First performed in concert in 1938 and fully staged for the first time in Zurich in 1942, Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher is the only one of Arthur Honegger’s large-scale works to have maintained at least a toehold in the repertory. For Honegger, it seems, the dividing line between opera and oratorio was often a very thin one – his 1925 opera Judith later appeared in a version for the concert hall – and the designation of Jeanne d’Arc as a dramatic oratorio in which the two main characters, Jeanne herself and Frère Dominique, are played by actors, certainly suggests a work with affiliations to both. The French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel wrote the text; his partnership with Honegger had been brokered by the dancer Ida Rubinstein, who had planned a staging in Paris as part of a “tetralogy of evil”, alongside works by Milhaud and Stravinsky, though the idea was wrecked by the outbreak of the second world war.
Yet as Marc Soustrot’s performance shows, the music of Jeanne d’Arc is easily strong enough to stand alone, without the need for any visual reinforcements. The choral prologue, which was composed after the rest of the score, in 1944, is followed by 11 scenes, which are played without a break and are dramatically independent of each other, though the final set piece is inevitably Jeanne’s death at the stake.
Neoclassical Stravinsky is the obvious musical model, especially Oedipus Rex - some of the set-piece arias recall similar numbers in that opera-oratorio – but also the melodrama Perséphone (another Rubinstein commission) too, but much more of the music is strikingly original, making full use of a large orchestra in which saxophones replace horns, there are pianos instead of harps, and an ondes martenot, then at the height of its popularity among French composers, gives a distinctive flavour to many passages. The spoken roles are well enough done by Marion Cotillard and Xavier Gallais on this live recording from Barcelona in 2012, but it’s the choral singing, superbly vivid, that provides the real dramatic muscle.
