For the first time in Venice, Francis Poulenc’s masterpiece Dialogues des carmélites will be staged. Never before performed in the lagoon, this pivotal title of the French repertoire will be staged in a new production co-produced by the Fondazione Teatro La Fenice with the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. The staging bears the signature of the visionary Sicilian director Emma Dante, who makes her Fenice debut in the context of a creative staff composed of Carmine Maringola for the sets, Vanessa Sannino for the costumes, Cristian Zucaro for the light design and Sandro Maria Campagna for the choreographic movements. The musical part will be entrusted to a specialist in this repertoire such as Frédéric Chaslin, at the head of the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro La Fenice and a cast composed for the principal roles of Julie Cherrier-Hoffmann, Vanessa Goikoetxea, Juan Francisco Gatell and Anna Caterina Antonacci. The pinnacle of modern theatre, Dialogues des carmélites recalls the story of the sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compiègne who were beheaded on 17th July 1794 in Paris during the days of the Reign of Terror for not having wished to renounce their vows: a subject transposed in 1931 into the novella Die Letzte am Schafott (The Last One on the Gallows) by Gertrud von Le Fort, and then into Georges Bernanos’s Dialogues published in 1949, the direct source of Poulenc’s creation. The opera was born at the suggestion of the publisher Ricordi to Poulenc, who in turn said he was thunderstruck by reading the Dialogues during a stay in Rome. Its debut on 26 January 1957 at La Scala in Milan was a triumphant success. “It is a work about women and freedom – this is how director Emma Dante illustrates what, in her opinion, is the decisive point of Poulenc’s work and of Bernanos’s play from which the text is taken -. In my opinion, it is the sense of freedom that these women reaffirm, a freedom that is certainly marked by an almost fanatical faith. When they decide to go and die, they lose control over rationality. We are not faced with a rational choice, but with a delusional decision that goes towards a freedom that is certainly linked to religion and faith. By staging Dialogues, I decided to take the side of the Carmelites, who before being religious are women”. ‘Poulenc’s music,’ explains conductor Frédéric Chaslin, “a bit like Mozart’s, is built on elements that can be found from one work to the next. It has “formulas” or “modules” that are found both in a piano concerto and in a melody or sonata. So in the case of the Carmélites, Poulenc used many of these modules that one recognises on first listening. For example, when the sisters speak and especially when there is a sermon or a sermon, he uses an extremely regular singing module, like an ancient prayer’.

Featured image: (c) Michele Crosera