Over the last several days I have revisited video accounts of two operas, each of which offers its own unique perspective on devout Catholicism. The older of these is Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, completed in 1956 and based on a play of the same name by Georges Bernanos, which had originated as a screenplay for a film that was never produced. Much more recent is Doubt, the 2013 opera composed by Douglas J. Cuomo, commissioned by the Minnesota Opera. The libretto was based on the 2005 play of the same name by John Patrick Shanley, which had already been given a film adaptation in 2008. Shanley himself prepared the libretto for Cuomo’s opera.
Doubt is likely to be more familiar to most readers. The plot revolves around the ideological differences between Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the rigidly conservative principal of a Catholic parochial school, and the new teacher, Sister James, who is much more flexible in her religious practices. Sister Aloysius, in turn, is also presented in opposition to one of her teachers, Father Brendan Flynn, who tries to be encouraging to his pupils, particularly Donald Muller, the only black student in the school. Sister Aloysius is highly suspicious of Father Flynn and undertakes her own investigation to confirm her suspicions about Father Flynn’s behavior and whether his encouragement may have crossed the line to abuse.
I have to confess that I have had a great admiration for Shanley’s work going back at least as far as the script he wrote for Moonstruck. While I never saw the staged version of Doubt, my attention was totally riveted to his adaptation of the play for film. It was as if he had worked out every last detail of each character’s personality traits and then placed them all in a series of awkward situations involving the challenges to overly orthodox professions of faith, good intentions, racism, and the rising suspicion of abusive behaviors among the Catholic clergy.
Watching the Public Television broadcast of the operatic version, I was as absorbed in the narrative as I had been with the film. Nevertheless, I realized that, only a few days after that viewing, I had no trouble recalling Shanley’s name but, for the life of me, could not remember the name of the composer. One reason for this may be that, while Cuomo’s score was far more than a film soundtrack, it never really established its own identity. It was as if the only priority was to hang Shanley’s words on the right notes without worrying about whether the notes themselves had anything to say through rhetorical techniques such as leitmotivs or engaging the ambiguities of dissonance to reflect the ambiguities confronting the characters. Over the course of time, the film emerged as far more memorable that the opera.
Dialogues of the Carmelites, on the other hand, is an opera that I first came to know through recording and then had the opportunity to see in a staging produced by the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. My initial reaction to the recording was that the opera was overly wordy. However, to be fair, that “first contact” took place at a time when I was still relatively unfamiliar with Poulenc’s music. The fact is that this is not an opera in which the drama can unfold in the mind of the reader limited to reading the libretto while listening to a recording.
At the end of the last season, the Metropolitan Opera revived John Dexter’s staging of this opera. That production was the last of the season’s HD offerings, and I saved a copy when that video was aired on Public Television. Here, again, words played a significant role in presenting the narrative rhetorically, as well as discursively. In this case, however, the music was anything but forgettable.
One reason, however, is that, by this time in my accumulation of experiences, the overall Poulenc catalog was more familiar. More specifically, I had much more extensive listening experience where his sacred music was concerned. Not all of those experiences were satisfying. There were definitely cases in which he seemed to be doing little more than hanging notes on Latin syllables. On the other hand there were also any number of compositions in which the rhetoric of the music meshed perfectly with the professions of faith in the text. In Dialogues of the Carmelites that rhetoric was definitely firing on all cylinders. One could absorb not only the words but also the ability of the music to evoke the thoughts behind those words.
This is not to suggest that I am trying to wield Poulenc as a stick for beating up Cuomo. Rather, the reason I chose to juxtapose impressions of Doubt and Dialogues of the Carmelites is that both operas rely heavily on core ideas underlying the narrative. Poulenc knew how to use his music to reinforce how those ideas emerged through the words of the libretto. In Cuomo’s opera, on the other hand, both the words and the plot on which they hang are so familiar, particularly due to the film version, that the ideas have no need for further reinforcement. Cuomo’s music may not be as “incidental” as a film score; but, by the same count, it never seems to establish itself as integral to the overall opera experience has Poulenc’s music turned out to be.
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