Harvard-Lyrica Dialogue

The Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations is pleased to announce the fourth and final of its annual Harvard-Lyrica Dialogues, scheduled from 4-6 PM, 9 May 2008 at Lehman Hall, Dudley House, 2nd Floor, in Harvard Yard.

This season's Dialogues are themed "Music and Memory -- Music as Memory", and the final Dialogue, "Revolution and its Discontents", will be an historical and sociological round-table discussion of Francis Poulenc's opera "The Dialogues of the Carmelites", set to the play by Georges Bernanos, in turn based upon based on the novella "The Last on the Scaffold", by Gertrud von le Fort. Von le Fort's story, a study in crises of conscience, recounts the massacre of the nuns of the Carmelite convent in Compiègne during the French Revolution, and the panel will deliberate Beranos's and Poulenc's masterful incarnations.

Panelists will include Jeffrey Mehlman of Boston University, Mark DeVoto, Emeritus, Tufts University, Jann Pasler, University of California, San Diego, and Paul-André Bempéchat, Harvard University.

Admission is free, and all are welcome.