Dialogues at the Met, Finally

By William Bender

One urgent need these days at the deficit-ridden Metropolitan Opera is to find ways to stage new productions as cheaply as possible, but still well. The company's mounting of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites was the best response yet to that challenge. Instead of the average cost of $200,000 to $300,000, not to mention the $800,000 lavished on Franco Zeffirelli's Otello in 1972, Dialogues came in at $75,000 --about $3,000 under budget. Stage Director John Dexter managed that feat by "cannibalizing" costumes and props from other Met productions--nuns' habits from Suor Angelica, raised flooring from Boris Godunov. One would never guess those origins. Dialogues looks fresh and innovative.

The new Dialogues must rank with the 1973 Les Troyens and 1974 Boris among recent Met triumphs. Its arrival finally corrects one of the major omissions of the Rudolf Bing era. Poulenc, the onetime dandy of French music who developed in his later years into a composer of surprising depth, completed Dialogues in 1956. Rarely has a 20th century opera received such a warm welcome. Milan's La Scala gave the premiere in January 1957. Before the year was out, it had been done by the Paris Opera, San Francisco Opera and the old NBC Opera Company. Yet Dialogues never quite received the critical success it deserved--largely because its conservative, tonal harmonic scheme was anathema to the academies and other contemporary-music coteries. Today, fortunately, much of the snobbism has gone out of modern music. Dialogues should now become ever more popular --or as popular as any opera with a nonromantic theme can be.

Dialogues depicts the plight of a tiny order of nuns during the French Revolution. A highly strung aristocrat, Blanche de la Force, joins their number, then flees the convent rather than fulfill a vow of martyrdom. She rejoins the nuns at the guillotine, however, as they are executed for illegal assembly.

Not your average opera plot. Poulenc resisted the use of arias and other standard set pieces. Instead, with deep expressiveness, he used a declamatory vocal style not unlike that of Debussy in Pelleas et Melisande. He also employed a Pelleas-like sequence of tableaux that is heavy on interior meaning and short on melodramatic display.

White Cross. The Met production takes the subject every bit as seriously.

The action is carried out on a raked stage formed into the shape of a huge white cross. Onto it are dropped occasional figurative pieces of scenery -- a one-dimensional wall here, a spidery church column there. The symbolism is obvious, but as unit sets go, this one is no less effective than the nave of the average cruciform church, or for that matter the raked ring at Bayreuth in the 1950s.

Within these boundaries the protagonists play out the drama of saintly endeavor and human fear like dancers in a dream of both life and death. Stage Director Dexter can take credit for that too, although he has been given some splendid singing actresses to work with -- Regine Crespin, Shirley Verrett, Betsy Norden, Maria Ewing. As Blanche, the rich-voiced Ewing emerges as a genuine comer in her blend of inner anguish and, at the end, heroic resolve. In the pit, French Conductor Michel Plasson shapes the music with enough loving deftness to underscore the fact that Dialogues is one of the few masterpieces of 20th century opera .

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