The Maid of Orleans

Act I 
Thibaut – Joan’s father – warns everyone about the dangers that await them. War is imminent and, in such uncertain times, Joan must obey her father’s will: she is expected to marry Raymond, to whom she was betrothed as a child. Joan refuses, much to her father’s fury, and he accuses her of being under the influence of sinister forces. Joan confesses that she has a calling that requires a vow of chastity. She feels that it is her duty to stop the bloodshed and put an end to the human suffering. When left alone on stage, Joan convinces herself that now is the time to act. She is overcome by doubts and fears until she hears voices that give her courage and confidence. 

Act II 
The war is raging on. In the royal castle, the knight Dunois is attempting to coax King Charles into regaining his pride and sense of responsibility, as the king has been neglecting all his duties. The empty treasury, military defeats and desertions – none of Dunois’ exhortations make any impression, though; the king seeks distraction in the arms of his lover Agnès Sorel. When Dunois hears that the dispirited monarch is planning to flee, he threatens to resign his post. At that critical moment, salvation comes in the form of a miraculous young maiden, a bringer of victory. The archbishop is prepared to confirm the miracle officially. Joan appears before the assembled crowd. She is convinced that if she can help the king, she will be helping everyone. By order of King Charles, Joan is granted extraordinary powers.

Act III 
Jeanne meets the enemy knight Lionel. They start fighting, but suddenly Joan hesitates: she cannot take her eyes off Lionel’s face. She finds herself incapable of delivering the final blow and urges him to flee. Confused and moved, Lionel asks her to follow him. Joan loses her self-confidence and is overcome by her emotions. She feels that she has broken her sacred vow. 

Charles celebrates his coronation and honours Joan publicly as his heroine. Suddenly, her father Thibaut steps out of the shadows. He accuses his daughter of consorting with the forces of Hell and demands that she proves her innocence publicly. Dunois draws his sword to defend her, yet Joan remains silent, convinced that she cannot counter these accusations. Everyone turns their back on her. The archbishop too poses the same question: is she guilty? No answer. Everybody deserts her. Lionel offers her his protection, but Joan rejects him.

Act IV 
Jeanne is alone, consumed by despair and longing. Doubting her calling and rejected by all, she waits and calls out desperately for Lionel. When he appears, she hears the voices: she has broken her vows and allowed earthly love into her heart. 

Joan is sentenced to death. In the presence of a large crowd, she is prepared for her execution. Then she hears the voices again; this time, they are bringing forgiveness.

“Joan is burning from within”

After his earlier productions of The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (2013) and Prince Igor (2017), director Dmitri Tcherniakov returns to Amsterdam — this time with a rarely performed opera by Tchaikovsky, The Maid of Orleans.

Text: Andrei Zorin

The Maid of Orleans is performed less frequently than other operas by Tchaikovsky and is even deemed by some to be a failure. What made you decide to stage it despite this?

“I wouldn’t say this is his most successful opera, but it is definitely not a failure. I have known this work since I was a child — I first saw it in the 1980s in the Opera of Odessa. I can’t remember the details of that performance, but something in it really moved me. It contained a secret, something I couldn’t explain. I still had the same feeling later when I heard it again as an adult. I could never believe in it unequivocally: it sounded too bombastic or a bit fake at times, at others too solemn or influenced too much by other composers and styles. Even so, I remained captivated by that sense of a hidden mystery. I’ve always thought I’d like to tackle this opera some day, if only to find out what that secret is.”

“There’s a persistent rumour that Tchaikovsky himself was dissatisfied with the result and was planning to revise the work. Some people even claim there is a second, ‘improved’ version, at least in sketch form, hidden somewhere in an inheritance. I did once investigate this, but it turned out to be a complete fiction. And now here I am, standing face to face with this strange opera — a work in which moments of heart-rending beauty alternate with passages that sound like a sudden outburst of Meyerbeer, or whoever Tchaikovsky was trying to learn from at that point. What motivates me is the puzzle: what is it that fascinates me, despite everything?” 

The Maid of Orleans is essentially an opera with one lead, despite the many characters. The drama revolves around Joan, a figure European artists have repeatedly returned to for five centuries now. How does this production fit in with that tradition and what is your personal connection with her?

“It’s true that Joan has all the loveliest music in the opera. You feel she is the focal point of Tchaikovsky’s inspiration. If she is not on the stage for a while, you almost start to miss her — you are waiting for her to return.”

“The picture we have of Joan of Arc is based mainly on her trial: the accusations, the witness statements and the interrogations. She was put under the magnifying glass, as it were; people wanted to study and dissect her. We know they even sent someone to make friends with her purely to get her to talk and to betray herself.”

“Joan was a troublemaker, someone who didn’t fit in a neat compartment. I don’t want to use her as a symbol of some modern movement or ideology — she has been misused for that purpose too often in the past. Over the centuries, she has been portrayed as a saint, a charlatan, a patriotic icon or a revolutionary figurehead. What fascinated me was not so much the real, historical Joan as Tchaikovsky’s Joan — his own personal interpretation. My task was to listen to that Joan.”

Tchaikovsky started on this opera soon after Eugene Onegin, which marked his breakthrough as an opera composer. Your own production of Eugene Onegin was a key point in your career. Do you see a connection between the two operas?

“The most obvious connection is the period: they are separated only by a couple of years. But it is striking to see how the composer of the intimate, subtle Onegin then went on to create a colossal grand opéra spectacle with a chorus, battles, coronations and ballets — entirely in the French style. Even so, a clear recurring theme in all Tchaikovsky’s operas is his female lead roles. You have Tatyana in Onegin, Maria in Mazeppa, Natasha in The Oprichnik and Lisa in The Queen of Spades. Joan belongs in that list. They are all visionaries who cause trouble in the world around them, which is ultimately their downfall. Each of them breaks with their old life and what is considered ‘appropriate’ at a decisive moment. It is an act of courage, as well as one of self-destruction. Their rebellion is both magnificent and tragic, but the bravery they demonstrate remains breathtaking.” 

Can you tell us something about your approach to the opera and why you think it will appeal to modern audiences?

“The key for me lies in rethinking the entire dramaturgy. That is because the libretto is problematic; Tchaikovsky wrote it himself, based on Schiller and other sources, and it is somewhat uneven. We have opted for a new structure that rejects a linear narrative in favour of a circular account, with Joan as the centre of gravity. At the heart of the production are her trial and conviction. We see her there alone, beset upon, already stigmatised. The scenes with other characters show them as witnesses, either in her favour or against her. The trial is constantly interrupted by flashbacks, memories, hallucinations and visions. What we see is her inner world — how someone can break, spiritually and emotionally, when under unbearable pressure.”

“It is clear from the start that Joan is different. She burns inside, as if she is possessed by an idea. She wants to set the universe alight, to melt a glacier. She is not a belligerent figure: she is fighting for redemption and an end to human suffering. But we see the people around her abandoning her to her fate, one after another. Those she helped turn against her; those she trusted betray her. In the end, nothing is left except the harsh conclusion that the world is fundamentally unjust and that everything — absolutely everything — seems pointless.”

The feminine, the heroic and the divine

Even by the standards of an art form as cosmopolitan and time-transcending as opera, Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orleans is an exceptionally complex and multifaceted tapestry of cultures and eras. The martyr from medieval France who inspired the Russian composer became known throughout Europe thanks to a ‘Romantic tragedy’ in German, written by Friedrich Schiller around the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time when Napoleon was achieving overwhelming victories against the German states.

Text: Andrei Zorin, Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford

A Romantic heroine
Schiller had little affinity with the emerging ideology of German nationalism, as is clear from his choice of a subject from French history. Even so, the political and artistic movements of his day are reflected in his treatment of the material, as a professional historian who had carefully studied the available documents. “The historical aspect has been tackled,” he wrote to Goethe on the subject of his tragedy, “and used fully, insofar as I can judge.” The dramatist drew extensively from the historical sources to capture the spirit of the time and place, but the story is very much his own creation.

Female warriors are a recurring phenomenon in the mythologies of many peoples, but rarely do they occupy such a central position as in German mythology. Schiller, who was familiar for example with the Nibelungenlied (rediscovered in 1755), made his heroine more ‘Germanic’. Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who received divine instructions to exhort her country to resist the enemy, may have been a standard-bearer and source of inspiration for the royal army, but she never took up arms herself. Schiller, however, has her fighting and killing. What is more, he rejects the motif of her being burned at the stake, the fate of the historical Joan according to the known facts. In his tragedy, ‘Johanna’ is captured by the English but breaks loose from her chains and throws herself from a tower into the midst of battle, where she brings victory for France but is fatally wounded in the process.

In addition, Schiller added a love interest to drive the drama, in accordance with the conventions of Romantic theatre. Joan’s prophetic gifts and supernatural powers have been granted to her on condition that she makes a sacred vow of chastity and renounces Earthly love. But during the fighting, she suddenly falls in love with the English knight Lionel. She experiences these feelings as sinful, which is why she is unable to defend herself against the accusations and she ends up dead.

Two years after the premiere, Schiller wrote that his tragedy united “the feminine, the heroic and the divine”. In this trinity, he put the heroic in the foreground: Joan finds strength within herself to reject Lionel, fulfil her duty and save France. Destiny presents her with a fatal choice, but when the time comes, she has the strength to make that choice.

Translation into Russian
Schiller wrote his Maid of Orleans at the start of the Napoleonic Wars. The famous poet Vasily Zhukovsky worked on the Russian translation of the play during the time of the Holy Alliance, the coalition of rulers that the Russian tsar Alexander I saw as a template for a future fraternity of Christian nations and royal houses. Zhukovsky was one of the spiritual architects of this conservative, religious utopia.

Zhukovsky put a great deal of care and passion into his translation of Schiller, but he also shifted the emphasis from the ‘heroic’ to the ‘divine’. He redefined the genre of The Maid of Orleans, replacing the original subtitle ‘Romantic tragedy’ by ‘Dramatic poem’. He also deleted the most cynical and bitter passages spoken by Queen Isabella and used a more solemn and elevated tone for the speech. For example, he consistently translated Schiller’s ‘Herz’ (heart) as ‘soul’. In Johanna’s final words — “Brief is the suffering, eternal is the joy!” — he changed the physical suffering into spiritual anguish (‘grief’) and the ecstatic joy that Schiller (and later Beethoven) lauded into a calm, reconciliatory ‘blessedness’.

Tchaikovsky was interested not just in Joan of Arc but also in the German author Schiller and the Russian translator Zhukovsky. Notes on Joan of Arc and a French poem dedicated to her have been found in his juvenile notebooks. His first musical composition was the cantata An die Freude (on Schiller's poem of the same name) and his (partly lost) opera Undine was based on a German text by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué in a translation by Zhukovsky. The composer may also have been driven in part by a competitive urge: he knew Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco (1845), which he considered to be “exceptionally awful”.

After Eugene Onegin, an opera he felt to be too intimate and insufficiently theatrical, Tchaikovsky dreamt of composing a genuine grand opéra — one with historical costumes and sets, crowd scenes, passion and a compelling story. In late November 1878, while “leafing through Zhukovsky”, he decided he had found his subject. He began on the score two weeks later, writing to his brother Modest that he had experienced “an excessively strong wave of inspiration”. The wave continued unabated and he was able to sketch out the whole opera in less than two months.

Symbolic and political
Three-quarters of a century separated Tchaikovsky from when Schiller’s ‘Romantic tragedy’ was written and more than half a century from Zhukovsky’s translation. In that period, nationalism — suppressed by the Holy Alliance from 1810 to 1820 — had triumphed. The German Empire was proclaimed in 1871, and the Papal States was absorbed into a newly unified Italy in that same year. France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led to an upsurge in French national consciousness — the mirror image of what had happened in Germany half a century earlier.

Joan of Arc became one of the symbols of French nationalism. In 1874, a statue of the heroine was erected in Place des Pyramides in Paris. It was also around that time that the process of canonisation started (which would be completed in 1920). Music theatre was part of that trend. Charles Gounod composed music for a play by Jules Barbier about Joan of Arc, and the Opéra Garnier reopened in 1876 after a fire with an opera on her by Auguste Mermet. In keeping with the spirit of the age, greater factual accuracy was expected from artists who tackled historical subjects than in the past. French authors may still have copied some of Schiller’s anachronisms but they now rejected the storyline elements he had invented — Joan’s forbidden love for an English knight and her death in battle. Barbier ended his play with Joan, as a righteous woman, burned at the stake and ascending to heaven, while Mermet concluded his opera with the coronation of Charles VII in Reims — the high point of Joan’s fame and triumph. During that ceremony, she has a vision of her future death as a martyr, but she decides to continue the fight for France despite that fate.

Patriotism 
Russia too experienced a surge of patriotism at that time. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, a clear ideal emerged of female heroism with the veneration of the Sisters of Mercy, who were officially permitted for the first time to tend the wounded soldiers on the frontline. Of course, such feminine self-sacrifice was very different to the image of the military Maid of Orleans. Only later would true ‘Russian Joans’ appear — in the underground revolutionary movement of the same decade.

In 1878, when Tchaikovsky decided on his subject, Russia was captivated by the trial of Vera Zasulich, a woman who had attacked and seriously injured the governor of Saint Petersburg after he had ordered a political prisoner to be flogged for failing to remove his cap. Zasulich was acquitted by the jury on 31 March, in contravention of the applicable laws. The acquittal was greeted by loud cheers from the spectators in the courtroom and hailed by liberals generally, who admired her as a heroine fighting despotism. 

Tchaikovsky was a conservative monarchist who felt no affinity with this stance. He often referred to the trial of Zasulich in his letters and he condemned both her acquittal — as a grave violation of the rule of law — and the public celebration of the outcome, which he saw as a sign of future rebellion. Even so, he wrote to his confidante Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck of his “sympathy for Zasulich as a person, who is undoubtedly exceptional and instinctively invokes admiration.” Although there was not a trace of revolutionary spirit in Tchaikovsky, he saw the young terrorist as a victim of “random violence” on the one hand and “misguided ideas” on the other. That ambivalent attitude is seen too in the opera on which he started work a few months later.

A cry of sympathy
Tchaikovsky agreed with his French predecessors that Schiller’s tragedy was not historically accurate but felt that it “outshone all other artistic representations of Joan in its psychological depth”. He decided on a compromise. On the one hand, he did not keep the image of Joan as a warrior. His Joan dies not on the battlefield but at the stake — like the real Joan. On the other hand, he kept and even enhanced the love story.

In terms of Schiller’s formula of “the feminine, the heroic and the divine”, the feminine became the most important element for Tchaikovsky. The play had to be cut severely for his musical adaptation: Tchaikovsky retained only a third of the characters and fewer than a third of the scenes, concentrating on the action. At the same time, he put greater emphasis on the relationship between Joan and Lionel, for example adding a love duet just before the scene in which Joan is burned at the stake — which turned it into a lament for a lost love rather than her apotheosis in martyrdom. 

While in the early stages of his work on the opera, Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother:  

“I was reading yesterday about Joan of Arc [...] and when I got to her trial and renunciation and her execution (she screamed horribly when she was led away and begged them to cut off her head instead of burning her), I burst into tears. I suddenly felt such pity, such pain for all of humanity, and I was overwhelmed by a sense of unimaginable melancholy!” 

That feeling of pity is expressed in the opera too: when Joan is led to the stake, the chorus of bystanders sing “Poor child!” Tchaikovsky based his final scene largely on Barbier, but while the French author had invisible angels singing “Go, daughter of God, go!”, Tchaikovsky’s version ends with the crowd surrounding the stake and calling out “Unhappy one! The Lord will forgive you!” The opera therefore ends not in a combination of ecstasy and religious awe but in a shriek of pain and pity.

When he completed the opera, Tchaikovsky wrote to Von Meck:

“I don’t think ‘The Maid’ is my best and most deeply felt work — but it seems to me to be precisely the work that could bring me popularity.‘Onegin’ and some of my instrumental works are closer to my inner self; I wrote ‘The Maid’ not so much in an unselfconscious flow, [...] but with more calculated attention to the theatrical and sound effects — which happens to be the most important thing for an opera.” 

His prediction did not come true. Eugene Onegin is still one of the standards of the global operatic repertoire whereas The Maid of Orleans is rarely performed and enjoys little popularity. But perhaps we should also cautiously cast doubt on the other part of Tchaikovsky’s assessment. It is precisely in this opera that we hear his “moral individuality” — as he called it himself — reflected in the music, feeling pity and pain for “all of humanity”.