Giovanna d'Arco (1832)

As a student Bizet had not only met Rossini but had also been presented with a signed photograph and had even been a guest at the famous soirées musicales at the Italian composer’s home in Paris. He could not, however, have been present at what is thought to have been the first performance of the cantata Giovanna d’Arco – by the composer’s favourite contralto Marietta Albon – in the Rossini apartment in the Chaussée d’Antin in 1859. Bizet was in Rome at the time, working on his opera buffa Don procopio perhaps or his ode-symphony Vasco da Gama. What he would have thought of it, had he been there, we can only guess.

We know that Bizet ranked Rossini, alongside Mozart, as one of the greatest of all composers and in Giovanna d’Arco he would certainly have recognised the Rossini of the operas he so much admired. Written in 1832 and dedicated to the composer’s future second wife Olympe Pélisser, this highly dramatic Joan of Arc monologue was, in fact, the most operatic score Rossini was to complete in the nearly forty years of his retirement from the opera house. But it was already dated in style in 1832 and by 1859 it would have seemed to a young composer like Bizet positively antique. On the other hand, while he might not have been impressed by a piano part that sounds at times like a make-shift arrangement of an orchestral original, he would surely have been thrilled by the extravagance of the vocal writing, however old-fashioned.

After a piano prelude that sets the sleepless night-time scene and, by means of simulated trumpet calls, offers a hint of the military ambition of the virgin shepherdess, the voice enters with an extended and emotionally many-sided recitative culminating in a sad farewell to the her fields and woods. “O mia madre” is a cantabile aria in ternary form with a heroic middle section and a highly elaborate cadence on “risponderá.” Another dramatic recitative, this one radiant with the light of a patriotic destiny, leads to a cabaletta so challenging that it requires not only the fearlessness of a Joan of Arc but also the agility of a Cenerentola.