âEs lebe Friedrich Schiller!â1 This is how the public in Leipzig expressed its enthusiasm for Schillerâs play, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, when he attended its third performance on 17 September 1801. His entrance into the theater that evening had been accompanied by drums and trumpets, an honor ordinarily reserved for visiting aristocratic dignitaries. At the conclusion of the play, the students and public of Leipzig cleared a path through town, with the men removing their hats and renewing calls for the playwrightâs long life as he passed by.2 Goethe himself had declared the singular high quality of the play in his first letter to Schiller after reading it: âEs ist so brav, gut und schön, daĂ ich ihm nichts zu vergleichen weiĂâ (NA.20 April 1801).3 Schiller, who was by that time very close friends with Goethe, was eager to share his opinion with Körner, another lifelong friend: âGoethe meint, daĂ es mein bestes Werk seiâ (NA.31 13 May 1801, 36).4 The publisher Unger reported to Schiller within days of the premiere, on 22 September 1801, his progress in binding a printed version of the play in Berlin, where the success of the work resounded in subsequent performances, enhanced further by a planned premiere in Vienna. After years of struggle and frustration, Schiller was at the pinnacle of his career.
Yet questions arise: Why did it take two years for the play to be mounted in Weimar, where Schiller often directed productions at the ducal theater and where his more famous friend, Goethe, was Privy Councilor to Duke Karl August? Why has the initial theatrical success of his play not endured, as with both his earlier and later works? Less than six years later, Goethe would write in his diary (27 May 1807) of what he saw as the âprimary mistakeâ of the play: âDer Hauptfehler in dem Motiv der Jungfrau von Orleans, wo sie von Lionel ihr Herz getroffen fĂŒhlt, ist, daĂ sie sich dessen bewuĂt ist und ihr Vergehen ihr nicht aus einem MiĂlingen oder sonst entgegen kommtâ (Wiese 735â36).5 Given that Schiller had died 9 May 1805, this observation was probably prompted by the second anniversary of Goetheâs lost friendâs passing. While the play would continue to be presented for many years throughout Europe and inspire the imagination of numerous artists, writers, and composers, the process of reevaluating it had already begun.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schiller had reinvented the image of Joan of Arc, with consequences that were to affect representations of Joan for the rest of that century and well into the twentieth. Before that time, if an educated person had possessed any knowledge of Joan, he would most likely have known her as the wily sorceress from Shakespeareâs Henry VI, Part One, or as the stable girl from Voltaireâs La pucelle dâOrlĂ©ans, cavorting around France, often naked and riding a flying donkey. Seeing these depictions as undignified, Schiller set out to create a more powerful character who suffers at the hands of fate but changes history by sheer force of will. He took as his allegorical model the characterization of Iphigenia made famous by Euripides in Iphigeneia among the Taurians and Iphigeneia in Aulis , in which the ancient Greek tragedian transformed his heroine from a pitiable victim of fate into a fearsome priestess able to reverse a familial curse and unite a nation at war.6 Schiller was equally bold with the historical facts of Joan of Arcâs life. Inspired by Euripides, he introduced romantic interests, paternal betrayal, and a rescue almost worthy of a deus ex machina. In Schillerâs alternate version, the enemy soldier who captured her in history becomes the object of her captivated gaze. In place of condemnation by the church, she finds herself denounced by her own father. Instead of burning at the stake, she experiences a glowing vision of the heavens as she dies in the glory of battle. The effect was electric, and his playâs enormous popularity gave rise to numerous subsequent treatments, including a translation into Russian by Vasily Zhukovsky, an opera by Verdi, and an opera by Tchaikovsky. This book examines the literary and aesthetic context in which Schiller created his drama and presents several reasons for its notoriously ahistorical character. The fundamental, guiding concept here will be âsublime sanctity,â which is the product of Schillerâs appropriation of Euripidesâs themes into his play. Sublime sanctity is the essential quality in Schillerâs depiction of Joan, an idea that seizes the willing spectator and enables the play to achieve its intended force. Additionally, subsequent versions achieve their force only by retaining key salient qualities that Schillerâs Joan shares with Euripidesâs Iphigeneia. Without them, these versions must fail; with them, audiences may be introduced to sublime sanctity itself, irrespective of their aesthetic dispositions. After establishing the ideas and principles underpinning sublime sanctity in Schillerâs play, the investigation will proceed to examine other manifestations of Joan of Arc, primarily in the theater, that trace their provenance directly to Schiller or, in the case of Shawâs Saint Joan , bear a high degree of affinity with his creation. The discussion will return often to the fluctuating distinctions between classicism and romanticism, idealism and realism, philosophy and history, and the impact produced by these themes on the artists involved, their works, and their audiences. I will account for the enduring appealâor just as often the lack thereofâof the various plays and operas on the basis of these very themes throughout the nineteenth century across Europe. These ideas will be seen more as reflections of the circumstances in which the works were created than as the basis for assessing their dramatic impact. Ultimately, the argument here is that the dramatic value of each of the theatrical works under discussion ought to be judged by the degree to which the various authors and composers preserve the salient elements of sublime sanctity and create an atmosphere in which the audience may respond to it.
Before turning to Schillerâs adaptation, his deployment of the Iphigenia myth, and the critical role of sublime sanctity, it seems helpful to offer a list of the primary sources that will be discussed, along with a brief description of the story that each respective source tells and when it appeared :
Author | Title | Description | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
Euripides | Iphigeneia among the Taurians | Greek tragedy about the reunion of Iphigeneia with her brother, Orestes, and their reconciliation with their homeland | 413 BCE |
Euripides | Iphigeneia in Aulis | Greek tragedy about the sacrifice of the virgin, Iphigeneia, to expedite the Trojan War | 407 BCE |
Shakespeare | Henry VI, Part One | A history play about the siege of Orleans during the Hundred Yearsâ War | 1592 |
Voltaire | La pucelle dâOrlĂ©ans | A mock epic loosely based on the lifting of the siege of Orleans | 1730, 17627 |
Schiller | Die Jungfrau von Orleans | A romantic tragedy based on the life of Joan of Arc | 1801 |
Zhukovsky | Orleanskaya deva | A translation into Russian of Schillerâs play | 1824 |
Verdi | Giovanna dâArco | An opera based on Schillerâs play | 1845 |
Tchaikovsky | Orleanskaya deva | An opera based on Schillerâs play | 1879 |
Shaw | Saint Joan | A chronicle play based on the life of Joan of Arc | 1923 |
The history of Joan of Arc herself is unquestionably equal in importance to these artistic creations, if not more important, in fact. The closest we come to an objective source, universally acknowledged as reliable, is the transcripts of her two trials: the condemnation trial in Rouen of 1431 and the rehabilitation (or nullification) trial, which began in Paris in 1455 and ended in Rouen in 1456. Given that some of the 115 witnesses in the rehabilitation trial were the same people whose testimony had resulted in Joanâs condemnation 25 years earlier, perhaps âreliableâ is not the right word to describe this testimony. The unfortunate reality is that there is no completely objective, or fair-minded, source on the life of Joan of Arc. The transcripts of her trials are, nonetheless, enormously valuable in the attempt to separate facts from pure speculation and rumor. They were first made available to the public by Jules Quicherat between 1841 and 1849 (Pernoud 286), which means that the documents were unknown to Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Schiller. These earlier authors drew upon other sources, which will be cited in the text. Quicherat was the first in a long and still growing line of historians and scholars to attempt to bring the true story of Joan of Arc to the attention of the world. His seminal work has been reedited several times (Pernoud 286â87). Pierre Championâs publication of the condemnation trial in 1910 is valued, alongside that of Quicherat, especially for his commentary on the events and personages surrounding Joan of Arcâs history. The list of subsequent biographies, revisions, redactions, and reevaluations is voluminous, and many will find mention here, but each of their writers ultimately seems to lose a degree of objectivity in service to some political or theoretical purpose. One French historian, an acknowledged expert on the Middle Ages, RĂ©gine Pernoud, stands out for her balanced approach to Joan of Arc. Recalling her first visit to the United States in 1950, she asserts:
[âŠ] I was told of no fewer than twenty-eight Roman Catholic parishes dedicated to her in that country â my hosts assumed that this information would please me because I was French, even though I made a point in those days of declaring (quite truthfully) my indifference to Joan of Arc.But soon after that moment, I was imprudent enough to open the documents of her nullification trial and I found myself literally incapable of closing them. Since then Joan has led me to new horizons and fresh interestsâŠ. (xi)
That the author established her academic credentials as a medievalist with indifference to Joan of Arc, and then subsequently immersed herself in the competing and contradictory sources that have accrued over time, seems to save her writing from the bias and preconceived notions that permeate so much of Joan of Arc scholarship. For this reason, when points of fact are adduced in the present work, more often than not, the source consulted will be Pernoudâs Joan of Arc: Her Story.8
The first sign of Schillerâs plan to radicalize Joanâs image is his playâs subtitle: Eine romantische Tragödie. The dissonance between the term âromanticâ and the essentially classical notion of tragedy is the signifier of a play challenging conventional ideas of genre. Schiller had concluded by this time in his career that tragedy was his natural medium, and therefore, this was the genre in which he felt that t...