Collaboration with the Academy of Music, the Academy of Dramatic Art, the Academy of Fine Arts, the School of Design at the Faculty of Architecture, and the Faculty of Textile Technology of the University of Zagreb
Following last year’s highly successful student opera project, Hippolyte et Aricie by Jean-Philippe Rameau, which brought this landmark work of French Baroque opera to Croatian audiences for the first time, this year’s project continues to explore the breadth of the French operatic tradition. This time, students and mentors from the Academy of Music, the Academy of Dramatic Art, the Academy of Fine Arts, the School of Design at the Faculty of Architecture, and the Faculty of Textile Technology of the University of Zagreb turn to the twentieth century and Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites.
Poulenc’s opera Dialogues of the Carmelites tells the story of sixteen nuns from Compiègne who, during the French Revolution, are confronted with persecution, fear, and execution. The work is based on true historical events first recorded by one of the surviving nuns. Their fate later inspired several literary interpretations, most notably Gertrud von Le Fort’s novel The Last on the Scaffold and Georges Bernanos’s play Dialogues of the Carmelites, originally conceived as a film screenplay. It was Bernanos’s text that Poulenc, in the early 1950s, recognised as suited for operatic adaptation.
In the dedication of the work, Poulenc openly acknowledged his debt to the musical past, above all to Debussy, Monteverdi, Verdi, and Mussorgsky. This musical language is further enriched by a network of motifs that represent not only individual characters, but also the qualities they embody — even when those same qualities emerge in others. In this way, individual destinies begin to flow into one another.
In December 2026, students and mentors bring a new reading of this powerful story of fear, courage, and faith to HNK 2.
The production is directed by Lea Anastazija Fleger, and musical direction is provided by Hervé Niquet and conducting students.
