France
The opera is written by Francis Poulenc. It tells a fictionalised version of the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, Carmelite nuns who were guillotined in Paris in 1794 in the latter days of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, after refusing to renounce their vocation. The opera premièred (in Italian translation) in January 1957 in Milan, premièred the same year in Paris, France, in French aa well as in the United States (in English translation).
