Adieu, forêts (The Maid of Orleans)

Tchaikovsky wrote The Maid of Orleans in 1878 and 1879, adapting Schiller's play himself and drawing also on Jules Barbier and on a French history of Joan of Arc. It was staged at the Mariinsky Theatre on 25 February 1881 under Eduard Nápravník, with the composer taking the curtain calls, and then slipped out of the repertory. He was deliberately writing for the French grand-opera stage — five acts, processions, ballet, crowd scenes — and later thought the result the least personal of his operas. Joan's farewell to the forests of her childhood is where his own voice returns.