Two Moments of Horror
It is relatively easy for tellers of big stories to supply good beginnings and middles. Effective endings are a very different matter. That's because human affairs are shaped like a sink from which the stopper is missing -- wide at the top but narrowing down at the bottom to the same inevitable conclusion for everyone. But sometimes the manner of that exit from life may be so striking that it's a struggle to depict all the preceding parts with equal effect. Anyone telling a story about Wild Bill Hickok faces that problem, and so did a French composer named Francois Poulenc when, in the middle 1950's, he wrote an opera called "Dialogues of the Carmelites," based on a true event from the French Revolution.
This opera focuses on a young woman named Blanche, who decides to renounce all her worldly states of mind to become a nun, and she applies to a group belonging to the order of the Carmelites. She draws close to the members of that group, but meanwhile those nuns have already run afoul of the Revolutionary government. Their group had been disbanded by the Revolutionaries four years earlier, but now they are accused of what was apparently considered to be among the worst of crimes, "living in a religious community." For that they are imprisoned in a convent. When they stubbornly insist on continuing to pursue their faith nevertheless, they are sentenced to death -- 16 of them in all.
Meanwhile Blanche has found that becoming a nun is not as easy as she had expected. She doubts the strength of her faith, and she leaves the cloister. But at the last minute, she discovers that her faith is indeed quite strong enough, and she rejoins the sisters -- in time for the executions.
In the final scene of "Dialogues of the Carmelites," the nuns are led offstage one by one, and you hear the sounds of their immediate beheadings. The nuns, unafraid and instead rejoicing in their martyrdom, leave this life singing, and you can hear the sound of the guillotine's blade dropping, and with the chopping off of each head, one more voice suddenly ceases, the volume of the singing drops slightly, and the orchestral background hesitates. But only for a moment. Then each time the singing surges forth once more, in powerful reaffirmation of their undying faith.
Finally only one small voice is left, that of Blanche, and then she, too, is dispatched, and we are left with just a few more bars of Poulenc's powerful orchestral comment.
I am not a sentimental or religious person, but of all the operas I have ever heard, the ending of this one alone brings tears to my eyes every time. It is the combination of the haunting music, the eerie singing of the doomed nuns as the totality of their voices gradually diminishes, the offstage sounds of the heads of the women being summarily lopped off, and just the thought that a group of nuns would be executed for ANY reason whatsoever.
If you will allow me a brief interlude of totally inappropriate levity between two moments of sheer horror that frankly are pretty heavy for me, the worst I have ever heard about nuns is that, if you go to a Catholic school, they will rap your knuckles with a ruler. From all that you hear (at least in the movies), you get the impression that that's the main thing that nuns do.
...Though his official trial hasn't begun yet, Saddam Hussein stands convicted of many crimes committed during his dictatorship, which lasted for a quarter of a century. But perhaps the climactic moment of his tenure as Iraq's ruler occurred not at its end but at its beginning.
It is recorded that around the time that he became the official leader of Iraq, in 1979 or thereabouts, 185 years after the events in Compiegne, France, he held a big meeting of the higher-ups in his ruling Ba'ath Party. At this meeting he said that a new day had begun and that he was determined to carry matters through with all the resolution at his command. To this end it was necessary to weed out all those in the party who hadn't been supportive of him. And while all the party members sat there in stunned silence and suspense, he read out the names of each one of those errant persons, and one by one they were escorted out of the hall and shot...immediately.
I don't know if Saddam Hussein and the lucky survivors could hear the rifle shots, or how many died.
I doubt that there was any singing, and Iraq has not yet produced a Francois Poulenc.
This opera focuses on a young woman named Blanche, who decides to renounce all her worldly states of mind to become a nun, and she applies to a group belonging to the order of the Carmelites. She draws close to the members of that group, but meanwhile those nuns have already run afoul of the Revolutionary government. Their group had been disbanded by the Revolutionaries four years earlier, but now they are accused of what was apparently considered to be among the worst of crimes, "living in a religious community." For that they are imprisoned in a convent. When they stubbornly insist on continuing to pursue their faith nevertheless, they are sentenced to death -- 16 of them in all.
Meanwhile Blanche has found that becoming a nun is not as easy as she had expected. She doubts the strength of her faith, and she leaves the cloister. But at the last minute, she discovers that her faith is indeed quite strong enough, and she rejoins the sisters -- in time for the executions.
In the final scene of "Dialogues of the Carmelites," the nuns are led offstage one by one, and you hear the sounds of their immediate beheadings. The nuns, unafraid and instead rejoicing in their martyrdom, leave this life singing, and you can hear the sound of the guillotine's blade dropping, and with the chopping off of each head, one more voice suddenly ceases, the volume of the singing drops slightly, and the orchestral background hesitates. But only for a moment. Then each time the singing surges forth once more, in powerful reaffirmation of their undying faith.
Finally only one small voice is left, that of Blanche, and then she, too, is dispatched, and we are left with just a few more bars of Poulenc's powerful orchestral comment.
I am not a sentimental or religious person, but of all the operas I have ever heard, the ending of this one alone brings tears to my eyes every time. It is the combination of the haunting music, the eerie singing of the doomed nuns as the totality of their voices gradually diminishes, the offstage sounds of the heads of the women being summarily lopped off, and just the thought that a group of nuns would be executed for ANY reason whatsoever.
If you will allow me a brief interlude of totally inappropriate levity between two moments of sheer horror that frankly are pretty heavy for me, the worst I have ever heard about nuns is that, if you go to a Catholic school, they will rap your knuckles with a ruler. From all that you hear (at least in the movies), you get the impression that that's the main thing that nuns do.
...Though his official trial hasn't begun yet, Saddam Hussein stands convicted of many crimes committed during his dictatorship, which lasted for a quarter of a century. But perhaps the climactic moment of his tenure as Iraq's ruler occurred not at its end but at its beginning.
It is recorded that around the time that he became the official leader of Iraq, in 1979 or thereabouts, 185 years after the events in Compiegne, France, he held a big meeting of the higher-ups in his ruling Ba'ath Party. At this meeting he said that a new day had begun and that he was determined to carry matters through with all the resolution at his command. To this end it was necessary to weed out all those in the party who hadn't been supportive of him. And while all the party members sat there in stunned silence and suspense, he read out the names of each one of those errant persons, and one by one they were escorted out of the hall and shot...immediately.
I don't know if Saddam Hussein and the lucky survivors could hear the rifle shots, or how many died.
I doubt that there was any singing, and Iraq has not yet produced a Francois Poulenc.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 6:14 AM
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