A light summer picnic - the martyrs of Compiegne

We’re in the middle of the summer opera season. This is the time when English people put on evening dress and go into the countryside to have picnics in great formality, in the rain, and attempt to recreate their usual existences in the great outdoors. We take tables and chairs, and china plates, and proper glasses, and relish our ability to make everything as proper as possible (despite the fact that nowadays we don’t have as many servants as we used to). The only thing we don’t really manage is to have adequately chilled drinks, but for many English people ice is a relatively novel concept anyway.

Chief amongst the summer opera outlets is Glyndebourne, but there are younger pretenders and one of these is Grange Park Opera in Hampshire. I admire this company very much. The first reason for this is that it was started from scratch by Wasfi Kani in 1997. Kani has managed to build a beautiful little opera house at the Grange, and to create festival that supports the work of her Pimlico Opera company, which exists to take opera to prisons.

The second is that Grange Park Opera stage repertoire that isn’t often heard and is in some ways beyond what many would imagine the scope of a small company with limited resources to be. This year they chose to stage Poulenc’s ‘Dialogues des Carmelites’. This is an opera, based on a play by Bernanos, which examines the real life martydom of the Carmelite nuns of Compiegne during the ‘terror’ of the French Revolution. The nuns of Compiegne refused to comply with the Revolutionary government’s law, which required the suppression of their monastery. As a consequence the nuns were imprisoned. This happened first at Cambrai, where they were locked up together with the English Benedictine nuns, who had been living in France ever since Fat Henry booted them out of England when he split with Rome because of his inability to father sons, and his need to fill his empty treasury by stealing Church property. But I digress.

The Carmelites’ refusal to abandon their way of life led to them being executed. Sixteen of them. From the 80 year-old Sister Charlotte of the Resurrection, to the novice, Sister Constance. Before going to their deaths they renewed their monastic vows and chanted the Veni Creator Spiritus, a hymn sung at solemn profession. It is of course, an invocation of the Holy Spirit.

Shortly after the execution of the Carmelites the reign of terror came to an end, and some credit the Carmelites’ sacrifice with bringing this bloody period of history to a close. The English Benedictine nuns were allowed to travel home to England and set up a monastery there for the first time since the Reformation. They left in 1795, wearing the lay clothes that the Carmelites had been forced to wear in the place of their habits, and which had subsequently been forced upon the Benedictines, after the Carmelites had gone to their deaths. These clothes, some still preserved at Stanbrook Abbey, are the only relics of these great martyrs, who were buried in a mass grave along with over 1000 other victims of the guillotine.

So… a bold choice for a summer opera festival.

The Poulenc/Bernanos opera takes this amazing story of courage and adds to it two fictitious characters – the Prioress and a young postulant/novice - whose lives (and deaths) are a profound lesson for the audience in the nature of making a good death. They also show us the courage people need, and sometimes suprisingly find or lose, in their final moments. Poulenc changes the Veni, Creator Spiritus to a a Salve Regina, which starts with the voices of all the nuns all singing as one, the sound gradually thinning as we hear each go to the guillotine. It sends shivers down the spine.

Grange Park did an excellent job of the opera when I saw it in June, and despite the quails’ eggs and poached salmon, the champagne and strawberries outside… inside the theatre, the piece still packed its incredible punch.

Here is a version of that exceptionally moving final moment from youtube:

Grange Park’s run of ‘Carmelites’ sadly came to a close on 12^th July, and it’s a shame really that it is not being performed today, on their feast day. But still, in this good weather and season of summer opera, it is good to remember our own mortality, and to remember the great sacrifice of these Carmelite sisters.

And what of a recipe to accompany this post? It is, after all, a food blog. Well take the quails’ eggs, the strawberries and champagne. The picnic, easy and delicious. If I know anything of nuns then I know that the martyrs of Compiegne would have relished these items and found them delectable.

Veni creator Spiritus, mentes tuorum visita, imple superna gratia, que tu creasti pectora.