it was a fortunate audience who had the chance to hear last Saturday the final performance this season of Poulenc’s Dialogues. The staging – from 1977 – was magnificent, the performances of the singers almost uniformly splendid and the conducting inspired. Poulenc’s modern musical idiom – if very much restrained here – works well in conveying the feverish, oppressive even nightmarish atmosphere of France in the revolution – or that of twentieth century totalitarianism.
For when Gertrud von le Fort published in 1931 the story upon which Bernanos’s libretto is based, the First World War had just ended and Catholics had experienced the persecutions in Mexico and the Soviet Union; the Spanish Civil War and its massacres, the Second World War and the conquests of communism in Europe and Asia stood immediately before. After the Second World War, Bernanos could survey all this. So possible martyrdom had become a reality for a large part of the Catholic world. For that world Bernanos crafted an extraordinary libretto of utter honesty, of bleak realism, of the courageous faith of flawed human beings in the face of seeming doom.
Soon, after the Council, Catholics had no more appetite for such depictions and such a message. I believe it was Mircea Eliade who interpreted the sudden rise of Teilhardianism in the early 1960’s as the Catholic repudiation of the “existentialist” spiritual drama and intensity of the Catholic Literary Revival with its focus on sin, redemption conversion and martyrdom. The soft and optimistic “spirit of Vatican II” is not that of Bernanos’ Dialogues.
In a similar manner, the Council paradoxically made impossible works like this opera. For those instances in the 1940’s and 50’s where “modern art” had achieved something in the spiritual realm – like Poulenc’s Dialogues or the churches of Matisse or Le Corbusier – had only come about through the fruitful confrontation of modernity with the still intact forms of belief and liturgy of traditional Catholicism. After the 1960’s such interaction was no longer possible – the Church either opted for junk or pandered to the worst excesses of a “modern art” gone mad.
It was impressive to see that each of these performances was nearly sold out and that so many young people attended. It was even more heartening to see in the audience musicians active in Catholic music and quite a few seminarians as well (2 in cassocks!). These young Catholics are rediscovering the links between the arts and the sacred lost to the Catholics of my generation. Those links that produced – not just in the middle ages or the Byzantine Empire but as recently as 1957 – a masterpiece like the Dialogues.
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