July 25, 2022
The apotheosis of an apostate. The slaughter of a political scapegoat. The final chords of a desperate dream, smothered in the flames of the pyre: Arthur Honegger’s oratorio “Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher” was on the program at the Salzburg Festival on Sunday. Despite all the musical artistry – met with thunderous applause from the audience – the question remains: Does today need a religious fundamentalist war heroine like Joan of Arc?
The backdrop for Jeanne’s absurd show trial could hardly have been chosen more appropriately. The sharp-edged arcades protruded like shadows from the rugged rock on the back wall of the stage and gave the spectacle, which oscillated between cynicism and slapstick, a gruesome character, accompanied monumentally by the SWR symphony orchestra. The singing of the two choirs, sometimes feverishly excited and shrill trembling, sometimes menacingly whispering, rose up to the stone boxes in the bare rock. Around barefoot Jeanne, wrapped in a simple linen dress, played emotionally by Irène Jacob, 1991 Best Actress in Cannes.
Under the sovereign musical direction of Maxime Pascal, the sonorous voices of the theater children’s choir and its stylistically versatile counterpart from the Bavarian Radio fluttered through the stone hall like a colorful flock of birds. Sometimes in a disciplined formation as a powerful-voiced phalanx, sometimes in a diffuse confusion of breathless indignation. And again and again the rising scraps of words sank back onto the stage, cooled down, like feathers from Jeanne’s delusions. Pens with which heretical scholars scribbled a mendacious death sentence in the book from which Frère Dominique (Jérôme Kircher) reads to the dismayed Jeanne in the first scenes.
Honegger’s historical model failed after glorious victories against the enemy English in the 15th century due to profane megalomania fed by spiritual extravagance. Even after her death at the stake, Joan of Arc remained a highly political figure. Posthumously pardoned by the Church in the Middle Ages, she was only canonized after the First World War in times of surging nationalism. During the occupation of France by the Nazis, processed in the dark prologue of Paul Claudel’s libretto, the victorious maiden finally advanced to become a mystical national symbol.
Just as multifaceted and controversial as the main character, Honegger’s musical repertoire is designed in an unconventional spectrum, ranging from folkloric songs to elements of sacred vocal music and erratic jazz to military-style march fragments. A demanding potpourri, which the protagonists, with their great facial expressions and voices, around Elena Tsallagova (Virgin Maria), Mélissa Petit (Marguerite), Martina Belli (Catherine) and Marc Mauillon (Le Clerc) brought to the stage. Damien Bigourdan as the pretentious magistrate Porcus (pig) and Emilien Diard-Detoeuf as the whinnying donkey filled the insane grotesque around the court, which is decorated with allegorical animal figures, with humorous and elegant life.
Iconic fabric can be thankless. And Joan of Arc is always iconic as a canonical hagiography. Honegger, however, was neither intimidated nor carried away to iconoclasm. This Jeanne is different from her martial, sometimes chauvinistically appropriated historical role model. Paul Claudel reinterpreted them, carefully placing their emancipation in the foreground. It is the psychogram of a young woman who rebels against encrusted conservatism and remains true to her ideals. Scenically reinforced by the Salzburg director’s trick of confronting Jeanne with her childlike image in the meaningful Trimazô. Accompanied and encouraged by the programmatic call “Go your own way”, which became a recurring leitmotif, this Jeanne is not a war heroine, but an anti-heroine – maybe even an anti-war heroine. And this present needs that more urgently than ever.
(SERVICE – “Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher” by Arthur Honegger as part of the Spiritual Opening at the Salzburger Festspiele. Libretto by Paul Claudel. SWR Symphony Orchestra, Salzburger Festspiele und Theater Kinderchor, Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks. Conductor: Maxime Pascal, Choir study: Howard Arman and Wolfgang Götz. With Jeanne d’Arc – Irène Jacob, Frère Dominique – Jérôme Kircher, La Vierge – Elena Tsallagova, Marguerite – Mélissa Petit, Catherine – Martina Belli, Porcus – Damien Bigourdan, Le Clerc – Marc Mauillon, Une Voix /Héraut/Un Paysan – Damien Pass, L’âne – Emilien Diard-Detoeuf).