In the late 1870s, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was on a roll.
He had just finished his great lyrical opera “Eugene Onegin” and had set out to compose something even more ambitious: his own version of the French grand opéra.
Its subject would be Joan of Arc, the patron saint of France, immortalized in several novels and dramas of the era. He had great hopes that the opera, with its large-scale battle scenes, rousing choruses and fiery finale would, as he wrote to a friend, be “the one that will make my name popular.”
Instead, shortly after that opera, “The Maid of Orleans,” had its 1881 premiere at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Czar Alexander II was murdered, and the theater closed as Russia went into mourning. It never completed its run.
Since then, the work has been rarely performed and infrequently recorded, becoming so obscure that many Tchaikovsky aficionados aren’t fully acquainted with it.
The Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov, who is known for his provocative interpretations, believes this piece has gotten short shrift.
He aims to change that with a new production, set entirely in a modern courtroom where Joan of Arc is on trial, at the Dutch National Opera and Ballet from Wednesday through Dec. 2. It is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, although no date has yet been set for the Met.
“Some pages are very impressive, and some are a little bit mediocre — it’s not homogenous — but at the same time I have a feeling of mystery inside of this score,” Tcherniakov said in an interview. “My main goal was to understand this mystery, and to realize this mystery on the stage.”
Tcherniakov, a film, theater and opera director, grew up in Russia but moved to Berlin in 2022 after denouncing the invasion of Ukraine. As a teenager, he loved the Russian operatic repertoire — Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, Glinka — and has since directed many of its treasures. “This is my connection with my childhood,” he said. “These are my favorite toys.”
“The Maid of Orleans” wasn’t popular in Russia, but as a teenager during the Soviet era, Tcherniakov saw a production in Odesa, which is now in Ukraine, and another as an adult. The opera is even less frequently performed in the United States. The Kennedy Center in Washington mounted a production in 2005, but it has never been staged at the Met, according to the company’s archivists.
Its title comes from a nickname for the 15th-century teenage girl who led the Siege of Orléans, a battle between France and England that turned the tide of the Hundred Years’ War in favor of the French. She faced charges of heresy and witchcraft in a pro-English ecclesiastical court, which found her guilty. She was burned at the stake.
“The story of Joan of Arc has come down to us primarily as legal evidence,” Tcherniakov said, via witness statements and court proceedings.
That was one of reason the director chose to set the opera in a contemporary courtroom, highlighting both the drama of her prosecution and its effect on her psyche. “It shows what happens to a human mind under such relentless pressure,” he said.
Tcherniakov said he found her story particularly relevant to the political persecution that is happening today, “not only in my country, Russia, but also in other places.”
As the curtain rises, Joanna, as the main character is called in Russian, is led into the courtroom by armed police officers and locked in an iron cage. The opera’s action revolves around her efforts to make her voice heard, with the chorus standing in for popular opinion.
“Joanna has this loneliness from the beginning,” said Elena Stikhina, the Russian soprano who will sing the role, “but every act after that is even worse. To play this broken heart is very difficult, and she becomes more and more broken, abandoned and desperate.”
Tchaikovsky originally wrote the role for a soprano voice, but most productions have used a later reworking for a mezzo-soprano, in a darker, lower register, which perhaps lent Joanna more gravitas. With the soprano score, Stikhina has the opportunity to explore more of Joanna’s vulnerability and “very fragile colors,” Tcherniakov said.
The director has a true sense of fealty to Tchaikovsky. The first opera he ever saw was “Eugene Onegin” at the Bolshoi in Moscow in 1983, conducted by the renowned Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov, and it forever shaped his love for the art form.
“I’m not from a musical family; my mother and father were engineers,” he said. “I was just in the opera house by chance, and something happened with my mind, and then I start to go every week, every month. I couldn’t imagine that I would be an opera director or that I would stage this piece one day in the Bolshoi.”
His own Bolshoi “Onegin,” which he mounted at age 36, switched between two 20th-century settings: pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet era. It catapulted Tcherniakov into the international limelight — but it also ignited an operatic war, after the great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya called it an “obscenity” and swore never to set foot in the Bolshoi after the premiere.
Nevertheless, his production toured widely, and during its 2010 run at the Royal Opera House in London, a Guardian critic raved that it was “unquestionably the most compelling version of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece” to be performed in Britain in 15 years. By 2020, it had become part of the repertoire at the Vienna State Opera.
Tcherniakov directed a Tchaikovsky double bill of the composer’s one-act opera “Iolanta” and his ballet “The Nutcracker” for the Paris Opera in 2016, reuniting two works that had premiered on the same night: Dec. 18, 1892, at the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg. Now he plans to direct the rest of Tchaikovsky’s repertoire as well.
In his final years, Tchaikovsky told a number of his friends that he would create another version of “Maid of Orleans,” perhaps hoping to save it from obscurity. But he died in 1893, without having done so.
Since then, it has been up to other musicians to smooth out the work’s rough sections and illuminate its moments of brilliance. Rudolf Weges, the Dutch National Opera’s senior librarian, pieced together Tchaikovsky’s version for soprano voice from several musical archives, and then the Russian conductor for the production, Valentin Uryupin, made additional amendments based on his knowledge of the score.
“Sometimes the music needs help,” Uryupin said, “if not small surgeries.”
Despite its “ups and downs,” he said, there was still “some touch of the genius” in “The Maid of Orleans,” including “moments of religious ecstasy, incredible warmth and sincerity of phrasing — and at the same time, the infernal moments.”
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