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.”