These are the main themes of Poulenc’s opera, whose music is extremely gentle on the ear, with its style akin to Impressionism and its tender lyricism gradating in the famous final scene, in which the song of the nuns approaching their death mingles with the dreadful sound of the guillotine dropping.
Several years later, the play served as the basis of Poulenc’s libretto to his opera. The story draws upon a tragic event during the post-French Revolution Reign of Terror, when 16 innocent nuns of the Carmel of Compiègne were arrested, condemned to death and, a few days before Robespierre’s passing and the end of the Terror, guillotined. Just like Bernanos’s play, Poulenc’s opera focuses on the fate of Blanche de la Force, a shy, fearful girl who retreats from the world and enters a Carmelite convent so as to escape life’s travails. Paradoxically, taking this decision ultimately results in her being executed and thus becoming a martyr ...
