Francis Poulenc’s ‘Dialogues des Carmélites’: Faith, Ideology, Love

Abstract

Francis Poulenc based his opera Dialogues des Carmelites on an eponymous screenplay by the novelist and essayist Georges Bernanos, for whose work he claimed to have an affinity. Taking into account the post-war context for Bernanos’s activities as a public intellectual, this study explores how his Catholic ideology informs Poulenc’s music and dramaturgy. The writer’s views on technology, power, tradition, French history, suffering, divine grace, and love all play a part, not only in the opera itself but also in its autobiographical reverberations. These questions are explored through an examination of the leitmotivic web of the opera as well as its intertextual links to Poulenc’s Stabat Mater, Debussy’s Le Martyr de Saint Sebastien, and Ravel’s melodie ‘L’Indifferent’.