by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Bluebeard’s Castle was another matter entirely: a great opera (Bartók shows such a mastery of the form
it’s amazing this was his only opera!), elegantly and (once you accept the basic assumption at its
core) logically plotted, with two great roles for soprano and baritone. This
time Trelinski’s direction seemed to come from the horror films of the 1950’s
and 1960’s — indeed one could readily imagine the story of Bluebeard’s
Castle as a horror film from that
period with Vincent Price, an actor able to bridge the gap between courtly and
mean as only two of his predecessors (Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) had been,
as the menacing but superficially attractive Bluebeard. Indeed, Charles noted
the similarity between Bluebeard’s Castle and the best-selling novel (just released as a movie) Fifty Shades
of Gray: both are about mysterious
super-rich men who have somehow managed to entice young, naïve women to run off
with them and become their sex slaves. At the start of Trelinski’s production
of Bluebeard’s Castle we see a
dark wood and a car pulling up — from the fancy headlights (three on each side)
we guess it’s a vehicle from the late 1950’s and the woman who emerges from it,
Judith (Nadja Michael), is dressed in a cocktail-party dress with a tight top
that shows off her nipples — she looks hard-bitten but not totally dissolute.
She announces that she has left her father, mother, brother and fiancé to run
off with Bluebeard (Mikhail Petrenko, who oddly came off as sexier in the tight
blue jeans he was wearing for his pre-taped opening interview than in the suit
he wears in the opera itself) and live with him in his mysterious dark castle.
The castle consists of a hallway and seven mysterious rooms Bluebeard insists
on keeping locked. Of course, Judith — in the tradition of overly curious women
that began with Eve and included Elsa in Lohengrin — demands that Bluebeard open each of the rooms in succession and basically throw
light on his darkest secrets. Room one is an S/M torture dungeon; room two is
full of weapons; room three is full of gold and jewels; room four opens a
window to Bluebeard’s mines and landed estates, the sources of his wealth; room
five turns out to be the entrance to a lovely garden; room six is a pool of
tears, and room seven … well, let’s just say that your traditional idea of who
Bluebeard was and what he did to the women he enticed into his lair is not
quite reflected in this story, based on a fairy tale by Charles Perrault (who
was essentially interested in collecting French folklore and fashioning it into
commercial literature the way the Grimm brothers were doing in Germany and Hans
Christian Andersen in Denmark); Bluebeard’s previous wives are still alive but
in a zombie-ized state, totally divorced of any will of their own and following
his bidding without question, and as the opera (at least in Trelinski’s
production) ends with Bluebeard descending into a half-dug grave and embracing
a corpse that appears to be Judith once she enters her ultimate role as yet
another member of Bluebeard’s zombie harem. This time the music was remarkable,
fully characterized and vividly dramatic, and Trelinski’s production matched it
ably; though no medium short of actual film could do justice to the scene
changes as Bluebeard and Judith make it through the seven rooms and she spots
the blood in or on virtually every object that mars its beauty, Trelinski did a
damned fine job, creating a surprising number of different visual atmospheres
that communicated both the beauty and horror of each room. The singers, too,
excelled in music that gave them far more to work with than Tchaikovsky’s
amiable meanderings; aided by Bartók’s insightful (though almost continually
dissonant) melodic lines and his vivid orchestration, they created two fully
fleshed-out characters, at once believable and symbolic.
Interestingly, a
decade before Bartók worked on this opera (he began it in 1910 and finished it
in 1917), the French composer Paul Dukas did an opera on the same story, Ariane
et Barbe-Bleue, though his was taken from
a Maurice Maeterlinck play based on the Perrault tale, and he and Maeterlinck
used the story’s ending — Ariane/Judith tries to get Bluebeard’s other female
captives to rebel, and they refuse, telling her they’re perfectly happy where
they are — to make an anti-feminist, anti-Leftist point that it’s impossible to
“liberate” other people and it’s best just to leave them alone and let them be
happy in the ways that suit them. Bartók and Balázs have a considerably darker
view of the tale; it’s unclear from their ending whether Bluebeard’s other wives are alive, dead (except in the
vividly expressed fantasies of them in Bluebeard’s last aria) or in some state
in between, and (fittingly for a libretto writer who was called on to adapt
Brecht and had solid Leftist credentials himself) there’s an implicit but
unmistakable critique of the rich and how they can literally turn anything, including fellow human beings, into their
possessions. A vividly sung, intelligently produced presentation of a far
richer, deeper and more interesting work, Bluebeard’s Castle triumphed where Iolanta sort-of did O.K. — Iolanta isn’t a bad opera, but it’s hardly alive to the potential complexities of the story
whereas Bluebeard’s Castle seizes them; it’s not surprising that Iolanta is a virtually unknown opera while Bluebeard’s
Castle has at least a toehold in
the repertory and probably would get performed even more if it weren’t for the
twin handicaps of length (about an hour, lengthened here by some sound effects
Trelinski added as some of the rooms are opened, which means it has to have a
double-bill partner) and language. When it was first done outside Hungary
performances were usually in German, and the first U.S. productions were sung
in English (I’d like to hear it that way some day!) — indeed, the official
score contains the text in Hungarian (which the Met used), German and English,
and the English translation was done by the composer’s son, Peter Bartók.
