Noa Ain graduated from Julliard and studied piano with Seymour Bernstein, composition with Overton and Miriam Gideon, and analysis with Stefan Wolpe. She has received an Obie Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award, and many other awards from ASCAP. Her opera, Joan of Arc, premiered at the Angel Orensantz Foundation in the spring of 2000. Opera News called the work a “brilliantly conceived experience.” Noa has many other operas to her credit including Angels’ Voices, The Outcast, and Trio.

In 1996 while working with a young people’s opera commissioned by the Kennedy Center, she visited the Corcoran Gallery and came across a wonderful painting of Joan of Maurice Boutet de Monveil. Joan was kneeling in her father’s garden as angels showed her a vision of herself as she would be in the near future. She was struck by this as well as the fact that the painting seemed to be divided down the center... Joan and the garden were painted in earth colors... the angelic vision in shimmering golds... and yet, somehow, the painting seemed completely balanced. The golds never outweighed what was “real.”

It was with these thoughts that she began work on Joan of Arc. She decided that she wanted the audience to experience what Joan experienced... to be enveloped in a “divine” wash of sound so physical that it would take one completely out of a temporal state. She wanted to create a piece that was not theater, not concert, but would feel as if Joan had come to this sacred space, for this hour, to remember (with us as witnesses) the events that led to her death at the stake.

Noa Ain’s paintings are inspired by her work on this opera and by the life, courage, and trials of Joan of Arc. Watch a slideshow set to a track from Joan of Arc just below, or view individual images of her paintings.