The “Dialogues of the Carmelites” at the Premiere of the Rome Opera

That powerful reflection on the horrors of history and the vanities of the soul that are Francis Poulenc’s “Dialoghi delle Carmelitane” will open the Teatro all’Opera season tomorrow evening directed by Emma Dante who had “already imagined the show with Carlo Fuortes” as he is keen to underline in a conversation on the telephone, and the direction of Michele Mariotti, at his first podium as music director of the foundation together with Ciro Visco, the new choir master. Much anticipation among music lovers, while the Romans grumble over the choice and make mistakes, because no moment could have been better, in Europe, to bring a complex opera like this back to the stagewhich was composed just after the Second World War on events that occurred during the last days of the Terror, reinterpreted by a double hand with a Catholic-spiritual imprintthe one of Gertrud von Le Fort and Georges Bernanos and which have now been entrusted to a director who has made her mark on intimate movements and female determination.

Francis Poulenc’s work entrusted to a director who has made her mark on intimate movements and female determination

The “Daughter of the Regiment” is certainly more entertaining, the “Ernani” offers a story of heartbreaking love and this no, not worldly love at least even though the director says that she will kill the nuns dressed up in the veil of the brides who, after all, it’s a fairly common choice for converse since ancient times; the Aida “fa più Prima”, without a doubt, but the stage of the Costanzi is not that of the San Carlo in Naples nor that of the Scala in Milan, so it is necessary to review the ambitions (only Riccardo Muti could insist on bringing the “Moise et Pharaon” by Rossini with the choir always singing in height and one ended up fearing that it would fall into the stalls).

Sixteen Carmelites executed a few days before the fall of Robespierre, inspiration for the novel by Gertrud von le Fort

You never leave the “Dialogues” as you entered, especially the women. The very simple plot is centered on the drama of the sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compiègne executed on 17 July 1794 in Paris, ten days before the fall of Robespierre: a true fact, on which in 1931 von Le Fort inserted in his novel “L’ultima al scaffold” the character-alter ego of Blanche de la Force and Bernanos poured his reflections on the theme of sacrifice and the blind and absurd violence of conflicts, a few years after condemning the war in Spain which he had made in the “Great cemeteries under the moon ”. Bernanos’ text debuted in the midst of the Cold War in Zurich and Paris in 1952; arrived at the Piccolo Teatro in Rome in 1953, during a particularly bitter electoral campaign, and was struck down by the critic of the Unit Giulio Trevisani as “a completely secondary operetta” that “tv”, obviously meaning tv tell us that in reality was still in the diffusion tests, he would not “fail to resume”, and as in fact happened in 1957 for the interpretation of Emma Gramatica and Lea Padovani (if desired, the video is still partially on YouTube, and it is obviously a wonder).

Beyond the criticisms, Terror is still the subject of debate and there are always those who, “in historical perspective” because Donbas is something else, civil wars are different according to political beliefs, consider the massacres and corpses lawful that mayor Robespierre wanted to be left to rot in the streets, “on pain of death”. However, it is a fact that all the authors of this composition approached it in the most difficult or fragile moments of their lives: Bernanos was close to death, Poulenc composed it from 1953 watching over the incurable course of the disease that had struck his companion Lucien Roubert (before deciding to accept the job offered by the superintendent of La Scala, Antonio Ghiringhelli, he opened the text at random outside a bar in Piazza Navona telling himself that only if from the words he laid his eyes on, with the classic rite of sortes apostolorum had the melodic curve arisen spontaneously, he would have continued. to Nazism.

The Dialogues of the nuns of Compiègne, the female community that revolves around the convent, who came there for the most diverse reasons and whose aspiration to holiness is put to the test at every moment, are in short only the reflection of the anxieties of those who put hand to their story, not excluding Emma Dante, a declared atheist, who almost exclusively investigated the very human aspect of the nuns “before taking their vows. What woman is hidden behind her veil? Who were they before wearing the cassock (which you define, somewhat deliberately, “tunic”, ed)? ”.

From the costume designer Vanessa Sannino, the director asked for combative, militant tunics-cassocks, “of a shiny fabric”, with armor-like corsets, as in the portraits of Joan of Arc who, after all, was the first to challenge a court, in her case even religious. In this convent which “is a place of spiritual fortification”, Emma Dante wondered what each of the sixteen sisters was looking for, “women who have chosen to devote their lives to sacrifice, renouncing material possessions, vanity” but perhaps not sensuality, to the senses sublimated in penance, prayer, ecstasy. “Almost all of them are fragile characters”, she observes, who told of another familiar and closed community of women in the “Macaluso Sisters”, yet “they have well-defined characters, lively and well-drawn personalities. The ‘Dialogues’”, he points out, “do not tell a community in general, as often happens in works where the main characters emerge and the context is left in the background, but, as the title indicates, the intertwining of feelings, joys, fears of many individuals. I’m in there with big doubts.”

In reality not manipulated and rewritten by Bernanos, the nuns of pre-revolutionary convents were – not always but not even rarely – women who preferred the silence of the cloister to a succession of pregnancies without end and always at risk or to the interests of their husbands. priceless opportunity to write and study. Taking away the very nineteenth-century narrative on the Nun of Monza and her dream of wicked love, it is evident that the monastic career was the only one not precluded to women for many centuries, just think of Hildegard of Bingen, who after the canonization desired by Benedict XVI have now also discovered books for rebellious girls (obvious question: would they have allowed her to exercise her studies in medicine and herbalism, practice as a witch, outside the walls of Rupertsberg?), but also for the laywoman Petronilla Paolini Massimi, gone down in history as the “feminist poet” of Baroque Rome (would she have managed to compose without taking refuge in the Santo Spirito complex with her husband tearing the sheets from her hands?) or Roswitha of Gandersheim, the first name found in the books of history of German literature.

“They thanked the judge who sentenced them with a smile”: not a collective descent into fanaticism, but a political and proud gesture

Convent, yes, a “hellish” place, as Sister Arcangela Tarabotti denounced from Venice in her last years of the seventeenth century, but also a hermitage of peace, of support, the only serious alternative, recognized indeed as untouchable, to a life of intellectual sacrifices. Of the historical facts of Compiègne it is known that the nuns “thanked with a smile the judge who sentenced them to death”, a detail that greatly struck Emma Dante, leaving her to suppose, as the revolutionary judges did, a collective descent into fanaticism when it is instead probable that it was a political gesture and pride partly of caste and partly of apostolic militancy. It is a documented fact that, after the confiscation of the convent and the ban on re-establishing the religious community, the nuns found themselves making a vow of martyrdom, and that they went up to the scaffold intoning a version of the “Marseillaise” composed by Sister Julie de Neuville: “Livrons nos coeurs à l’allégresse / le jour de gloire est arrivé / loin de nous la moindre faiblesse / le glaive sanglant est levé” (“let us abandon our hearts to joy, the day of glory has come, we will not give in to the slightest weakness , we raise the bloody sword”).

During the journey, wrapped in their white cloaks, they intoned the Te Deum, the Salve Regina and the Miserere and the Mother Superior, Thérèse de Saint Augustin, after buying the condemned women a cup of chocolate to refresh them, begged the executioner to execute her last so that she could support her sisters. It is history that the singing of the psalm “Laudate Dominum omnes gentes” gradually faded as the guillotine withdrew voices from the choir and that the final Amen remained suspended in front of a crowd for once not excited by the spectacle of blood, but speechless in the face of such a test of courage. And it is this final moment, a spontaneous script, that exerts an irresistible fascination on the spectators and, of course, on the directors.

To Blanche, who finds redemption from pusillanimity by reuniting with her companions, Emma Dante reserves a Christological end

Emma Dante did not want the guillotine, the schafott of von Le Fort’s novel but, as she explains, a more symbolic scenography. The entire visual system of the new exhibition takes place around the paintings of the palace of the Marquis de la Force, father of the fifteen-year-old Blanche, born in tragic circumstances and even fearful of her own shadow, which first open like doors onto the convent and then, by hand as Terror insinuates itself into the lives of the protagonists, devastating bodies and things, they are reduced to simple frames to frame the large white sheets that the condemned women drop, one after the other, on stage. The white of western purity that becomes the white of hiatus, suspension, death, as in the Japanese tradition. To Blanche, the scapegoat, who in the dramaturgical text finds redemption from her pusillanimity in the choice to reunite with her companions, Emma Dante reserved a Christological end, the ultimate sacrifice, as Bernanos also noted in his Diary from exile in Tunis , entering into the mystery of salvation: “It is precisely our weakness that He wants to put to the test, not our strength”.

And here then is the disturbance of the Prioress of Croissy (played at the Opera by Anna Caterina Antonacci) who, on her deathbed, in the convulsions of a slow and atrocious agony, puts her long fidelity to Christ into crisis in a deaf rebellion, a sense of defeat and humiliation that did not escape the younger sisters and in particular Costanza (“who could have ever believed that she would have suffered so much to die, that she would have died so badly! One would say that when it was time to give it to her, the good Lord he was dead wrong, as in the wardrobe one dress is given for another. Yes, that must have been the death of another, a death not on the scale of our Prioress, a death too small for her… That other one, when the hour of death comes, he will be surprised to enter so easily and to find himself comfortable there… One does not die each for himself, but for one another, or perhaps one in place of the other, who knows?”). Around this line, Emma Dante also imagined her Christ on the cross, the inspiration of Blanche who, in choosing her name as a converse, asked to be called “Suor Bianca of the Agony of Christ”, and will be a fluid Christ, as indeed – alas, if you try to cause scandal here, you will find few footholds – testify to a Western iconography that for centuries has portrayed a blond, hairless Christ with ringed ringlets and feminine eyelashes. “I believe that bodies are free”, says Emma Dante who, while on the one hand she “respects the figure of the great martyr of Jesus”, on the other she can’t imagine him except agender. She’s not alone. Enter the house of any Sicilian grandmother and you will find this among the holy cards and calendars: a man so angelic that he appears, in fact, asexual like the angels.