Sprechen und Singen im Dramma-Oratorium: Zu Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (Paul Claudel / Arthur Honegger) und Thyl Claes (Wladimir Vogel)
Speaking and Singing in the Dramma-Oratorio: Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (Paul Claudel/Arthur Honegger) and Thyl Claes (Wladimir Vogel)

Summary/Abstract: It is no accident that two famous musical works created in the dark times of tyrannies before and during World War II belong to the genre of “dramma-oratorio” that, combining speaking and singing, is neither (pure) drama nor (pure) oratorio. When in the twentieth century, following Brecht, “a talk on trees nearly is a crime”, what then is a song, based on the beauty of its melody? Speaking therefore possibly appears to be a remedy that enables art to remain in contact with the spheres of politics and everyday life. The two works put in the center of the dramma-oratorio a dying hero, one historical, the other one fictitious: Joan of Arc, a French catholic heroine in the fight against England during the fifteenth century, on the one hand, and Thyl Claes, fils de Kolldraeger, modelled according de Coster’s novel Thyl Ulenspiegel, a picaresque Flemish hero in the fight against Spanish catholic occupation during the sixteenth century, on the other hand. Both works make use of historical aspects for depicting present conflicts, in both speaking signify a sound metaphor for the dark political times of twentieth century-tyrannies, as well as an expression of forces in opposition to those tyrannies. And it is neither an accident that both works were created in Switzerland, a country not involved in World War II: Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher in Basel in 1938, Vogels’s Thyl Claes in Geneva in 1943-1947.

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