Last year I posted a YouTube video of the magnificent setting of the Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen) the concludes Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmelites , with the sound of the guillotine searing this into the memory. Here is another staging, from La Scala in 2004:
And from the New York Met in 1987, here is Jessye Norman and Maria Ewing inter alia in an extremely powerful scene (this guillotine seems especially loud!):
Séamus Sweeney 