So great was the excitement before the single Royal Albert Hall performance of Arthur Honegger's stage oratorio, Joan of Arc at the Stake, that the Observer compared it to the time in September 1968 when Pianist Daniel Barenboim was warned that he was going to be shot during a concert. The big attraction, however, was not murder; the oratorio was bringing together the professional talents of the recently married lovers Mia Farrow and Andre Previn, she as Joan, he as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, the Ambrosian Opera Chorus and a children's choir. The critics were cool. "Though often touching," said the Daily Telegraph, Mia was "lightweight casting for a part that demands uninterrupted inner concentration and the vocal range of a great actress."

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President Richard Nixon has more in common with grass-roots America than many people realize: he has a cousin on welfare. Philip Milhous, 55, whose father was the President's uncle, lost his small chain-saw business in Grass Valley, Calif., after he had a heart attack in 1966. Welfare and Social Security payments were not enough; his wife Anna, 47, has rheumatoid arthritis, and they needed someone to help keep house. The Milhouses turned to the California Rural League Assistance project, recently under attack by Governor Reagan for inadequate service to the poor. Within days of CRLA intervention, the state agreed to supply Phil and Anna Milhous with money for a helper, though no funds were made available for transportation to a doctor. White House Press Secretary Ronald L. Ziegler noted that the Cousins Milhous, "a very self-reliant family," had been quoted as seeking no aid from Nixon. The President, he said, was "proceeding on that basis." In an interview with London's Sunday Telegraph, the President recalled his own family's insistence on self-reliance. During the '30s, when his brother Harold was bedridden with tuberculosis, his parents refused to send him to a county hospital. Instead, they borrowed the money for private hospital care. They felt it was morally wrong "to accept help from the Government."

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The world's No. 1 collector of Picassos is Pablo Picasso. He is especially possessive about his construction sculpture; no museum owned a single example of his work in this art form until last week, when Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art announced that Picasso has given it one of the great breakthrough pieces in the history of sculpture--his sheet-metal and wire Guitar. Until he made Guitar in 1911 or 1912, sculpture had been mainly a matter of modeling or carving materials. Picasso was the first to begin assembling them, and this has been a prime sculptural technique ever since. According to the museum's chief curator of the painting and sculpture collection, William S. Rubin, who visited him early this month, Picasso said that he had done the Cubistic Guitar before experimenting with collage, a revelation upsetting the generally accepted theory that construction sculpture derives from the pasting together of materials. Rubin's impression of the 89-year-old genius was "not only of a man looking decades younger than his years, but of a man whose passion and energy are still overwhelming."

Diplomats are expected to do their best to get to be au courant with the fundamental developments in art, as in everything else. Therefore Russian Ambassador to France M. Valerian Zorin kept his eyes peeled as he moved through the recent opening of the annual "Painters, Witness of Their Times" show in Paris. Going in the opposite direction was Brigitte Bardot--not exactly the living end, but a sculpture by Mougin.

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How is Richard Nixon like Julius Caesar? According to Author Theodore H. White (The Making of The President), Nixon faces the same temptation to transcend the law of the land. Before a rehearsal of his first play, Caesar at the Rubicon, at Princeton University's McCarter Theater, owlish politicophile White, 55, noted that Caesar's problems "were reborn with the American Constitution. We were the first republic under the law since Rome." Within five years after crossing the Rubicon, said White, "Caesar had become dictator and god, master of the world. He had placed himself outside the law. It is a temptation, I think, all Presidents and all men who aspire to great power face." Even so, Author White feels that the United States is at least half a century away from the possibility of anything like Caesarian takeover. "There is, however, a real threat of a dictatorship by power blocs and through mass manipulation. But I have great faith in the ability of our communications media to protect us."

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Playwright Arthur Kopit--who is best known for his hit, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad--is now busy working on a new screenplay. Its Kopital title, which is presumably half the creative battle: Good Morning, Berenger! How's Everything Today? Not Bad? That's Good.

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