Walter Braunfels – Jeanne d’Arc
Juliane Banse; Salzburger Bachchor and Kinderchor; ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra; Manfred Honeck
Capriccio C5515 (naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=C5515)
Her brief but eventful life and agonizing death have been depicted in paintings, books, plays, films and several operas, most notably those by Verdi and Tchaikovsky. In 1943, Walter Braunfels completed the three-act opera he titled Szenen aus dem Leben der Heilige Johanna (Scenes from the Life of Saint Joan). It wasn’t heard, however, until 2001 in a concert performance in Stockholm conducted by Manfred Honeck (since 2008 the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra). At the 2013 Salzburg Festival, Honeck again conducted a concert performance, preserved in this two-CD set.
Braunfels’ self-written libretto traces, in seven scenes, Joan’s life from when she first receives her marching orders from Saints Catherine, Margaret and Michael until her immolation at the stake. It’s dramatically compelling throughout, illuminated by Braunfels’ powerful score, composed in the post-Wagnerian Germanic idiom that Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker employed in their increasingly admired operas – rapturous flights of vocal lyricism amid intense, tonally indecisive harmonies and boldly-coloured orchestral strokes.
The chorus provides some of the opera’s most thrilling passages – the stirring scene as the entire ensemble prepares to march off to the besieged city of Orleans, singing of the victory to come; the exalted grandeur of King Charles’ coronation; and the angry mob of Rouen’s townspeople demanding Joan’s death. The opera’s closing minutes are extraordinarily emotion-wrenching – Joan’s ecstatic, final outburst at her trial for heresy (Braunfels quoted her words from the actual trial documents), Gilles de Rais’ anguished aria as he witnesses Joan’s execution and the chorus of townspeople, having seen Joan’s heart unburned and a dove rising from her ashes, proclaiming a holy miracle.
Leading the superb cast are soprano Juliane Banse (Joan), her light, bright voice perfect for the teenage heroine, tenor Pavel Breslik (King Charles), bass-baritone Johan Reuter (Gilles de Rais) and bass Ruben Drole (Duke of La Trémouille). As the opera requires an additional 12 soloists plus chorus and children’s chorus, in today’s economic climate the expense of mounting a fully-staged production of such an unfamiliar opera may be too risky an enterprise. But it surely deserves to be seen as well as heard! (Texts and translations are included.)
