Thread by @david_m_wagner

1/ Thank you for reading my 1st thread on #DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES. This one will feature passages from the play that did not make it into the opera (opera composers always have to cut) but which illustrate important spiritual themes in both.

2/ Blanche is at her first interview with Mme. de Croissy, the Old Prioress. The OP says:
"Poor child. You've dreamed of this house the way a frightened child, just put to bed by the servants, dreams in her dark bedroom of the drawing room, of its light, of its heat. You know

3/ nothing of the solitude in which a true religious is exposed to live or die." A few lines later (and this IS in the opera):
BLANCHE: What does it matter, if God gives me strength?
OP: What He will test in you is not your strength but your weakness.

(I remember so well Crespin

4/ as Croissy and how she sang this line in English: "...not yeuhr strensss but yeuhr WIKnesss!" Btw tonight's performance is in French, w subtitles. @MetOpera has done this opera both ways.)

Shortly thereafter, Mme. de Croissy is dying. Mother Marie of the Incarnation keeps

5/ her company. She is in for a difficult "passage." The doctor finds this surprising. Mother Marie has this dialogue with him:
MM: If you had longer experience with houses like this, you would know there are only two sorts of religious who die altogether peacefully: the very

6/ holy, and the mediocre.
DOCTOR: I would have thought that the Faith -
MM: It is not the Faith that reassures, but Love. And when the Bridegroom himself approaches us for the sacrifice, as Abraham did to Isaac, one would have to be very perfect or else very stupid not to

7/ sense trouble.
DOCTOR: Forgive me, I thought that in a House of Peace -
MM: Ours is not a House of Peace, sir, it is a House of Prayer. ...
Later, the Old Prioress discusses w Mother Marie the name Blanche has chosen.
MM: Yes, she still wishes to be called Sr. Blanche of

8/ the Agony of Christ. You have always seemed to me quite struck by this choice?
OP: That's because it was my own, long ago. Our Prioress in those days was Mme. Arnoult, she was eighty years old. She said to me: "Question your strength. Who enters Gethsemane does not

9/ come out again. Do you feel in you the courage to remain to the end the prisoner of the Most Holy Agony?" I was the one who introduced Sr. Blanche of the Agony of Christ to this house. This is my affair.... Of all my daughters, none gives me more concern. I had thought to

10/ recommend her to your charity, but, upon reflection, and if God wills, this will be my last act as Prioress - Mother Marie!
MM: My Reverend Mother?
OP: It is in the name of obedience that I remit Blanche de la Force to you. You will answer for her to me before God.

11/ Actually that last bit *is* in the opera - with a spectacular octave leap on the words "devant Dieu," such that old sopranos and mezzos who come out of retirement to do this role still have to have their upper-range chops!

Sr. Constance, an apparent flibbertigibbet whose brain occasionally stops whirling and lights on a profound thought, tells Sr. Blanche that she thinks the Old Prioress "died someone else's death." "That means that that other one, when the hour of death comes, will astonish

12/ herself by entering it easily, and feeling herself comfortable in it."
The New Prioress is Mme. Lidoine, and in her first speech as Prioress she says:
"What the era in which we live will amount to, I have no idea. I ask only of Holy Providence those modest virtues

13/ that the rich and powerful willingly hold in contempt: good will, patience, spirit of conciliation....There are different kinds of courage, and that of the great ones of the earth is not that of little people; it would allow them to survive....I repeat that we are poor girls

14/ assembled to pray to God. Let us beware of everything that could turn us away from prayer - and that includes the hope of martyrdom. Prayer is a duty: martyrdom is a reward. If a great King, in front of all his court, were to signal to the serving-girl to come sit with him

15/ on his throne, just like a well-beloved wife, it would be better for her at first not even to believe her eyes or her ears, and to get on with dusting the furniture."

16/ In the end it's Mother Marie - one of the aristocrats, preoccupied with honor - who is left off the list of the condemned. In the penultimate scene, when the chaplain informs her of this, she says (and Poulenc opted not to set this):
MM: I am dishonored!
CHAPLAIN: That's the

17/ word I was waiting for. This, for you, is the cry of nature against agonly. This, yes this, is the blood God is asking of you, and which you will have to pour out. You would have given with joy what flows in your veins, you would have poured it out like water. But every drop

18/ of *this* blood tears out more than your life.

Then the last scene: the Carmelites go up the steps to the guillotine one by one, singing "Salve regina," losing one voice with each fall of the blade - and these are deliberately off rhythm, so unless you're the techie

19/ operating the guillotine-noise machine (I've read various theories on how this is done), you don't know when to expect them, so each one comes as a shock.

At the last minute, Blanche, having found unexpected courage, joins them.

I've written these up so it's not *just*

20/ oh, yeah, martyrs, and how impressive that last scene is, but the internal path that various of them take - incl. the Old Prioress, who gets her Calvary early. That's why the retelling of their story started not with "the song at the scaffold" but "the last at the scaffold" -

21/ the last being Blanche, the timorous one. /fin