She was an illiterate girl who said she heard and saw visions of the Ark Angel Michael at the age of 12 that inspired her to lead an army against England.

And it's for Gundy and allies to defend the French monarchy.

She was called a visionary, a heretic, a sorceress, a witch, a cross dresser and much more.

Her public execution was horrific, and her remains were tossed into the Seine River.

Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909 and canonized Saint in 1920.

She was a woman for all media and became appealing as a symbol, as heroin as an icon to Christians, to freedom fighters, to feminists, to all kinds of people who felt that they were marginalized in one way or another, and her life, or what we perceive as her life became profoundly important source material for every kind of creative artist problem.

In telling the story of Joan of Arc, is that even though she only lived 19 years, her life was incredibly eventful.

And because it was the early 15th century, the source material is not reliable.

There are a few letters.

There are paintings.

There are accounts that are told about Jones life, but she's become a myth.

She was multimedia well before multimedia existed.

The only painting done of her in her lifetime was destroyed.

But we have paintings done by people who saw those paintings, and that's his closes we get.

We have accounts from church figures.

We have accounts and kings of France.

We have accounts in the British.

All of them tell a very different story.

The fact that Joan to lead the French arming dressed as a man, was considered by some people noble by other people, heretical.

So the thing about Joan of Arc is that she's amazingly polarizing.

And when you take her story and put it in a different form, whether it's an opera play an oratorio, a film, what it becomes is the creator's version of what Joan of Arc represents to him or her.

Verity saw her as a noble figure, and very in the 18 forties road operas that tried to inspire Italians to throw off the yoke of foreign domination.

Soto have a figure, such as a young woman leading the battle, leading the charge against foreign occupiers.

In Jones case it was.

The British was a perfect surrogate for Italian audiences in Milan who were under the domination of Austria.

Tchaikovsky did another very famous version of the maid of Orleans, the Schiller play.

It was his sixth of his 11th operas.

It came right after Eugene O'Neill Hagen and came in 18 78 18 79 at a time when there were struggles with the royal family in ST Petersburg in which the serfs demanded to be set free.

It was a very powerful work in a very powerful concept for those who embraced it, Tchaikovsky himself wrote the libretto, the work that we're going to see if the New York Philharmonic John Darko Boucher, Joan of Arc at the Stake is an oratorio by Arthur Honegger, a Swiss composer.

It was commissioned by Ida Rubinstein, who was a dancer and actress.

It was set to a libretto by Paul Claudel, and the work runs about 70 minutes.

Claudel was a very controversial figure, Um, and he was more famous in his time than Honaker.

Claudel was perhaps France's leading playwright in the early 20th century.

Some people said that he and bared hell Brecht with the two most important European playwrights of that time.

Claudel had a very strong religious conversion, and for him, Joan was a Christian figure.

She was a saint.

She was carrying out the visions that had been handed to her from above and doing the Lord's work because of his extreme devoutness.

Some would say too devout.

Claudel was accused of anti Semitism, and he had to really bend over backwards in World War Two to convince the French that he was on their side and not on the side of the Nazis.

But when this work, this oratorio premiered in neutral Switzerland and Basel in 1938 it was perceived as something that was a call for peace.

And what it is is the story of Joan of Arc at the stake.

There's a prolonged their 11 scenes, and she looks back over her life and narrated scenes from her life.

Tell some of them we have an actress doing it and famously in the past was Ingrid Bergman and then Martha Keller, who did it with the New York Philharmonic and now marry in Courtyard.

You have the actress speaking certain lines.

You have singers singing certain music.

You have a chorus, you have the orchestra.

It is in its way, multimedia.

And if you think of it that way, as you listen to the performance, you'll discover that what we are perceiving or Jones visions But rather than seeing visions of the future, their memories of the past and what's so powerful about this work, and what Claudel and Honegger and Rubenstein understood was that at this dramatic moment at the moment of her death, as the flames lick up as she becomes Rihanna, she becomes fevered and frenzied.

Yes, maybe she sees visions again, but she looks back over her life, and it makes for an incredibly powerful, very singular kind of work and in a way that the New York Philharmonic can present as theater as music as drama, as something much beyond Joan of Arc.

It was, and is a person who represents everything that we see to be noble, whether we are religious, whether we're not religious, whether we believe in freedom for all whether we want and want to emphasize self assertion, self identity.

She has something for everyone, and I know she'll have something for you.