CRIES FROM THE SCAFFOLD : Poulenc's 'Carmelites'.

Later this month, veteran conductor Julius Rudel will lead performances of Francis Poulenc's 1957 Dialogues of the Carmelites at New York's Juilliard Opera Center. Rudel, now eighty, conducted a memorable Metropolitan Opera production some twenty years ago. Since that time, Poulenc's musical setting of the martyrdom of Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution, his masterpiece, has been performed and recorded repeatedly. It is a heart-wrenchingly dramatic setting, in the best tradition of Italian opera, although it is sung in French. It shows an uncanny gift for quicksilver characterization of the individual nuns, alternately fearsome, flighty, or faithful.

The opera follows the destiny of Blanche de la Force as she enters the cloister at Compiegne, painting a portrait in sound of the humble, neurotic heroine. Dialogues is a synthesis of romantic conventions and the psychological self-awareness of modern music. In act 1, for example, the First Prioress dies amid music of hysterical emotion, as in Italian opera, yet dignity and refinement are present throughout. Though the music is harmonious (which has led some listeners to underrate Poulenc's ingenuity), at dramatic moments it is fresh and raw. This is especially true in the composer's use of percussion to inspire fear, most unforgettably in the slicing, terminal sounds of the guillotine at opera's end. One feels that Poulenc really knew these women, and by the final curtain, the listener has come to understand them as well. For dramatic energy and verve, the best recording remains the 1958 EMI version.

Poulenc (1899-1963) was heir to a fortune from the pharmaceutical company Rhone-Poulenc. Still, his sybaritic life did not prevent him from creating the Dialogues as well as other works of spiritual vigor, such as the popular "Gloria," "Stabat Mater," and "Sept Repons de Tenebres." The sinuously attractive melodies in Poulenc's choral works, written for plush solo voices like soprano Leontyne Price, are what the French call "Saint-Sulpicien," after the glamorous, grandiose church in Paris's sixth arrondissement that was Poulenc's favorite. The composer commissioned the chic Parisian silversmith Puiforcat to create ritual objects as offerings of thanks for each of his major religiously themed works. He donated these to a shrine at the French pilgrimage site of Rocamadur, which may be visited today as the Musee-Tresor Francois Poulenc.

Dialogues des Carmelites had complex origins, which researcher Claude Gendre elucidates in a groundbreaking chapter in the recently published Francis Poulenc: Music, Art, and Literature (Ashgate Press). The French Carmelites' story was first transmuted into fiction by the German Catholic convert, Gertrud von le Fort (1876-1971), as The Song at the Scaffold. Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest, was asked to write dialogue for a 1947 screen version of von le Fort's story. The mortally ill Bernanos managed to complete the task, and posthumous stage productions of his "dialogues" were proposed, although exclusive theatrical rights had previously been assigned to Emmet Lavery (1902-86), an American lawyer and detective-story writer.

Lavery was also the founder of the National Catholic Theatre Conference (1937), and the author of widely performed plays such as The First Legion and Magnificent Yankee. Lavery described his own adaptation of von le Forte as having a "certain lightness of heart and a lightness of touch, which I do not find in the Bernanos treatment." He was well aware of literary rights and defended his agreements with von le Fort. In 1954, three years before Poulenc's opera was staged, a writer's arbitration tribunal in Paris ruled that the Bernanos family must pay damages to Lavery and include his name in all future productions of stage versions of Carmelites.

Unaware of this discord, in 1953 Poulenc had accepted Dialogues as a subject at the suggestion of the Italian music publisher Ricordi. Poulenc threw himself into the task, writing in a letter to a baritone friend that he was so taken with the project "I nearly called you Reverend Mother!" Poulenc's own health problems, intensified by hypochondria and coupled with the real illness of his lover, Lucien Roubert, made the creative process all the more difficult. By the end of 1953, with a good portion of the opera already composed, Poulenc first became aware of the copyright issues, and this complication weighed on him.

But in July 1954, a Father Griffin, a Carmelite from Dallas, Texas, learned of the opera project and wrote Poulenc: "I hasten to assure you that not only the Carmelite fathers of Dallas, but all the Carmelites in the United States--fathers, sisters, and brothers--are beginning a novena for you this week."

Moved by this letter, Poulenc found that the Lavery-Bernanos family issues were soon resolved. But the composer's personal life added drama when his lover Lucien died of pleurisy in 1955, confirming a principal notion from Bernanos's text that "we don't each die for ourselves, but some in the place of others." A sad and anguished survivor, Poulenc finished writing his opera at the time Lucien was dying in the next room.

Amid the turmoil, Poulenc achieved the dramatic intensity that has made Dialogues a lasting achievement. The singer Pierre Bernac recalled: "On certain evenings when he played his opera for friends, he would almost be in a state of trance." Generations of listeners have reacted in the same way to this spellbinding operatic creation.