Joan in Manhattan

Swiss Composer Arthur Honegger had successfully set to music everything from Greek legends (Antigone) to steam engines (Pacific 231) and sports (Rugby). Then he bit off a chunk that many a musical better--Verdi, Gounod and Tchaikovsky, among others--had broken a tooth on. He began work on an oratorio on Joan of Arc. French Poet (and onetime Ambassador to the U.S.) Paul Claudel provided a mystical, introspective text.

Last week, the U.S. got its first chance to hear Honegger's giant-sized theatrical score. It ran for 75 minutes with no intermission, and put a considerable dent in the New York Philharmonic-Symphony's budget. Besides an augmented orchestra, it employed the 185-voice Westminster Choir and a group of soloists which included Metropolitan Opera Sopranos Nadine Conner and Jarmila Novotna, and two actors--Ballerina Vera Zorina, dressed in a white gown, as Joan, and Raymond Gerome (in tails) as Brother Dominic.

Grey-haired French Conductor Charles Muench, a conductor of the windmill school, lifted his baton and the cellos rumbled out a dark and ominous theme. Poet Claudel had first tied his heroine to the stake, then let her mind wander through agonizing flashbacks: memories of the coarse yells of the mob, a howling dog, rolling drums. Standout scene: Joan's trial. Claudel and Honegger make her judges animals, with Porcus, a pig, presiding. Porcus (dramatically sung by Tenor Joseph Laderoute) screams his charges and denunciations, and the chorus howls "Heretique! . . . Sorciere!" Joan finally dies in a flaming burst of music from chorus and orchestra. After a stunned pause, the audience demanded ten curtain calls of cast and conductor.

Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher (Joan of Arc at the Stake) was highly effective as theater, if not always exciting as music (sometimes the score sounded like background for a Norman Corwin radio thriller).

Composer Honegger, 55, took no curtain bows. Ill with heart trouble since suffering an attack last summer while teaching at Serge Koussevitzky's Berkshire Music Center, he is living in seclusion outside Paris, and doing no composing.

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