Classical byDermot Clinch

Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites ends with the spectacle of 16 nuns proceeding, very slowly, one by one, to their death at the guillotine. The blade thuds. The reduction of the women's chorus to three, two, one, none, is agonising. On the opening night at the English National Opera I sat next to the man from the Church Times, who agreed the spectacle had an impact.

Poulenc's opera has another week to run at the London Coliseum.The pauses in the first scenes on the opening night where dialogue drooped into serial monologue will by now be up to speed. The swinging legs of Sister Constance, sitting perched on the refectory table - thus the nun denotes her love of life - may be oscillating more slowly, in time with the stylised ethos of the production as a whole. What will be left is the strongest, best-conceived ENO production for months.

The nuns welcome their martyrdom. Should they? Do they really? The opera is cleansingly French in its examination of such niceties. "It is not for us to decide whether our names shall appear in the breviary," a calm superior admonishes a sister who looks too eagerly towards her own death. The libretto, following a play completed by the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos shortly before his death in 1948, promotes an intense inner drama of necessity, choice, faith and grace into something stimulating and real. The impact of Poulenc's wonderfully supple operatic version is profound and the ENO's one act of English perfidy is to have excised the word "Dialogues" from the opera's title. The Carmelites is just too filmy. Dialogue is what Dialogues is about: scene after scene after scene.

The opera is dedicated "to the memory of Claude Debussy, Claudio Monteverdi, Giuseppe Verdi and Modest Musorgsky". There are harps, trumpets, drums, bangs, crashes, guillotines. But it is inward-turned, a piece that finds the best expression of grief in grammatical self- questioning. Immediately after the confused, tragic death of the prioress, the young nun, Blanche - the aristocratic girl whose decision to join the convent springs the drama's lock - stands by the deathbed and stumbles to interpret her Mother Superior's final words. "The reverend mother is saying . . . was saying . . . would have wanted to say . . ." The tense for sudden loss is hard to find and Blanche's lines parse the movement of grief with grim objectivity.

Bernanos's play began as a film script, and was derived from a German novel that was based on fact. The Carmelites of Compiegne did go to the scaffold for defending their faith and their king. Their histories are documented, and their story is told by Mother Marie of the Incarnation of God, who survived the persecution and died in 1836. Mother Marie presides movingly over the final tableau at the Coliseum, welcoming her sisters into the embrace of Heaven. Beyond this, and the odd ancien regime gaiter, the temptation of naturalism is ignored.

How long would such an approach last at Glyndebourne? How long would a sponsor contribute to a production that pared down the garden of Mozart's Figaro, say, to a single explanatory tree, the Egypt of AIda to a solitary sand dune? The new Glyndebourne production of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - the anti-aria opera without whose precedent Poulenc would never have set dialogue happily at all - is in places musically sublime. Christiane Oelze sings Melisande with simplicity and without sickly niceness. John Tomlinson, as her husband, is a marvellous bastard.

But Debussy wanted mystery. Graham Vick offers baronial halls, family photos on drawing-room tables, shaky hands on coffee cups, heirlooms everywhere. It would be hard to say precisely what job Arkel, King of Allemonde, did in the city before retiring. But the images are of Daliesque brightness. The balustrade is set on fire at the end. Given surrealism instead of suggestion, the imagination has no room for flight.

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