Dialogues of the Carmelites

Dialogues des Carmélites
Opera by Francis Poulenc
Elin Rombo as Sister Blanche in a 2011 production at the Royal Swedish Opera
Translation	Dialogues of the Carmelites
Librettist	Poulenc
Language	French
Based on	Dialogues des Carmélites by Georges Bernanos
Premiere	26 January 1957 (1957-01-26) La Scala, Milan (in Italian)

Dialogues des Carmélites (Dialogues of the Carmelites) is a French opera in three acts, divided into twelve scenes with linking orchestral interludes, with music and libretto by Francis Poulenc, completed in 1956. The composer's second opera, Poulenc wrote the libretto after the work of the same name by Georges Bernanos. The opera tells a fictionalised version of the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, Carmelite nuns who, in 1794 during the closing days of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, were guillotined in Paris for refusing to renounce their vocation.

The world première of the opera occurred (in an Italian translation) on 26 January 1957 at La Scala in Milan. The première of the original French-language version took place in Paris on 21 June 1957. The United States première, in English translation, followed in San Francisco in September 1957.

Bernanos had been hired in 1947 to write the dialogue for a film screenplay, through Raymond-Léopold Bruckberger and the scenario writer Philippe Agostini, based on the novella Die Letzte am Schafott (literal translation, The Last on the Scaffold or Song at the Scaffold, the published title of the English translation) by Gertrud von Le Fort. The novella is based on the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne at the monastery of Carmelite nuns in Compiègne, northern France, in the wake of the French Revolution, specifically in 1794 at the time of state seizure of the monastery's assets. It traces a fictional path from 1789 up to these events, when nuns of the Carmelite Order were guillotined.