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 12th 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.
Quails' egg, anyone?