Werner Egk and 'Joan von Zarissa': Music as politics and propaganda under National Socialism

Werner Egk's Joan von Zarissa, a relocation of the Don Juan saga to 15th-century Burgundy, provides a case study in the complexities of creating art and establishing an artistic career in Germany during the National Socialist period. Egk's 1932 radio play, Die Historie von Ritter Don Juan aus Barcelona is a progenitor to Joan von Zarissa. Egk's first works for radio were a reflection of the leftist Weimar milieu in which Egk came of age as a composer. They provided the foundation for Egk's later works, perpetually lauded as both illustrative and dramatic.;Werner Egk's oeuvre from the National Socialist period appears to be a collection of disparate pieces across a variety of genres. When considered as part of a young composer's attempt to forge a career, it becomes possible to reconcile Egk's "Nazi works" such as Job, der Deutsche with works as "culturally Bolshevistic" as Peer Gynt. The ostensibly dissimilar genres actually map Egk's compositional path from film and radio to opera and dance. Additionally, Egk wrote journal articles that attempted to make space for himself and his colleagues.;The Joan von Zarissa published today is not that which premiered in Berlin on 20 January 1940, nor is it that which Egk originally composed. The primary sources from which Egk drew his inspiration were Jean Fouquet's paintings and the Feast of the Pheasant. Egk collaborated with artist Josef Fenneker to create a stage design that captured the salient features of these models.;Joan von Zarissa is an example of New German Dance, but this label does not admit the presence of spoken and sung texts within it. The work is more correctly a latter-day Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk synthesizing gesture, poetry, music, set, and lighting.;Egk's music is an extension of conventional tonal music. Its power and dance-like quality are carried by its rhythm and meter. Melody is fundamental to Joan von Zarissa, serving both to delineate structural form and to unify the drama. While Egk expands his chordal vocabulary beyond conventional triads and seventh chords, he often retains functional harmonic progressions.;Joan von Zarissa premiered at the Berliner Staatsoper on 20 January 1940. By the time all German theaters shut down in September 1944, Egk's had been was produced in fifteen cities across six European countries. Joan von Zarissa was danced twenty times in Occupied Paris between 1942 and 1944. The cohesive nature of Joan von Zarissa and Egk's recreation of the atmosphere of Renaissance court culture were universally acclaimed. Both inside and outside the Reich, Joan von Zarissa met with excitement and success.;The hybrid German-French nature of Joan von Zarissa created a perfect work of cultural propaganda which the Germans directed toward Occupied France. In producing Joan von Zarissa, Paris Opera Director Jacques Rouche occupied the stage with a palatable work, thereby preventing the production of something perhaps more insidious. Ultimately, Joan von Zarissa never truly gained entry into the French canon.;Egk created a framework for subtextual interpretation in the many bifurcated elements of Joan von Zarissa. These include the dual-platform stage, on which different actions occur simultaneously; the image of Odysseus and the Sirens, that causes observers to question what is being presented, especially by the choir behind it; and the parallel nature of the drama of Joan von Zarissa itself. The presence of a subversive subtext is confirmed by the use of disjunctly joyful elements that mitigate the problematic material preceding them. The choruses of Joan von Zarissa call both Germans and the French to question the National Socialist regime.;After World War II, Egk was called to account for his artistic activity in the Third Reich in three separate denazification proceedings. Egk was blacklisted by the Americans; exonerated by the Germans; un-exonerated by a single German prosecutor; retried; re-exonerated; and almost retried again. Egk did not deserve to be blacklisted by the Americans, nor does he deserve a naive whitewash. Egk occupies the expansive field of grey between. Like others who survived Nazi Germany, Egk had made a life for himself within National Socialism, but never embraced its Weltanschauung.;After the war Egk continued to compose, work for composers' rights, and advocate new music; and Joan von Zarissa continued to traverse the globe in productions from Buenos Aires to Berlin to Bangkok.