Bluebeard's Castle
Details
In Brief
There are evenings when our Opera House cannot perform because rehearsals are ongoing on stage until the evening. There are audience members who can only afford to hear their favourite pieces with a discount. And there are works that, although very popular, cannot be staged every season due to the congestion of productions. All these issues can be solved at once by the Hungarian State Opera’s new IC series, whose name carries the of iron curtain, but which may also gain popularity with the speed of an express train. Even though it will feature in the programme as a regular series beginning only with the next season, we are already presenting this new, semi-staged operatic format that offers more than concert performances on selected evenings during the current one as a preview. The titles are major works by great composers, requiring smaller choruses but offering fewer but particularly significant soloist roles.
A mere hour after a stage rehearsal, visitors having purchased their ticket with a 20% discount find the iron curtain of the Opera House lowered. The massive double steel plate, covering a surface of 170 m², does not only conceal the set of the next production behind it but also serve as an acoustic reflector meeting audiophile standards. Onto this enormous surface, decorated with architect Miklós Ybl’s engravings, we project a unique video installation, with Hungarian and English surtitles displayed at the top. The orchestra takes its usual place in the pit, while the hand-picked, first-rate singers step through the door in the iron curtain to take a seat at the front of the stage, then step into the limelight when it is their turn to sing.
The form is quasi-concert-like, but the soloists do not use sheet music, they appear in period costumes, and can use their faces, hands, and bodies for dramatic gestures. The participating chorus performs from various points of the building to astonish the audience with a powerful 3D sound. From all this, a single, significant, shared experience can emerge: the wonder of sound that feels much closer to the audience, magnifying gestures and offering a far more intense, truly record-quality experience in an auditorium that is thus transformed into one with the best acoustics in Hungary, the concert hall of the Opera House.
During the 2025/26 Beethoven–Mozart–Wagner season, a Don Pasquale and two Bluebeard’s Castle performances introduce the Opera IC format. In the following season, a series of performances including Don Giovanni, Tosca, and Rigoletto can be expected.
Events
Synopsis
The protagonists of Béla Bartók and Béla Balázs’s symbolist opera are Bluebeard and his wife, Judith, who has left her family and her betrothed in order to follow her love. However, Bluebeard’s castle – that is, his soul – contains seven closed doors. Judith persuades her husband to open them, one after the other. Behind the first door is the torture chamber, while the second leads to the armoury. Still unsatisfied, Judith wants to open the other doors in order to fill her beloved’s castle with light. Bluebeard gives her three more keys: the third is for the treasury, the fourth opens the door to the hidden garden. The treasure and the flowers, nevertheless, are bloody. At her husband’s bidding, Judith also opens the fifth door, where Bluebeard’s realm shines with brilliant light. The clouds, however, cast dark shadows. Judith now wishes to look behind the “innermost” doors, but she asks Bluebeard in vain: she must not ask, but instead simply love him. Judith receives the sixth key, which opens the door to the lake of tears. From behind the final door emerge the three former wives. All goes dark.
Concert guide
Introduction
“This piece by Béla Bartók is the greatest thing that has happened here, in this city, in my lifetime. […] it was a revelation to me, like a new continent, some kind of proclamation,” wrote Sándor Bródy. Who is Bluebeard? Perhaps the accursed Conomor, who murdered his pregnant wives, or Gilles de Rais, the 15th-century French nobleman? Or maybe Perrault’s famous fairy-tale figure, or Anatole France’s perennial fool corrupted by women, whose image posterity magnified? According to László Bóka, he is “the embodiment of an adolescent liberated into love and his world of desires,” a tragic Don Juan who is given the chance to open himself through self-examination, but “memory, like a dreadful waxworks, preserves its victims in petrified form,” and thus it is inevitable that the new wife also becomes part of this panopticon.
In 1918 Izor Béldi wrote disapprovingly in Pesti Hírlap about the work’s psycho-sexual embeddedness, the aggression of selfish sexuality, yet paradoxically he could not resist the power of the music: “Bartók’s music even outbids Balázs’s pathological text: a kind of musicalised psychopathia sexualis […] but even in this aberration an extraordinary creative force destined for the greatest tasks manifests itself.” Kodály, writing in Nyugat, highlighted the musicality of the naturally stressed, Hungarian-style declamatory language use, but he also emphasised the intentional dismantling of operatic clichés. This is perhaps the real scandal of the piece: Bartók’s apparent alienness to tradition is, from a Hungarian perspective, the greatest linguistic-musical sense of home.
Zoltán Csehy
An “unperformable” opera
“I would go to the rehearsals of Bluebeard; I would go to the performance of Bluebeard! Now I know that I will never hear it in my life.” Sometime at the beginning of 1915, this cry of pain burst from Béla Bartók in a letter to his wife, recalling the already years-long, hopeless ordeal of his opera. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was completed between March and September 1911, and that October Bartók entered the opera, setting Béla Balázs’s mystery play to music, into the Lipótváros Casino’s Ferenc Erkel Prize competition. Unperformable – so went the judges’ verdict, and a few months later the Rózsavölgyi Music Publishing Company’s opera competition, and subsequently the Hungarian Royal Opera House, evaluated Bluebeard in much the same way. “I have been officially executed as a composer,” Bartók complained afterwards to one of his younger colleagues, Géza Vilmos Zágon (incidentally the cousin of Béla Zerkovitz), for “either they are right, in that case I am a talentless bungler; or I am right, in which case they are idiots.”
The injury done to the genius was then remedied within just a few years, and not even a revolution was needed: it was enough – quoting Béla Balázs – to apply “the aristocratic superiority, the aristocratic cool-blooded impudence.” Miklós Bánffy, who created a brief golden age at the Opera House, used his authority as intendant to push through the premiere of Bluebeard’s Castle, and since May 1918 the appreciation of Bartók’s only opera has depended not only on the musical and operatic institutions but also on us, the opera-going public. And however difficult it is to admit, we sometimes contemplate Bluebeard with a certain embarrassment. The cause of this discomfort mostly lies in Béla Balázs’s work, for right from the Bard’s spoken prologue it uses irritatingly contrived, contriving turns of phrase: “The castle is ancient, and this story / About it is ancient too. / Now you too shall hear it.”
Balázs Béla and Those Who Do Not Need Him – György Lukács published a militantly pro-Balázs collection of essays under this very title in 1918, yet in truth the Hungarian reading public has kept a certain distance ever since from the otherwise much-merited and widely active writer’s style. But Bluebeard is made disquieting not only by its wording but also by its plot and message, and this can hardly be separated from Bartók’s contribution and his artistic stance. For the heroic-tragic portrayal of the incurably lonely male soul seems partly affected, partly utterly lacking in self-reflection. So, with some shame we may even feel that those doors all open to the same place in truth. And yet we continue to marvel at this conspicuously un-operatic and so difficult-to-stage wonder. Behold, this is our realm!
Ferenc László
A French legend on the Hungarian opera stage
The myth of Bluebeard is traditionally linked to two historical figures. One is the 1st-century ruler of Brittany, Conomor the Cursed, who killed his wives when they became pregnant. According to the legend, the ghosts of his previous wives warned his last spouse, allowing her to escape. The other historical figure was a 15th-century nobleman named Gilles de Rais. Despite being an educated man who had participated in the Crusades, the “pious monster” eventually turned to occultism and committed terrible murders. Accounts say that his beard had a tint of blue when seen in a certain light. The story of Bluebeard became well-known when Charles Perrault’s published his collection of tales in 1697. The subject was rediscovered in the Romantic era and was adapted by several authors. With his short story Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue, Anatole France was the first to depict Bluebeard not as a murderous beast, but rather as a clumsy man who is dominated by women.
The story has appeared in Hungarian folklore as well – for example, in the Ballad of Anna Molnár and the story The Wife of the Mason Kelemen. The young Hungarian writer Béla Balázs was inspired by the legend too, especially Maurice Maeterlinck’s version, the symbolic play Ariane et Barbe-Bleue ou la délivrance inutile (Ariane and Bluebeard or The Useless Rescue), which served as the basis for the 1907 opera by Paul Dukas. Béla Balázs wrote his own version for the stage with the title Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the full text of which was published in the periodical Stage Drama on 13 May 1910. Music historian György Kroó argued that Béla Balázs “originally offered the mystery play to Kodály, and he read his play aloud to him in 1910. Bartók, who was also present to hear it, was captivated by the theme.”
Judit Kenesey