Dialogues Of The Carmelites

[Chiquitunga]

Have you guys heard of this production, [url="http://www.theatreinchicago.com/playdetail.php?playID=923"]Dialogues of the Carmelites[/url]? It was on the front page of the entertainment section of the Chicago Tribune - "Nuns, faith and death" with a big picture of a Carmelite in full habit on stage.

It said in the article it's a life changing production, actually - didn't give any negative view of Catholicism. It's about the French [url="http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/martyr05.htm"]Carmelite martyrs of Compiegne[/url].

[url="http://www.lyricopera.org/productions.aspx?arrRef=20078"]Dialogues .. [/url]on Lyric Opera site.

Edited February 17, 2007 by Margaret Clare

[Chiquitunga]

[url="http://www.lyricopera.org/productions.aspx?arrRef=20078"]http://www.lyricopera.org/productions.aspx?arrRef=20078[/url]

[Totus Tuus]

Is this is opera about the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne?

[Chiquitunga]

yep

[Birgitta Noel]

Oh! But why do tickets have to be SO EXPENSIVE?!

[Didymus]

my sister and I were gonna buy tickets for my parents for their anniversary or something, but she might have decided on the Barber of Seville. Are you gonna see it Margaret Clare?

[Chiquitunga]

hmm .. probably not .. though my mom did ask me if I wanted to go ... But I might like to see it on DVD, which is available.

[Totus Tuus]

[quote name='Margaret Clare' post='1198681' date='Feb 17 2007, 10:00 PM']hmm .. probably not .. though my mom did ask me if I wanted to go ... But I might like to see it on DVD, which is available.[/quote]

Good idea. That way if you fall asleep you won't be wasting your money :

Hehe, I'm sure it's a good opera but I did fall asleep in the Phantom of the Opera so maybe operas just aren't my thing

[Chiquitunga]

Here's the article from the Tribune:
[font="Book Antiqua"]
[quote][b][size=3]Moving, exciting, horrifying 'Carmelites'[/size]
Lyric Opera's first staging of Poulenc's opera about nuns, faith and death

By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic
Published February 16, 2007

There are not many operas in the active repertory that qualify as truly life-changing experiences.

One of them is French composer Francis Poulenc's masterpiece, "Dialogues of the Carmelites," which will receive its belated Lyric Opera of Chicago premiere Saturday afternoon at the Civic Opera House.

"Dialogues of the Carmelites" is not an "easy" opera for a general audience to understand, nor does it yield all its subtly nuanced pleasures at first hearing: You have to pay close attention to the text, which Poulenc's music fortunately allows you to do. But, as soprano Patricia Racette has pointed out, "when people get it, they really get it"--and find their lives changed in the process.

Stage director Robert Carsen's production, revived here by Didier Kersten, marks the 50th anniversary of the opera's first performance, at Milan's La Scala, in 1957. It also marks the first major professional staging of "Carmelites" in the Chicago area since 1982, when the Hinsdale Opera Theater ventured the work. It has also been mounted at Northwestern University and at Dominican University in River Forest, where soprano Denise Duval (for whom Poulenc wrote the leading soprano role) and a then-unknown young baritone from Downers Grove named Sherrill Milnes appeared in a 1962 production.

Although the storyline is fictional (adapted by Poulenc from the play by Georges Bernanos), the opera's background--the martyrdom of the Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror--is ripped from the pages of history. Its subject, in Carsen's view, is "faith and the human ability to transcend human cruelty and oppression."

The work's central figure is Blanche de la Force (soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian), a young Parisian aristocrat who, filled with anxiety by the surrounding social and political upheaval, retreats from the world by entering the Carmelite monastery at Compiegne. (The word "monastery" rather than "convent" is appropriate for the Carmelite order.)

There she encounters Mme. De Croissy, the old prioress and mother superior (mezzo Felicity Palmer); Mme. Lidoine, the humble and practical new prioress (soprano Patricia Racette); Mother Marie (mezzo Jane Irwin), who persuades the nuns to take the vow of martyrdom; and Sister Constance, the good-humored novice (soprano Anna Christy), who shocks Blanche with her belief that both nuns will die young and together.

The opera, as its title suggests, unfolds as a series of dialogues during which Blanche undergoes a spiritual journey from vague terror to serene acceptance of a common fate in which the Carmelites had always believed and even longed for.

[size=3][u]Poulenc, who rediscovered his Catholic faith following the death of a friend in 1936[/u], once said the opera really is about the state of grace and its transference from one person to another--thus his treatment of the old prioress' final suffering as a sacrifice that enables Blanche to "die well." The challenge was to make us care about this dedicated but fairly ordinary group of women caught up in an extraordinary destiny. Poulenc achieved as much, and magnificently so.
[/size]
His wonderful score achieves something else--making "Carmelites" succeed as both an opera of abstract religious ideas (never particularly easy for composers to bring off) and an opera stocked with dramatically credible people and situations. Poulenc wrote masterfully for the voice, and his exquisitely crafted vocal lines manage to take on a ravishing beauty or fierce power here, depending upon the dramatic situation. (emphasis added by Margaret Clare :j)

"I hope that with our production of `Carmelites' the audience will somehow be able to feel the structure of the music," says Carsen. "I thought it was very important to have a lot of dramatic tension [onstage]. When you take the audience to a deeper level of consciousness, hopefully they will be moved or excited or horrified in an equally intense way."

Poulenc's score may not boast the hum-along arias the average opera-goer craves, yet certain episodes leap out at the listener with undeniable emotional and lyrical force.

One is the scene, crucial to an understanding of the work, in which Blanche and Constance discuss the meaning and implications of death--so transparently written that its effect approaches the sublime. Another is the ravishing scene in which the Chevalier de la Force (tenor Joseph Kaiser) tries to persuade Blanche to leave the monastery, unmistakably a love duet even if it happens to be sung by a sister and brother.

Above all, there is the final scene in which the nuns, having been condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal, walk to the guillotine as they sing the "Salve Regina" against a musically unrelated chorus from the crowd. The women's voices drop out one by one as they are executed.

The first time I heard "Carmelites" in the theater, at Oberlin College in the mid-1970s, that scene proved so deeply moving that people on all sides of me were weeping--I was too.

`Dialogues of the Carmelites'

When: Opens at 2 p.m. Saturday

Where: Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive

Price: $32-$179; 312-332-2244[/font][/b][/quote]

Edited February 18, 2007 by Margaret Clare

[Chiquitunga]

[quote name='Totus Tuus' post='1198690' date='Feb 17 2007, 10:05 PM']Good idea. That way if you fall asleep you won't be wasting your money :

Hehe, I'm sure it's a good opera but I did fall asleep in the Phantom of the Opera so maybe operas just aren't my thing [/quote]

Well actually, Phantom is not even an opera really, but a musical, so then you might [i]really[/i] fall asleep at an opera.

Edited February 18, 2007 by Margaret Clare

[Piccoli Fiori JMJ]

My school is selling discounted tickets for it, but I can only buy one and I'm not sure if they still are either...

[williamb]

I saw the opera in Portland, Oregon about 4 years ago. At the pre-lecture the researcher said that there were several differences between the opera and what really happened of course. In real life they all wanted to stop the guillotining by offering themselves as martyrs, so they would sing really loud where people could here them, "the people on the revolutionary councilare jerks and idiots and they would sing songs in praise of the late Louis XVI. However their sacrifice was not without effect, the very last guillotining was like the day after theirs. The crowds that watched were usually very noisy but they dispersed after the sisters guillotings and the silence was unbeleivable.

[williamb]

[quote name='williamb' post='1199824' date='Feb 18 2007, 02:39 PM']I saw the opera in Portland, Oregon about 4 years ago. At the pre-lecture the researcher said that there were several differences between the opera and what really happened of course. In real life they all wanted to stop the guillotining by offering themselves as martyrs, so they would sing really loud where people could here them, "the people on the revolutionary councilare jerks and idiots and they would sing songs in praise of the late Louis XVI. However their sacrifice was not without effect, the very last guillotining was like the day after theirs. The crowds that watched were usually very noisy but they dispersed after the sisters guillotings and the silence was unbeleivable.[/quote]
Actually the revolutionary council wanted nothing to do with and wanted to ignore them. But as anyone knows sisters inspired to serve the lord are harder to stop than an a herd of elephants in a banana plantation.

[magnificat]

[quote name='Margaret Clare' post='1198681' date='Feb 17 2007, 10:00 PM']hmm .. probably not .. though my mom did ask me if I wanted to go ... But I might like to see it on DVD, which is available.[/quote]
Can you get the DVD online?

[Chiquitunga]

[quote name='magnificat' post='1200081' date='Feb 18 2007, 10:14 PM']Can you get the DVD online?[/quote] [url="http://www.amazon.com/Poulenc-Dialogues-Carmelites-Sutherland-Australia/dp/B0000687ED/sr=8-6/qid=1171919253/ref=pd_bbs_sr_6/102-8030804-5239313?ie=UTF8&s=dvd"]Here's one from 1977[/url], that looks like it was done in English. (In case you're wondering abut the cover, it's about a young woman that seeks to escape society during the French Rev. to the Carmelite Monastery)