MUSEUM

The Frick
Flaming June - Frederic Leighton

The painting captivates me.  The sheerness of the drapery over the human form that is still visible in detail.  The color and the colors.  The triangle of head to hip to knee.  But most of all, the left foot that projects forward, foreshortened, under the sheerness of the fabric yet the anatomy of the foot is completely visible.  I'm not even close to being a painter but that looks difficult to do.

Review: ‘Flaming June’ Arrives in New York, Preceded by Its Reputation

“Flaming June” by Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), a famous Victorian painting, has come to New York for the first time in more than 35 years, for a solo turn at the Frick Collection.

Anyone who’s ever perused books of late-19th-century British art will instantly recognize the idyllic image of a young woman in a sheer, incandescent orange dress curled up in sleep on piles of drapery on a marble bench, with a sunstruck Mediterranean in the distance. She’s particularly memorable for her disproportionately long and muscular right thigh. Tightly wrapped in diaphanous fabric, it extends from buttock to bended knee across the lower middle of the picture, practically dwarfing the upper part of her body. Leighton based her pose on Michelangelo’s sculpture “Night” and on a copy of his lost painting “Leda and the Swan,” both of which feature similarly bent legs with powerful thighs.

Measuring just under 4 feet by 4 feet, “Flaming June,” circa 1895, appears within a brightly gold-leafed, tabernacle frame that imitates the Ionic architecture of ancient Greco-Roman temples. It invites viewers into a hallucinatory space of pagan mystery. At the Frick, the whole assemblage hangs between dark, wooden, Ionic pilasters in the museum’s Oval Room. In the company of James McNeill Whistler’s tall portraits of three fashionable women and a man, all brushily rendered in muted colors (they are permanent Frick fixtures), “Flaming June” glows. It looks as if she was always meant to be here. (Why it’s called “Flaming June,” no one knows.)

It’s not one of the world’s greatest works of art — this isn’t anything like Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” which visited the Frick in 2013. Leighton’s subject has none of the magical vitality of Vermeer’s. Painted with academic virtuosity in viscous glazes, she seems as if immersed in Jell-O. But as an artifact of Victorian consciousness, Leighton’s painting is exceptionally interesting.

Organized by Susan Grace Galassi, the Frick’s senior curator, “Leighton’s ‘Flaming June’ “ includes one other piece — a lovely, 4-inch-by-4-inch painted study for the final work.

Pablo Pérez d’Ors, associate curator of European art at the Museo de Arte de Ponce, in Ponce, P.R., the painting’s permanent residence, notes in his catalog essay that the beautiful woman asleep in some archaic past was a recurrent motif in Victorian art. He speculatively connects that with fantasies about opium dens popularized in stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, which “paved the way for the appearance of symbolic allusions to the unconscious and to death.” Along these lines, he points out that the red flowers in the scene’s upper-right corner are oleanders, which were known to be poisonous. This makes the woman a femme fatale, a dangerously alluring figure who would seduce the unwary into oblivion.

Because she’s asleep and possibly dreaming, and because the image itself is like a dream, it’s hard to resist some psychoanalysis, the method that Freud was inventing around the same time that Leighton was working on his picture, the last and most famous of his career. Two elements are conspicuous: the weirdly oversized, unmistakably phallic thigh and the fluttering drapery all around the figure, which makes her appear to be “enfolded in a field of energy,” as Ms. Galassi puts it in her catalog essay. What else can this be, a Freudian might rhetorically ask, but an image of what the French call “la petite mort”? But the broader context of European history and its accelerating second Industrial Revolution is worth considering, too. The figure of the languid woman is more than just an object of erotic desire. She’s the opposite of the rationalist, ever-striving, murderously competitive spirit — once conventionally thought of as distinctively masculine. She embodies a yearning to relax, to retire from the fray and take pleasure in just being alive. As a shape-shifting archetype, she turns up repeatedly in Modernist art: in paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and countless other, usually male, artists. She’s the countercultural soul of modernity.

Leighton himself was no rebel. Born into a wealthy family and trained in Frankfurt, Paris and Rome, he was for many years president of the Royal Academy. But the 20th century wasn’t kind to his memory. Until the 1970s, Victorian art in general was regarded by sophisticates as stale, morally stultifying, formulaic kitsch. Then the tide turned. With their complex narratives, poetic metaphors, references to times past, the Victorians appealed to a Postmodernist sensibility. That new enthusiasm precipitated an avalanche of art books in which “Flaming June” was frequently reproduced. Now it belongs as much popular as to high culture. You can even buy “Flaming June” jewelry: earrings and pendants featuring miniature reproductions of the picture.

That the painting is so widely known today is owed mainly to Luis A. Ferré, who, in 1965, founded the Museo de Arte de Ponce. How Mr. Ferré acquired it is a tale of luck and passion. From 1915 to 1928, the painting was exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, after which it disappeared. Then in 1962 it was discovered hidden behind a false panel in a house in London. The following year Mr. Ferré spotted Leighton’s siren in a London gallery and, as he put it, “fell in love with her at first sight.” He bought it for about $8,000, factoring in inflation. The original frame was lost, but it turned out that the molds used to make it still existed at Arnold Wiggins and Sons. The firm created a new frame just like the old one in 1994, and “Flaming June,” called in its day “the most wonderful painting in existence” by the collector Samuel Courtauld, was finally restored to its former glory.

A Sleeper Awakened With Color

ByJames Gardner

June 26, 2015 5:38 p.m. ET

Like most Englishmen of the 19th century, Frederic Leighton believed that beautiful art consisted in the depiction of beautiful things. In practice, this conviction led to images of statuesque women wearing robes of exemplary loveliness and sitting on marble thrones in southern lands. 

Lord Leighton’s generation was perhaps the last to share this belief across the length and breadth of society, and it is doubtful whether it was ever asserted with greater energy than in “Flaming June,” a painting that he completed in 1895, shortly before he died at age 65. For the next three months, the Museo de Arte de Ponce, in Puerto Rico, is lending the work to the Frick Collection, in New York, where it appears between two of the Frick’s ethereal portraits of women by James McNeill Whistler, together with a small oil-sketch for Leighton’s painting, on loan from a private collection. (Two other Whistler portraits are hanging on the opposite wall.) 

“Flaming June” depicts a radiant young woman dressed in classical robes, asleep on a marble bench under the stars. Behind her, beneath a golden-orange awning, a thin grayish sliver of water is visible, infused with the light of the full moon. The spirit of the work is almost realist in its depiction of antiquity as somehow sharing a border with the here and now. Unlike Leighton’s “Garden of the Hesperides” from three years before, no residue of reverie or myth stands between the viewer and the subject of this work. At the same time, there is a powerful physicality—even carnality—to this beautiful, but hardly ethereal, young woman.

The overwhelming aesthetic thrust of the work is its circular composition—defined by the sleeper’s limbs and the folds of her garments—as well as the startling emphasis on the orange or saffron that defines her robes. This abundance of orange is nearly unprecedented in Western art until well into the 20th century. Its insistent use in the sleeper’s robes is repeated in the awning overhead, so artfully as to approach that ideal of monochromatic painting that haunted Whistler, not least in his two grayish-white female portraits that flank Leighton’s painting as it hangs in the Frick.

And yet, there is a vital paradox at the heart of “Flaming June.” The central figure is in a state of deep sleep: One can almost sense the dreams flitting about her eyes. At the same time, the robes that engulf her are like a relentless eddy in their churning movement, an extremity of dynamism in an extremity of repose. This contradiction is played out in the overall composition as well. If its emphatic circularity is rare in British art at this time, no less rare is the insistently four-square context in which Leighton has set it. Five strong horizontal bands, defined by the awning, the sky, the sea, the marble bench and the marble pavement, are deployed by the artist to contain the whirlwind of the sleeper’s robes.

There are surely ancient and pre-modern precedents for the painting, in classical friezes and several works by Michelangelo. But perhaps the most direct and important precedent is Albert Joseph Moore’s “Midsummer” (at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth, England), completed in 1887. Here too a beautiful young woman of antiquity sleeps on a sumptuous throne, and the preponderance of orange in the two paintings is so striking that it can hardly be coincidental. 

But if Moore’s painting is a charming though somewhat musty example of late Victoriana, “Flaming June” is a true and accomplished work of art. The defining failure of most 19th-century academic painting is its overwhelming tendency to see art as a substitute for reality or an improvement on it (hence all those unnaturally perfect women lounging around in unnaturally perfect weather). Allied to this is an unwillingness or an inability to see the work of art as sovereign and autonomous, which is roughly how the Old Masters and the Modernists saw it. This experiential surrogacy is still to some degree an element of “Flaming June.” But in this painting Leighton, perhaps inspired by Whistler, is animated by the far higher ambition to create a unified work of art that can stand as much on its formal strength as on its contextual terms.

Leighton himself was the supreme academician of his day, even though he was influenced by the Realists, the Pre-Raphaelites and finally the Aesthetic Movement. He was associated with the Royal Academy for over 30 years, and for the last 17 years of his life he served as its president. It was precisely during the period of his presidency that artistic modernism began to take root in London, about a generation after it first appeared in Paris. And it may well be that Oscar Wilde has Leighton in his sights when, at the opening of “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” he describes a party attended by “several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists.”

Wilde’s snipe at Academic art was merely a foretaste of what was to come. With the spread of modernism in the first half of the 20th century, few artistic movements fell into steeper disrepute than Leighton’s academicism. Although “Flaming June” was greatly admired in its day, and was displayed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 1915 to 1928, thereafter it disappeared from sight and from the memory of the art world. For more than 30 years it somehow remained hidden behind a panel above an old chimney in a house in Clapham Common, South London, only to be fortuitously rediscovered in 1962. One year later, Luis A. Ferré, who was then beginning to acquire art for the museum he intended to found, the Museo de Arte de Ponce, came upon the work in a London gallery. Without hesitating, he bought it and spirited it back to the Caribbean, where to this day it remains the pride and centerpiece of his collection.

“Flaming June” is not without its shortcomings. There is a certain perfunctoriness to its details, in the cluster of oleander at the top right, for example, as well as an inability—which almost defines 19th-century Academic art—fully to energize the paint textures. But its composition and chromatic harmony succeed so well that it compels us to re-examine our most inveterate assumptions about this sort of art. Sometimes, from out of the general mass of pleasing mediocrity that defines this style, a work of real power like “Flaming June” can emerge, and, if proof were needed, “Flaming June” is it.

LINCOLN CENTER

Metropolitan Opera Hall
American Ballet Theater

Cinderella - Sergei Prokofiev

 "Ashton's Cinderella is widely considered one of the greatest ballets of this timeless rags-to-riches fairy tale. Performed to Prokofiev’s hauntingly soaring score, this romance is a stage fantasy to enrapture children of all ages as well as a cornucopia of sly wit and inventive choreography to sate the most devoted of ballet fans. Colorful characters abound, including the gloriously grotesque stepsisters portrayed, as is the tradition, by male dancers who introduce a wonderful note of pantomime comedy."

FREDERICK ASHTON'S BALLETIC TRIUMPH RETURNS FOR 2015

Captivating costume and an Art Deco-inspired set design works hand-in-hand with Sergei Prokofiev's hauntingly beautiful score to make this American Ballet Theatre production of Cinderella a visual feast for both children and the most ardent of ballet enthusiasts alike.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

There's really no helping you if you don't know the age old tale of envy and vanity, but here goes! Cinderella is the maltreated heroine of the tale, who is forbidden to attend an important ball at the palace. Her cruel stepsisters harangue Cinderella's father when he tried comforting her, as he fears them. The humorous and grotesque stepsisters are played by male dancers, a traditional feature of Cinderella ballets and one which introduces a playful pantomime element to proceesings. When an elderly woman knocks at their door, they try to send her away, however the kindly Cinderella sneaks her a piece of bread.

After her family have left for the ball, the mysterious woman appears again; however this time she is young, graceful and shining; she is Cinderella's Fairy Godmother, come to send her to the ball. Together with the Four Seasons, she takes Cinderella to the stars where she is given the ultimate makeover, and dressed in a shimmering white dress. On earth, the Godmother transforms a common pumpkin into the famous coach of legend. 

At the ball, the grotesque stepsisters are trying to make a play for every man there, including the Prince! - however it is to no avail. Once he spots the disguised Cinderella, his heart is lost to her, and they dance all night long. But at the stroke of midnight, the spell suddenly starts to fail, and Cinderella must flee before she is recognised by her family; she runs away, leaving behind a glass slipper and the Prince is determined to use this to find his love.

- See more at: http://www.newyorkcitytheatre.com/theaters/metropolitanoperahouse/american-ballet-theatre-cinderella.php#sthash.JNOmVGOZ.dpuf

UNITED NATIONS

Delegate's Dining Room
Lunch & Tour

LINCOLN CENTER

Metropolitan Opera
American Ballet Theater

Swan Lake - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
"Of all the great classics performed by ABT today, Swan Lake remains the quintessential ballet, the one that defines the standards of the Company, tests its dancers and ennobles the spirit of the audience. This romantic fable of ill-fated passion, dreamlike transformation and ultimate forgiveness is set to Tchaikovsky’s glorious score. With breathtaking choreography and visually magnificent sets evoking a Renaissance court, the fabled lake of the swans rises into view, inspiring awe for generations to come."

RECITAL

St. Thomas Church
Music of J.S. Bach: John Scott Organ Recital

"John Scott plays a program of music by J.S. Bach performed by Mendelssohn at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1840."

If the music was good enough for Mendelssohn's attention, it's good enough for me to hear.

A casual hour of Bach on 5th Avenue in the middle of the shopping district.  St. Thomas Church in Manhattan copies Thomaskirche in Leipzig.

Great composer, great organist, great organ, great setting, great Saturday afternoon.

"John Scott, Organist and Director of Music at Saint Thomas Church performs a program of works by J.S. Bach which Felix Mendelssohn played in 1840 at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. The 1840 performance was attended by Robert Schumann, who wrote glowingly about the music and the occasion, which was an opportunity for the Thomaskirche to raise funds for its now-beloved Bach memorial statue."

The program includes the following works:

• Fugue in E-flat major BWV 552

• Schmücke dich, O liebe Seele BWV 654

• Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV 543

• Passacaglia in C minor BWV 582

• Pastorella in F BWV 590

• Toccata in D minor BWV 565

LINCOLN CENTER

Rose Hall
Jazz at Lincoln Center

The Music of Puente, Machete & Henriquez

"Carlos Henriquez, the bassist in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, doubles as musical director of this program, featuring the band in new arrangements of works associated with Machito and Tito Puente. Joining as featured guests are some surviving members of Puente’s orchestra: the trumpeter Pete Nater and the percussionists George Delgado, José Madera and Johnny Rodriquez Jr."

Elements of Latin music can be heard in some of the earliest jazz, a tendency Jelly Roll Morton referred to as the “Spanish Tinge.” Music Director and bassist Carlos Henriquez and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra explore the phenomenon of Latin jazz, through the paradigm of Afro-Cuban forefather Machito and "Mambo King" Tito Puente along with special guests vocalists Cita Rodriguez and Marco Bermudez, trumpeter Pete Nater, and percussionists George Delgado, Jose Madera, and Johnny Rodriguez Jr., many of whom performed with Machito and Puente. Machito was one of the first to introduce Afro-Cuban jazz as one of the earliest hybridizations of the two genres and, in doing so, created a lane for a plethora of Latin styles like mambo, son, guaracha, and guajira to further diversify the music. Hailing from the Bronx, New York, Henriquez’ home borough is a historical haven for Latin culture and creativity. A longtime member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the versatile Henriquez has shared stages with Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Eddie Palmieri, Ruben Blades, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, Bobby Cruz, and a host of greats from various genres. One of the most gifted inheritors of the breadth of what has become Latin jazz, Henriquez will also debut his own compositions, rightly affirming, “[The] melting pot is still brewing for more innovation."

LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Joan of Arc, Made ‘Timeless’ for the Stage

By

Jennifer Smith

June 8, 2015 8:42 p.m. ET

In France, Joan of Arc, the 15th-century peasant girl credited with leading the French army to victory at Orléans over the English, is regarded as a national hero.

This week in New York, the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard will portray the martyr in a different light: as a childlike figure who recalls her tumultuous life as a series of visions, in the New York Philharmonic’s presentation of “Joan of Arc at the Stake.”

A dramatic oratorio by French-Swiss composer Arthur Honegger that incorporates both spoken and singing roles, the work will be performed in French, with English surtitles. It closes out the Philharmonic’s 2014-15 season and will be conducted by Alan Gilbert, the orchestra’s music director.

This fully staged version, by French director Côme de Bellescize, involves vivid costumes—participants in Joan’s heresy trial are dressed as circus animals—and has a cast that includes solo singers, an adult choir, a children’s chorus and actors from the Comédie-Française, France’s storied theater company.

“Everyone sees Jeanne as a warrior, a woman who takes men’s clothes,” said Mr. Bellescize, using the French version of her name.

But in Honegger’s work—created in the 1930s for Russian dancer-actress Ida Rubinstein, with a libretto by French dramatist Paul Claudel—“she is a child,” Mr. Bellescize said. “They want her to be an icon of innocence, of fate…It’s a very spiritual way of thinking.”

His production places Joan on a platform in the middle of the orchestra. In the moments before her death, she is visited by a friar, Brother Dominique, who reads to her from a book containing the events of her life.

The participants in Joan’s trial appear as animals sitting in judgment. The judge is a pig and the jury are sheep. Later, the political and military aspects of her story are dramatized as a game of cards involving the Duke of Burgundy and a series of knaves.

“Everything that happens on stage is like a mirror of her soul,” said Mr. Bellescize, who created this version for Japan’s Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto in 2012.

Ms. Cotillard is best known for her film work, and received an Academy Award for her turn as chanteuse Édith Piaf, another French icon. But she has a family connection to Honegger’s Joan: Her mother, the actress Niseema Theillaud, also played the role.

Ms. Cotillard first portrayed Joan in 2005, and has performed the role with the Orléans Orchestra and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. She recently completed a tour of the staged version by Mr. Bellescize in Monaco, Toulouse and Paris.

The role is in some ways a natural fit, according to co-star Éric Génovèse, an actor with the Comédie-Française.

“Her parents were both coming from theater,” said Mr. Génovèse, who played Brother Dominique at the Matsumoto festival and performed the role alongside Ms. Cotillard this year. He said the actress is a “great worker” who despite her relative inexperience on the stage maintained an impressive calm during their work together on the oratorio.

While the actors don’t sing in “Joan of Arc at the Stake,” the work does present musical challenges. The main characters must follow the conductor’s rhythm and tempo, working in concert with the orchestra and the singers alongside them on stage.
“You have to be really inside the music,” said Mr. Génovèse.

The work, which will be performed June 10 through 13, continues the orchestra’s recent emphasis on fully staged theatrical works. In recent years those have included a dance-infused presentation of works by Igor Stravinsky as well as operas such as “Le Grand Macabre” and “The Cunning Little Vixen.”

Mr. Gilbert, who announced this year that he intends to step down in 2017, said the Joan of Arc production “fits right into the kinds of projects that the Philharmonic and I have been exploring since I’ve been here.”

He said Mr. Bellescize’s approach rendered the story of Joan “timeless.” The idea of telling a story is something the orchestra aspires to every day, Mr. Gilbert said, adding that “having musicians share the stage with accomplished actors such as these heightens this sense of storytelling through music.”

‘Joan of Arc at the Stake,’ Distilled to Her Essence at the New York Philharmonic

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art hangs a large, mesmerizing painting of Joan of Arc by the 19th-century French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. Joan’s gaze is both innocent and determined, her blue eyes focused on something that seems to hold her in thrall.

The painting is one of a remarkable number of depictions of Joan created since the poet and historian Christine de Pizan wrote the epic ballad “Ditié de Jehanne” (“Song of Joan”) in 1429. Joan, the humble French peasant girl who heard voices and battled English armies, has been depicted in countless paintings, plays, books, movies and musical works, including operas by Verdi and Tchaikovsky, a choral piece by Leonard Bernstein and in Arthur Honegger’s 1935 oratorio “Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher” (“Joan of Arc at the Stake”).

The New York Philharmonic, which last presented Honegger’s work in 1994 under the baton of Kurt Masur, will perform it Wednesday through Saturday at Avery Fisher Hall, with Alan Gilbert leading a cast that includes the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard in the title role, a speaking part. It is the American premiere of the production, created in 2012 by Côme de Bellescize for Seiji Ozawa’s Saito Kinen Festival in Japan.

Joan was “characterized above all by paradox,” Kathryn Harrison writes in her book “Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured.” Her image has been harnessed for highly eclectic political ends, co-opted by groups from Mexican revolutionaries to France’s right-wing National Front. In his play “Saint Joan of the Stockyards,” Bertolt Brecht turned Joan (who in reality developed a taste for luxury at court) into a socialist heroine in 20th-century Chicago; she has been romanticized by painters including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, mocked and sexualized by Voltaire, and depicted in a feminized manner far removed from the virginal girl who refused to wear women’s clothing.

Her bobbed hair, known in France as the Joan of Arc cut, was appropriated by flappers in the 1920s to project female emancipation and sported by Jean Seberg in the 1957 film “Saint Joan.” Joan’s face was even featured on American posters urging women to buy war savings stamps during World War II.

In France, she is above all a nationalist symbol, albeit a “deeply clichéd one,” as Mr. Bellescize put it in a telephone interview. As a result, there are challenges in presenting a work about Joan to the French, who come to her story with preconceived notions, he said; on the other hand, “New Yorkers don’t have a good idea of who Joan is, so the challenge is to make a real connection between the audience and the story.”

What is unusual about Honegger’s Joan is that the character is childlike — represented as the naïve teenager she really was. With a libretto by Paul Claudel, the French poet and dramatist, the story is told from Joan’s viewpoint in the afterlife through a series of flashbacks. Friar Dominic, her confessor, reads events from her life, starting in reverse order with her trial and final moments in the fire and ending with her pastoral childhood. Scenes shift between her farcical trial, her reminiscences about the landscape of her native Lorraine and her spirited declarations at the stake.

“The way Honegger employs flashback and has children singing naïve folk songs is extremely moving,” Mr. Gilbert said. The composer scored a mix of Baroque, plainchant, pop and jazz elements for adult and children’s choirs and for a large ensemble that includes piano, saxophone and the eerie, airy tones of the ondes Martenot.

The unwieldy oratorio, championed in recent years by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and recorded by Helmuth Rilling with German ensembles on the Hänssler-Classic label, seems at odds with much of Honegger’s other works. A member of the group of French composers known as Les Six, his musical sympathies tilted more toward the Germanic tradition than the French one.

“I attach great importance to musical architecture, which I should never want to see sacrificed for reasons of literary or pictorial order,” Honegger once said. “My model is Bach.” His catalog includes multiple film scores, the colorful orchestral work “Pacific 231” (inspired by his love of locomotives) and some curiously underperformed but vital symphonies like the Symphony No. 3 “Liturgique,” once championed by Herbert Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.

The premiere of the first production of “Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher,” in 1938 in Basel, Switzerland, starred the actress Ida Rubinstein. French critics faulted the casting of a Russian-born Jew in the role of France’s heroine even though Honegger and Claudel wrote the work with Rubinstein in mind. It wasn’t the first time the French had taken issue with an outsider’s perspective on Joan: In 1928, French nationalists criticized the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer for filming the 1928 silent “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” The prologue to Honegger’s oratorio, which begins with the chorus singing “Darkness! Darkness! And France was without form and void,” was added in 1944 to invoke the Nazi occupation of the country.

But his music later fell out of favor because of the composer’s perceived affiliations with the Nazis, which led to his expulsion from the resistance movement and a temporary ban on his music in France. (Though Swiss by nationality, Honegger spent most of his life in France.) He attended wartime meetings in Paris organized by German cultural officials and took part in a festival in Vienna organized by  Joseph Goebbels in 1941.  In 1942, the Germans celebrated Honegger’s 50th birthday. But “going to the enemy’s camp,” he wrote, “does not automatically mean that one supports his cause.”

Mr. de Bellescize said that in creating the production, he initially questioned the idealization of Joan. “Why should I defend this girl in front of an audience?” he said he had asked himself. “She used violence.” But ultimately he concluded that she was an idealistic child who became a symbol of strength, hope and resistance as well as a pawn of political and military forces. (In the oratorio, Joan asks Friar Dominic, “How did this all happen to me?” He replies, “It was a game of cards that decided your fate.”)

Given the tensions rising in Europe at the time of the work’s 1938 premiere, it would have been easy for Honegger and Claudel to simply make Joan a French nationalist symbol, Mr. de Bellescize said, but instead they emphasized the personal and religious elements of her story. “If you go deeply in the text,” he added, “you can see that Claudel wanted to make her a feminine figure of Christ.”

For Ms. Cotillard, Joan is “a hypersensitive person with an unwavering faith,” the actress wrote by email. “The desire to reunite her country became a need and brought her an uncommon strength.”

“What Claudel was interested in was more the origin of her faith than her journey as a warrior,” Ms. Cotillard added. “She is driven by a force that takes its roots in the very deep connection she has with the world around her, particularly with nature and the elements.” The oratorio ends with the chorus singing, “Greater love has no man than he who gives his life for those he loves.”

Mr. Gilbert said, “The message is universal: the message of resistance and of standing up for what’s right.”

Joan “was a violent person who happens to be naïve,” he added. “It’s complex. I wouldn’t say that she’s a totally sympathetic character, and what motivates her might be misplaced. But those levels of complexity make it interesting.”

THEATER

59E59
My Perfect Mind

This is small theater and a big opportunity to really enjoy a play.  We've seen and like Lear.  There were many moments and head nods to Shakespeare and Lear.  But, the play never pulled together and captured our full attention.

The King’s the Thing, Not the Play, for an Actor Who Would Be Lear

Eight years ago, the English actor Edward Petherbridge flew to New Zealand to play King Lear. He’d never seen himself as the Lear type.

“One thinks of Lear as rather towering, a kind of oak,” he said, sipping a cappuccino in a coffee bar near Central Park. “I’m more a sort of birch.” Indeed, he seemed nearly as slender as a birch in a tan linen jacket and a white straw hat with a black band — Edwardian chic. With his wispy white hair, a bristlier white beard and red-rimmed eyes, he has the look of a gentleman rabbit, not a warlike royal.

But at 70, an age at which major roles are scarce, he was hardly going to turn down the part. “I thought, ‘Well, if somebody wants me to do it, I can do it.’ ” During the first day of rehearsal, the cast members read the play, and on the second they began work on Act I. Mr. Petherbridge recited Lear’s speech about dividing his estate so that he can “unburdened crawl toward death.”

That night, he woke in the early hours and collapsed on the bathroom floor of his hotel. His right side was paralyzed. He feared he’d had a stroke. He crawled toward the telephone and called for an ambulance.

He had had a transient ischemic attack, sometimes called a mini-stroke. Dr. David Greer, a professor and vice chairman of neurology at Yale University described such an attack as “a warning of a stroke,” a rehearsal.

Mr. Petherbridge said that in his case, the rehearsal was “a pretty full-dress one.”

Even before he had a second, more serious attack in the hospital two days later, Mr. Petherbridge said he knew: “I wasn’t going to be able to do Lear, no question.”

But he’s doing Lear now, though not quite as Shakespeare intended, in “My Perfect Mind,” from the theater company Told by an Idiot, which opens at 59E59 Theaters next Tuesday. Mr. Petherbridge and the actor Paul Hunter, who met when they starred in a roundly detested West End revival of “The Fantasticks,” created the play, which takes its title from a line in “Lear,” in which the king frets, “I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”

Antic and impish, the two-actor piece describes Mr. Petherbridge’s life, career and recent illness. It is a play about not playing King Lear. It was presented at the Young Vic in London last year.

A few days before his attack, Mr. Petherbridge had been ready to rage at the storm. Afterward, he couldn’t walk without support, couldn’t write, couldn’t read. He remembers having to learn to put his finger and thumb together. “I thought, finger and thumb together, how do I do that?” he said.

But a year later he was back onstage, in a revival of Kurt Weill’s last musical, “Lost in the Stars.” And a year after that he was in that production of “The Fantasticks” and soon he began work on “My Perfect Mind.”

Until recently only younger actors dared to play the role of Lear. As James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, explained in a telephone conversation, Shakespeare originally wrote the part for the actor Richard Burbage, who was then in his late 30s. “For most of its history, this was a younger actor playing an old man rather than an old man playing an old man,” he said.

“It is a daunting and taxing role both mentally and physically,” said Mr. Shapiro, whose “The Year of Lear,” about 1606, when the play was written, will be published this fall.

Lear is no ordinary character. He may call himself “a foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward,” yet he is vigorous enough to overpower and kill an opponent in the final act, then stagger onstage with a dead Cordelia in his arms. And Lear has almost a quarter of the lines in the play, which is not exactly a short one.

At 78, Mr. Petherbridge, hasn’t quite reached fourscore, but he’s had a long and eventful career. His résumé includes many seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company and London’s National Theater, two Tony nominations and a stint as Lord Peter Wimsey on the BBC. If greater fame has eluded him, he doesn’t seem to mind. “I’ve not been in ‘Downton Abbey,’ ” he said, with cheerful resignation.

In the past, Mr. Petherbridge has played the Fool and the King of France in “Lear,” but after New Zealand, he still dreamed of giving the title role a try.

Backstage at “The Fantasticks,” Mr. Petherbridge first proposed to Mr. Hunter that they create a two-character version of the tragedy. But Mr. Hunter (a co-founder of Told by an Idiot, which Mr. Petherbridge describes as “frightfully avant-garde”) argued they’d have more fun creating a new play.

They brought on Kathryn Hunter (no relation), one of the few women to have played Lear, as the director and an additional creative voice, and began devising scenes for “My Perfect Mind.” Mr. Petherbridge describes that process as lively and imaginative, “like having a kaleidoscope and shaking it and seeing a series of pictures.”

Many of those pictures illustrate Mr. Petherbridge’s biography, but there’s a lot of Shakespeare in there, too. As he and Mr. Hunter refined the script, “There’s a war of attrition going on,” he said. “It’s a friendly war. There’s me trying to get as much Lear into the show as I could and him trying to take as much out.”

The director Ms. Hunter described the extraordinary “clarity of thought” and the “state of fragility” that Mr. Petherbridge brings to the Lear passages, especially the reunion with Cordelia, a suggestion of the Lear he might have been. In an email, she said she wondered if Mr. Petherbridge’s illness and recovery, “this experience of having one’s identity suddenly wrenched and thrown out of balance,” also informed his acting.

These days, Mr. Petherbridge saves his fragility for the stage. Walking in Central Park last week, he was energetic and sure-footed, clambering up stairs and down slopes and around ponds. He said the only lingering effect from his illness was that sometimes, when he is telling a story, “its poignancy or even its humor can make me feel as though I want to sob.”

Still, he’s not crying over Lear. Not when he has “My Perfect Mind” to look forward to.

“It’s the most glitteringly golden booby prize that you can possibly imagine,” he said. “It really is.”

My Perfect Mind – review

This two-man show is the oddest of mixes: part trawl through the life and times of the classical actor Edward Petherbridge, part Shakespeare recital, part theatrical in-joke and part metaphysical meditation on the frailties of old age and the extraordinary abilities of mind and body to renew themselves. Told by an Idiot's My Perfect Mind is an exquisite piece of tomfoolery, inspired by Edward Petherbridge's experience of not playing King Lear. It offers a playful and moving exploration of life as an ongoing performance. It is infected by gleeful madness.

The facts are these: in 2007, Petherbridge travelled to Wellington in New Zealand to fulfil his long-cherished ambition to play Shakespeare's mad monarch. But two days into rehearsal, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed. Remarkably, he was still able to remember every word of King Lear.

Played out on Michael Vale's tilted stage – a world that's off-kilter and difficult to physically negotiate – and directed by Kathryn Hunter (who has played both Lear and the Fool), the show mirrors the relationship between the foolish king and his wise fool. Paul Hunter plays a series of fall guys, from a German psychiatrist to a Romanian Shakespeare professor, and Laurence Olivier, who advises that the essential requirement for an actor who plays Lear is a Cordelia who weighs very little. There is a running gag that all these impersonations are "borderline offensive".

In fact, the entire show gurgles with merriment as it skewers luvvydom, pokes fun at conceptual art and offers tongue-in-cheek advice to theatre-makers on how to treat the audience: "You've got to shove it up their arses before you shove it down their throats." The theatrical in-jokes would wear thin, were it not for the fact that Petherbridge's mixture of bravado and frailty brings real heart to the enterprise. So, too, does the untangling of his relationships with his mother, who herself suffered a stroke two days before he was born, and his brother.

It's a show that invokes the ghosts of Petherbridge's childhood, the ghosts of all those actors who have played Lear, and the ghost of the performance that Petherbridge never got to give.

The result is a funny, moving reminder that however much we aspire to be the king, we are all fools in one way or another.