I personally  attend opera mostly for the music but surprisingly the story and performance at the Philadelphia Opera of the Dialogues had a strange synergy for me.  I say surprisingly and strange because I am more scientist than religionist by belief, and I am not a music or opera professional, just a music lover, an amateur. I heard members of the audience commenting on how Poulenc had extensively borrowed from his own previous works in the music and just listened with interest. With some inner trepidation about my comments being off he mark or even incorrect, here is how it affected me.

The story takes place during the Terror of the French Revolution about 1794. We have the oxymoron of Dialogues of Carmelite Nuns who have a vow of silence. They range from their 20s to their 80s and when the zealots of the Revolution, here depicted as high school age boys with guns, are carrying out executions of Nobles, which we are all very familiar with. But as more Leninist than Jeffersonian variety revolutionaries, they don’t stop with their heinous acts of cruelty and beheadings at the nobility, moving on to attack the Church and, by extension, religion as well, with some idea of the Church supporting oppression of the lower classes.  Religion is considered to be degenerate  and reactionary.  Youngest of the Carmelites is Blanche, the novice, Blanche may not have joined out of piety alone.  She is sort of anxious shut in, or agoraphobic.  It’s important that Blanche does not volunteer for her position out of fear either.  Being alone with one’s fears in silence takes more courage than the diversions of the outer world.  Cloistered she will need to face her own fear.  Blanche is made to see Reverend Mother suffer through a prolonged death, through delirium and doubts in her own faith.  Was there some mistake in heaven’s bureau of death assignments.  Maybe this  pious woman’s agonizing death saved another from a difficult passage to the next world. Her agony served to save another.

Near the end, with churches and monasteries being sacked and people murdered in the streets, the nuns take a vow of Martyrdom. This decision needs to be unanimous.  When they take their silent vote there is one hold out who it is assumed may be the novice Blanche or the young nun Constance. Constance “admits” to being that one hold out and changes her vote. Now the all of the nuns are at risk to give up their lives.

Constance is a fascinating character. She has a premonition, as soon as she meets the novice Blanche, that the two of them will die on the same day. Constance argues against the notion of living passively to old age. Better to die young for an ideal, to have the privilege of living and dying devoted to a cause. That very issue seems to me the conflict of our time. In our post-religious age, all of us make the choice, (OK, mostly unknowingly) about whether we will be sacrifice our life for something, or just to live out our days, hoping to have a long and pleasurable existence which, admittedly, serves no purpose.. Some of us are merely of the type that makes some commitment, others are not.  That’s all there is to it my book.   Those who believe in nothing salute elderly folks who happen not to harbor a lethal gene and live out their time into passive exalted old age, while others wish to devote their lives to something, even if that causes them to sacrifice the length of days.

As a clinician I have come upon persons of both stripes. The paradox is the devotees and sacrificers turn out to live longer and healthier lives. They do better for the most part, not always, some do die young after all life is high stakes.  Persons who devote themselves to something, generally seem to be richer, healthier, happier, less isolated, if my observations are correct. Many of these folks are active in what seem to me to be absolutely ridiculous religious faiths, which I won’t mention here for fear of getting my head cut off. It doesn’t matter. What seems to make a difference is their devotion and self-sacrifice for a cause or purpose. That’s the main reason that even as a non-religionist, or more of a scientific type, I look more kindly on religionists than most twenty-first centrians.

The end of Dialogues is powerful. This is not a spoiler because it has to be seen and heard. I knew what would happen but didn’t have a clue how it might be staged. Each of the nuns is individually guillotined. They are, it seemed to me, in an altered glorious ecstatic mental state, caused by their awareness of their giving themselves up to the God, singing Veni, Creator Spiritus.  Blanche’s stepping in at the end to die with her sisters, symbolized the ultimate renunciation of self.  Poulenc, librettist and composer of the Opera, experienced I am told,  many misgivings and undulations in his own faith and this was transmitted into his characters.

Our seats were not the best. The plateau of the stage floated exactly at eye level and we needed to crook our heads all the way back to see the supertitles.  We were over the orchestra pit front and center right behind the conductor’s head. In that final scene the music would play on until, you couldn’t tell where, there would be sudden percussive discontinuity, signaled by a rapid ulnar flexion of the conductor’s wrist, meaning that the blade had fallen and down to the floor would drop another woman in her turn, one less, then another less voice, until there was one only and then none.  It couldn’t have been more moving.