Bluebeard\u2019s Castle, Bart\u00f3k\u2019s bloodthirsty psychodrama, invites us to explore the hidden recesses of our own imaginations, as\u00a0Tom Service explains <\/p>
O<\/span>n<\/span>ce upon a time\u2026 Where did this happen? Outside, or within? The music sounds, the flames are lit\u2026 Observe carefully.\u2019 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n T<\/span>hose are the words that the Bard, the narrator, declaims at the start of one of the strangest pieces of 20th-century music, an opera that remains an enigmatic and terrifying riddle more than a century after the Hungarian composer B\u00e9la Bart\u00f3k<\/a><\/strong> composed it in 1911: Bluebeard\u2019s Castle<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> What do we observe there? There are just two singing parts in this story: the aristocratic sadist Bluebeard, who brings his latest young wife Judith to his castle, with its seven locked doors. <\/span><\/p>\n Her curiosity flings them all open throughout the drama, revealing his torture chamber and his armoury, the walls of the castle oozing with the chromatic torment and blood-stained semitones of Bart\u00f3k\u2019s score; there\u2019s the thrilling blaze of C major dominion behind the fifth door, and the living corpses of Bluebeard\u2019s previous wives behind the seventh and last door, where Judith is doomed to join them at the end of the opera.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Bluebeard\u2019s Castle<\/i> is the staging of a well-known fairytale, which had already been turned into operas by Offenbach and Dukas before Bart\u00f3k, and it\u2019s been remade by writers and film-makers like Angela Carter and Catherine Breillat in our time. But it\u2019s also a piece that puts pure psychology on the opera stage: locked doors, dark chambers of imagination and sexuality that Bluebeard would rather keep hidden but that Judith can\u2019t resist trying to open with her love. <\/span><\/p>\n Why was the 30-year-old Bart\u00f3k so attracted to this story? And why did he dedicate the piece to his wife, M\u00e1rta Ziegler, who was 16 when they married? What a wedding gift, in its sound, its symbolism and its story: an older man with a teenage bride, a life in which she walks round the castle of his imagination and creativity to find only darkness. Blue-beard, Bart\u00f3k-beard, who knows?<\/span><\/p>\n But it\u2019s not as a chance to psychologise its composer that Bluebeard\u2019s Castle<\/i> remains so darkly fascinating for us today. The piece is really an invitation to observe ourselves through the horrifying machinations of its story. <\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s another, unseen door that the piece opens: to our own responses to this drama. We might choose to bury the Bluebeard experience deep in the recesses of our imagination, but if we\u2019re honest, we also want to go down there and open those locked vaults: what secrets will we find in ourselves? Our sympathy for Judith, or our sympathy for Bluebeard? Do you let the light into the darkest places of your consciousness, or keep them hidden?<\/span><\/p>\n Bart\u00f3k\u2019s bravery in Bluebeard<\/i> is going there in his own creative and psychic world, and daring to open those doors: our question is whether we\u2019re brave enough to join him.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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