opera’s superb new production. It sounds gamey, and anyone who knew Poulenc’s other works, even the great choral pieces, might wonder if he could bring it off without lapsing into cloying pathos or kitsch. Wonderfully, the answer is that he does. He manages to move between the various idioms he cultivated in his bracing instrumental works, the easy colloquial flow of the songs, and the sub-Stravinskyan choral music, without any seams showing. The staple of the dialogues is convincing, without one’s ever feeling that they might as well be spoken. The Debussy of Pelléas and much more Mussorgsky’s Boris are evident but not intrusive elements, some of the Old Prioress’s death scene being almost lifted from the latter.