The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Hinterland
It may look like torture – but even the most opera averse should pay a visit to Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Given that Béla Bartók is possibly Hungary’s greatest composer it is surprising how few of his works are well known outside his country. (I can hear the outrage from devotees of Liszt: he was undeniably great, but to my ear he lacked the genius and originality Bartók radiates.) Yet Bartók had a mixed relationship with Hungary. At his peak, in the aftermath of the Great War, he felt deep hostility to the authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy, which followed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The rise of Nazism disturbed him: he refused to perform in Hitler’s Germany (he was then one of Europe’s greatest concert pianists) and became a prominent anti-fascist at home. When Horthy aligned Hungary with the Axis powers in the autumn of 1940, Bartók and his wife emigrated to America. Within five years he was dead from leukaemia at the distressingly early age of 64. His birthplace of Nagyszentmiklós is no longer even in Hungary; when the borders were redrawn in 1920, it fell into Romania instead.
Bartók wrote only one opera, but it is a most sublime example of his orchestral technique and his unique sound world. He based Duke Bluebeard’s Castle on the 17th-century French story La Barbe Bleue by Charles Perrault, using a libretto by his friend, the Hungarian poet Béla Balázs. (The libretto had in fact been written for another of their friends, Zoltán Kodály, who would himself become a famous composer, but Kodály had turned it down.)
Bartók composed the music in 1911, when he was 30; he revised it twice before its first performance in May 1918. The opera is a little over an hour long and features only two singing characters: Bluebeard and his wife, Judith, with whom he has just eloped to the castle of the title, taking her there for the first time.
The opera is an early work of expressionism, part of the modernist movement that was sweeping Europe at the time, and of which Stravinsky, then working in Paris with the Ballets Russes, was perhaps the leading exponent. It begins unusually with a spoken prologue before a slow musical introduction. When Bluebeard and Judith arrive at his castle it is in darkness, and she asks him to open all the doors to let in the light. He refuses to do so, only giving in when she implores him.
There are seven doors: behind them are a bloodstained torture chamber, an armoury, a treasury, a garden, a vast and beautiful kingdom, and a lake of tears.
One door remains closed, and Bluebeard begs Judith not to make him open it. She insists, believing the blood and tears she has seen are those of his previous three wives, whom he has killed.
The last door opens: behind it are his three previous wives, all alive, who process silently out in fine clothes and jewels. Bluebeard falls down before them and seeks to ingratiate himself with them before taking their jewels and bestowing them on Judith. She, however, joins the other three and leaves the stage through the seventh door, before darkness returns and conceals Bluebeard.
What emotions were Bluebeard, or Bartók, expressing? The most popular interpretation is that the blood represents the composer’s own suffering, and that Judith is a woman simply confronting her own fears. The spoken prologue stresses that the story must be shaped by the imagination of each member of the audience.
The work demands a large orchestra. Unlike much of Bartók’s later work, the music is not atonal, but it does sometimes have different instruments playing in different keys, which produces an astonishing effect on the listener.
The pivotal moment in the music is the opening of the fifth door – on Bluebeard’s vast kingdom – where the sound world is loud, dazzling, and inspires a sense of awe and majesty. For non-Hungarian speakers, the libretto is notoriously difficult to sing, though the great bass Sir John Tomlinson has recorded it three times, the last time – with the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen – probably his best, his voice a tuneful, magnificent roar.
It is remarkable that this opera was not performed in England until 1957, though it was popular in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. For those unfamiliar with Bartók, it is an ideal way into an extraordinary oeuvre.
When a vast kingdom is revealed behind the fifth door, Bartók’s score is dazzling