Michael Tanner

Gallic pieties

Only Poulenc and Messiaen deal with religious subjects without falling into sentimentality or campness

issue 10 March 2018

My two attempts to see Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Guildhall School were frustrated by the weather. Forced back on to my DVDs and CDs — vinyl, even — I took the opportunity to survey some of the manifestations and investigations of religious feeling in 20th-century French music.

I began with Vincent d’Indy’s Fervaal, an opera he composed in 1895 which used to be referred to as ‘the French Parsifal’. Refreshing my memory of the plot by looking it up in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, I was struck by the writer’s insistence that, while the work is heavily influenced by Wagner, ‘[d’Indy] had a better sense of dramatic pacing than Wagner, and more essential humanity’. That sent me back to my private recording of Fervaal, the only one there’s ever been, and two hours of mild amusement at the flagrancy of d’Indy’s indebtedness to what all Frenchmen were by then calling the wizard of Bayreuth, and my fairly strong boredom at how little purpose he put it to.

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