That this year’s Proms were big on God and death was maybe nothing special: God and death are ever-present in the concert repertoire. But looking back over the season, it was notable how many of the standout Proms events explored these topics. A case in point was Dialogues des Carmélites: the Poulenc opera brought to the Royal Albert Hall from Glyndebourne in a semi-staging.
Carmélites isn’t an easy piece. The product of its author’s fervent, anxious (some would say neurotic) but sincere engagement with Catholicism, it adapts the true story of a community of nuns who held their faith during the French Revolution and were guillotined as a result. They’re known these days as the Compiègne Martyrs. They went to their deaths singing the Salve Regina and the Veni Creator. Poulenc turns that historical detail into one of the most disturbing final scenes in all opera as the nuns process to the scaffold; you hear the sound of the blade fall time and time again (it’s in the score) with sickening thuds – the number of voices reducing at every fall until the last is cut off in mid-phrase.
