The Maid of Orleans was to be the work that admitted Tchaikovsky to the pantheon of grand opera. Jam-packed with soaring arias, acclamatory choruses, duets and trios and all with the same passionate reach as his music for ballet, this was the stuff to give Verdi a run for his money and put the Russian firmly in the big league. Except it didn’t. In the event, Tchaikovsky made a dog’s dinner of the libretto, handling the drama unevenly and turning the story of France’s heroine into a prurient probe of her private life, with the addition of a love interest in the person of the knight, Lionel – possibly one of the most awkward roles in opera. Given only two productions in the composer’s lifetime, despite being a treasure trove of exquisite music, the piece is rarely staged.
Dutch National Opera has thrown everything at making it work this time. A uniformly outstanding cast was led by the transfixing Elena Stikhina as Joan, with the national opera chorus on absolutely spellbinding form. Under the baton of Valentin Uryupin, whose work on the score has made this production possible, the Netherlands Philharmonic were, as ever, a knockout. It was an evening of glorious music you will never hear performed better anywhere.
Director and set designer Dmitri Tcherniakov offers a radical courtroom setting that concentrates the drama against the libretto’s rambling tendencies, presenting the story as Joan’s trial after the event. The excitement of the opening day is brilliantly captured as the chorus file in to a magnificent courtroom, and it was from the defendant’s cage that Joan sings “it’s not yet midnight, let’s be jolly, girls” along with the women of the chorus: a poignant reading of those lines as Joan braces for her fate. The courtroom revolves as the action slips through time to the recent past so we can experience Joan answering the call of the angels. Then we’re back again seven weeks into the trial and everyone’s looking jaded. The guards smoke in the empty courtroom which, in a clever bit of stagecraft, shifts into the king’s court. Tigran Matinyan’s jailor, who was singing so beautifully a meditation on time, becomes court jester to Allan Clayton’s infantile, complacent King, and his enabler, Agnes (Nadezhda Pavlova) – a sort of anti-Lady Macbeth armed with marshmallows. Uryupin leant in to the eeriness of this obsessive relationship and held back the orchestra as their voices entwined around each other, eventually breaking free of accompaniment altogether.
Tcherniakov’s direction is as deft as it is economical, kaleidoscoping the focus as the trial moves through its various stages. With the interval approaching, a sudden escalation of rearrangement matches the rapid modulations in the score, and the curtain comes down decisively just as we reach the point that will explain why we’re all here. It’s gripping stuff.
But then comes the second half and, despite his many strengths, even Tcherniakov can't stop the libretto’s turkeys coming home to roost. In her prison cell, Joan is subjected to an internal examination, stirrups, rubber gloves and all. As a weapon of intimidation it is effective, with male guards looking on, and serves as a reminder that a nationalist state will tend to play out its anxieties in its control of women’s bodies. So far, so grimly familiar. But now here comes Lionel (Andrey Zhilikhovsky), who arrives shooting his mouth off at the still knickerless Joan about how he’s looked for her on the battlefield and is ready for revenge. A scene of shocking vulnerability turns quickly into one of mutual sexual attraction and – as every woman in the audience knows – it just doesn’t happen, though the suggestion that it might is all too familiar as a justification of sexual assault. Apparently panicked into making a statement of solidarity at this point Tcherniakov has the guards dress Joan in a preposterous blonde wig, mini-skirt and heels, which Lionel then has to remove as an act of adoration. It’s a credit to Stikhina and Zhilikhovsky that they managed their duet so beautifully while getting Joan back into her trousers.
Dramatic tension returns in the clever choice to have the brass on stage during Joan’s courtroom hallucinations, though her father’s fatal intervention pops up out of nowhere. This ‘maid’ makes no explicit vow of chastity: something of a dramaturgical conundrum.
By the time the climax finally arrives (surely even Tchaikovsky knows it’s all 20 minutes too long) the production has run out of steam. Joan produces a flaming torch and the safety curtain quickly falls (as it must when ‘Inspector Sands’ is in the building). Projected on this curtain is an account of the fire, started by the defendant, in which she had perished, investigations ongoing. A more thorough laying of this sabotage plotline would have kept the drama from grinding to a halt and given Joan the agency that ought surely to have been hers from the beginning.
