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Monday, May 02, 2005

About last night

You know, I bet “About Last Night” would be a really good name for a blog about art, music, and cultural events of one kind or another.  If I had a blog like that, I would tell a story about last night, when Janet and I traveled to the Philadelphia premiere of The Passion of Joan of Arc / Voices of Light.

The story would go something like this.  Richard Einhorn, the composer of Voices of Light (1994), got in touch with me via the Internets at some point last year about something or other, and we corresponded for a while; in late October I met him and his wife in New York, and we caught a performance of something at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and hung out for a bit.  By happy coincidence, my mother had seen Joan / Voices in Norfolk earlier that year, and described it to me as if it were something approaching an out-of-body experience; so by the time I met Richard Einhorn himself I’d bought the CD and listened to it a couple of times, and was mightily impressed, but I didn’t know anything about the film except what I’d read in the liner notes to the CD.  So Richard very kindly invited me and Janet to last night’s performance.

Ahem.  You see, in keeping with my customary practice of representing myself on this blog as if I were much cooler than I am, I have to establish first that Janet and I went to see this performance as guests of the composer.  This kind of thing happens all the time, I assure you.

Now, the film by itself is an amazing work of art—which is one of the reasons Einhorn wrote Voices of Light for it.  Its history is bizarre, but rather than paraphrase things I’ve learned only recently, I’ll just crib from the program notes:

The strange history of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) nearly equals Joan’s itself. It has many of the same elements, including obsession, madness, and even fire.

The original screenplay for Joan was by Joseph Delteil, who had written a rather hyperventilated book about her. For one reason or another, Dreyer chose to forgo most of Delteil’s ideas and instead used actual excerpts from the trial transcripts as the script (the film, which is set entirely at Joan’s trials, and burning, compresses the action of the trial from seven months into a single day).

The film, censored somewhat by the Catholic Church prior to its release, was soon hailed as one of the greatest films of all time. Reneé Falconetti’s performance as Joan was (and is) considered one of the most extraordinary ever filmed. With its extreme close-ups and bizarre camera angles, with an editing rhythm that breaks nearly every rule of the craft, The Passion of Joan of Arc makes virtually every movie critic and scholar’s short list of masterpieces. It clearly influenced such filmmakers as Bergman, Fellini, and Hitchcock, and echoes of its intense style appear in the work of such contemporary masters as Martin Scorsese. Shot without makeup and with “natural” acting, Joan looks like it was finished yesterday.

But a few months after the premiere, Joan’s judges descended upon Dreyer’s film. The negative and virtually all prints of The Passion of Joan of Arc were destroyed in a warehouse fire. Dreyer, referring in all likelihood to his workprint for the original cut, painstakingly reconstructed the entire film from outtake footage that had survived the fire. This second version was destroyed in a second fire!  Devastated, Dreyer gave up and moved on to his next film, Vampyr.

From here the history of the film becomes confusing. Highly corrupt prints that somehow managed to survive the fires circulated for a while. In addition, the Cinémathèque Français unearthed a copy of the film in its vaults (at the time, it was unclear which version it was). In the late forties and early fifties, a French film historian by the name of Lo Duca pieced together his version of the film (apparently using prints from both versions) and added a score that was a montage of Albinoni, Vivaldi, and other Baroque composers. The result so horrified Dreyer that he completely disowned the “Lo Duca” version.

Then, in 1981, several film cans from the ‘20s were discovered at a mental institution in Oslo, Norway, stashed in the back of a closet. They were shipped unopened to the Norwegian Film Institute. Inside the cans, in nearly perfect condition, was a copy of The Passion of Joan of Arc with Danish intertitles. The accompanying shipping information made it clear that it was, in fact, a print of the original version of Dreyer’s great film.

In an informal talk preceding the performance, Einhorn mentioned that the people who discovered those film cans recognized that they contained nitrate film, and that opening the cans would not only destroy the film but also release some nasty toxic gases.  Had they not understood this, Dreyer’s film would very likely have burned a third time.

Voices of Light, heard by itself, is a beautiful, moving piece of work; much of it is written in the style of “early” music (medieval chant, the first fumblings at polyphony, motets; there’s even a viola da gamba in there, and last night I learned all about the gamba), but it never sounds merely neo- or citational.  The libretto is composed of texts written by female mystics of the period (St. Hildegard von Bingen, Marguerite d’Oingt, St. Umiltà of Faenza, Blessed Angela of Foligno, among others, and the nonmystic protofeminist Christine de Pizan as well) as well as the letters Joan (illiterate herself) dictated, all of which are sung in the original languages (Latin, Old and Middle French, Italian).  It’s quite overwhelming in and of itself.

But together with The Passion of Joan of Arc, the effect is stunning.  Einhorn’s music is not exactly a “score”; although it’s coordinated with the film, in fifteen movements—and Einhorn even took along a portable DAT recorder to get the sound of the church bells in Joan’s home town of Domremy, and the chiming of the bells occurs at key moments in the film—it’s more like a parallel text than a score.  And since the film relies on the transcript of Joan’s trial, you find yourself dealing with no fewer than four interwoven textual threads: the transcript, the visuals of the film itself, the music, the libretto.  It’s dizzying at first, and it stays dizzying for about half an hour or so.

The overpowering moments of the music were, well, overpowering: the thundering “HOMASSE!” of the interrogators as sung by the entire chorus would tear the roof off of any building, and then there’s the menacing but beautiful “Glorioses playes” ("glorious wounds") of the scene in which Joan’s inquisitors kindly show her around the torture chamber.  But what especially struck me about the performance were some of its most subtle and vulnerable moments: the opening—just one alto and one soprano in a delicate chant, almost too ethereal to survive in this world—and the violin solo that accompanies Joan’s “relapse” about two-thirds of the way through.  I had been listening to that solo for about a minute before I realized that I really hadn’t given it its due in its CD version, and then a moment later I realized that the first violin was playing it with an intensity that had her practically flying out of her chair.  All right, I exaggerate.  But not by much.

About the final ten minutes I cannot speak.  Partly because I don’t want to give the ending away—you all have to go get the DVD for yourselves, right now—but mostly because I can’t possibly do it justice.  I’ll say this much: there’s a burning.  There’s a riot.  There is much swinging of maces.  Musical motifs from the interrogation scene and the torture chamber return, transformed.  There is a climax that is anything but cathartic.  The performance ends.  And nobody, in an auditorium of over a thousand souls, can find the voice to speak for another fifteen minutes.

So instead, we all jumped up, those of us who were crying and those who were merely shaken, and gave the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia Chorus and the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia a nice long ovation.  Then, as everyone calmed down a bit, but only a bit, Richard Einhorn took the stage for a brief question-and-answer.

We went out for drinks with Richard after he’d been thoroughly congratulated by everyone, remarking what a pity it was that after all the rehearsals and all the planning, there was only one performance of the piece in Philadelphia.  And guess what?  We wound up at a bar where we bumped into . . . members of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, including the first violin, whose name happens to be Gloria Justen and who, in response to my praise of her solo, gave me (along with her thanks) a postcard advertising her upcoming performance (with Charles Abramovic on piano) this May 13 at 8 pm at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia.  (I can’t make it—I’ll be in Ontario that day, speaking to the Canadian Down Syndrome Society—but I’ll pass the news along to any of you who might be in the area.  Twelve bucks—and the program will look like this.) It was so odd—it was like being backstage with the band, though of course it wasn’t really backstage and they weren’t really a “band.” We did entertain ourselves, though, by picking all the orange M&Ms out of the candy bowl for the benefit of the cellists.  Cellists are such pains in the ass about these things.

Actually, what happened was that we talked with Richard for quite a while before realizing that we should stop monopolizing the guy already and let him hang out with the good folks of the Mendelssohn Club who’d actually put this whole event together.  D’oh!  You just can’t take us anywhere.  But we had a great time, all the same.

There’s one more thing about last night.  Last night was the very first time we left Jamie alone for an overnight with a sitter (along with copious instructions about getting him to school this morning).  I’d originally asked Richard if we could bring Jamie—Jamie’s very well-mannered at such things, and actually loved going to a recent performance of the ballet “Giselle” with Janet—but Richard gently reminded me that, uh, you know, some aspects of the performance might be a bit much for a child.  And as I watched the crumpled, silhouetted form of Joan burning amid the flames and the chanted words of St. Hildegard, I thought, OK, so maybe this would be a bit much for a child.  I guess he had a point. For that, too, we owe Richard Einhorn our thanks.

Now stop reading this aesthetically overwhelmed and emotionally drained blog, and go get that DVD already.  And remember to play it loud.

Posted by Michael on 05/02 at 02:12 PM
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