City University of New York (CUNY) TV has been showing a five film series of East German movies. The last and most emotionally involving is entitled The Actress. This tells the story of an actress on the verge of becoming Nazi Germany’s greatest actress. There’s only one problem! She is in love with a Jewish actor. How does she solve her problem? You’ll have to ask CUNY to show the film again! However, within the film The Actress plays two Joan of Arcs. One by Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and one by George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan.
In the Schiller, she is a hypnotic, ranting, almost mad savior/messiah. She resembles Hitler, and her eyes almost roll in her head just like bi’s did. The audience and the critics go wild for her performance, just as they did for Hitler’s. This frightens her! In the St. Joan, she speaks of her fear of torture, but indicates, after torture she will recant any confessions she makes. There is a third St. Joan: St. Joan of the Stockyards by Bertolt Brecht written in 1920/30. It is odd that an East German film company would not use a piece by a Stalin prize winner and founder of the East Berliner Ensemble Theater Company. Perhaps it just didn’t fit the plot. Anyhow, we now have three St. Joan’s. Harold Clurman, in an essay on Brecht, stated: “The core of the man is the poet, the ‘minstrel.’ This cannot be fully appreciated by those ignorant of German.” The same, I believe, can be said of Schiller. I’ve read him in translation without being overly impressed, but when The Actress does her possessed Joan, it is riveting and frightening. German to me is not a particularly melodic language, but it is when she is possessed.
Giuseppe Verdi turned to Schiller more than any poet but Shakespeare. Actually, Groves says that. I came up with four for Schiller: Luisa Miller, Giovanna D’Arco, I Masnadieri, and Don Carlo,” and only three for Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff.
Giovanna D ‘Arco with libretto by Salera is only partial l y based on Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans. This was Verdi’s first attempt to set Schiller to music. The opera is decidedly mediocre. There are two main reasons to purchase it. No true opera lover would be without all of-Verdi and Monserrat Caballe. I remember it as her debut album – at least in the United States. It is available on Angel C.D. ‘s. The opera is weak, but the cast is strong: Placido Domingo is the tenor, and Sherrill Milnes is the baritone. The London Symphony Orchestra is conducted by James Levine. Andrew Sarris, now film critic for The Observer, has a theory that in film, if two directors handle the same subject, the greater director will always make the better picture. If that theory holds in opera, and I don’t believe that it does, then Tchaikovsky is a better composer than Verdi. Tchaikovsky’s Maid of Orleans is also based on Schiller. Tchaikovsky wrote his own libretto. His end is different from Schiller’s. Nadya von Meck, his patron, sent him a Joan of Arc scene by Henri Alexandre Wallous. He liked it and based his end on that.
Tchaikovsky’s opera is a thrilling opera. I have Columbia-Melodiya Records. Search for the C.D.’s. Even though it is a good opera, the main reason to purchase it is Irina Arkhipova. For those of you who have not had the privilege of hearing her, this is her finest recording. We could do a column on Arkhipova alone. Suffice it to say that’ she was a ”People’s Artist of the Soviet Union.” Their highest honor. A year or so ago, the Bolshoi brought The Maid of Orleans to the Met. How the mighty have fallen! They were terrible, the production was awful, and it would be charitable to merely say the maid of Orleans was no Arkhipova. Gennadi Rozhdestzensky conducts the Arkhipova recording.
Last, but by no means least, is Arthur Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake. This Joan is French even though her composer was Swiss. This is a cantata with a spoken Joan. She came in 1938 to save France from Hitler, but she failed. I have Seiji Ozawa’s Boston Symphony version, but there are other excellent versions recorded. Serge Baudo’ s, for one. Did I say last? There must be 1,000’s of other works of art based on Joan of Arc. Remember Ingrid Bergman’s disastrous film. I t really wasn’t that bad! Let’s see how many others you can send in. Oh! One last word about Schiller. He provided one more service to music. In fact, he is a major contributor to the most popular (by vote more than once) classical piece of all time. He wrote the “Ode to Joy,” and Beethoven put it in his Ninth; and the rest, as they say, is “choral history.”