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 is 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 are, as ever, a knockout. It's an evening of glorious music you will never hear performed better anywhere.
Director/designer Dmitri Tcherniakov gave us 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 was brilliantly captured as the chorus filed in to a magnificent courtroom, and it was from the defendant’s cage that Joan sings ‘it’s not yet midinght, 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 revolved 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 smoked in the empty courtroom which, in a clever bit of stagecraft, shifted again into the king’s court. Tigran Matinyan’s jailor who was singing so beautifully a meditation on time becomes, as the set is rearranged, 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 was as deft as it is economical, kaleidoscoping the focus as the trial moved through its various stages. With the interval approaching, a sudden escalation of rearrangement matched the rapid modulations in the score, and the curtain came down decisively just as we reach the point that will explain why we’re all here. It’s gripping stuff.
But then came the second half, and despite his many strengths, even Tcherniakov couldn'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 was effective, with male guards looking on, and served 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 arrived shouting 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 turned 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 had 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 manage their duet so beautifully while getting Joan back into her trousers.
Dramatic tension returned in the clever choice to have the brass on stage during Joan’s courtroom hallucinations, though her father’s fatal intervention that in the libretto, and this production, pops up out of nowhere. ‘The maid’ makes no explicit vow of chastity: something of a dramaturgical conundrum.
By the time the climax finally arrived (surely even Tchaikovsky knew it’s all twenty minutes too long) the production had run out of steam. Joan produced a flaming torch and the curtain quickly fell (as it must when ‘Mr Sands’ is in the building). Projected on it was an account of a 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.
