The power of evil
The Spanish-Catalan artists' collective La Fura dels Baus combines Debussy's "La Damoiselle élue" with Honegger's dramatic oratorio. An evening well worth the journey.
While Arthur Honegger has just disappeared from our wallets (lucky the Swiss, who have been able to carry their artists on their banknotes for so long!), he is still on the program north of the Rhine - currently at the Frankfurt Opera with a brilliant production of his dramatic oratorio Joan of Arc au bûcher (1935). This is the third time, after 1949 and 1968, that this entirely solitary work has been staged in the Main metropolis. Of course, it is neither associated with nor proclaimed as a special performance tradition - and yet the work in the production by Àlex Ollé and his internationally successful Spanish-Catalan collective La Fura dels Baus can also be seen and heard as a reflection of reality (at least in parts of the world): power-political intrigues, show trials and the decline of a civil society once founded on solidarity.
Grandiose between the genres
