Bill T. Jones (Artistic Director/Co-Founder - Ann Arbor District Library

happiness. Judith is woman as the embodiment
of love. She loves Bluebeard because he is
the essential Man, the unhappy seeker of
uncompromising and joyless truth. She wants
to redeem him, to reconcile him with life, to
make him accept happiness.
All three of Bartok's stage works the others are
the ballets The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous
Mandarin—focus on the relationship between man
and woman. In Bluebeard's Castle, Bartok uses
contrasting music to distinguish the two: pentatonic
and folklike for Bluebeard; chromatic and romantic
for Judith. These are the only singing roles, and the
relationship between them is not defined by stock
operatic gestures or forms; they sing to each other,
but not together until the very end, and then only
for a few measures. The symbolism is powerful:
they cannot reach one another. The drama in
Bluebeard's Castle is accomplished through music,
not action. (As the bard who speaks the prologue
suggests, the stage on which the work unfolds
may well be one of the mind.)
The opera begins and ends in total darkness,
with music based on a pentatonic scale (using
only five notes) starting on F-sharp; but with the
flood of light at the fifth door, Bartok unleashes
a blinding flash of pure C Major. (Significantly, C
is the note furthest from F-sharp.) That moment,
capped by Judith's cry on a high C, comes at the
very center of the piece and suggested to Bartok
the arch form that became his favorite architectural
plan. Bluebeard's Castle is a gradual crescendo
from darkness to light and then back again.
The opening of the doors invites orchestral
music that is richly descriptive of each discovery.
The horrors of the torture chamber are illustrated
in chilling sounds from the entire orchestra: there
are shrieks from the piccolos and a nervous trilling
throughout. Trumpet and horn fanfares introduce
the armory. Glistening patterns from the celesta
and harps accompany the discovery of the jewels.
The garden behind the fourth door is depicted in
a pastoral horn theme over a wash of quiet string
music. The broad vistas of Bluebeard's kingdom
are scanned in slow progressions of brilliant triads,
ceremonial and spine-tingling in the sheer power
of their sound. Arpeggios from the celesta, harps,
and winds suggest the immense waters behind the
sixth door.
At the seventh door, the drama is turned on its
head. Judith has heard the rumors and believes
the last door will reveal the bodies of Bluebeard's
UMS Chicago Symphony Orchestra
murdered wives. But the women are not dead. As
Peter Bartok explains, "In Balazs's symbolic version,
representing Bluebeard as the prototype of tragic
and creative man, the central motif of the old
folk tale, Bluebeard as the wicked wife-killer, is
thoroughly sublimated." He concludes:
No woman, then, can give Bluebeard joy and
happiness on her own terms, as Judith had
wanted to. The women are forever enshrined,
as figures of undying beauty, in the secret
recesses of the castle of gloom, which in
its turn symbolized man's soul. Bluebeard's
women make his flowers bloom and his
treasures grow; in other words, they are the
source of the creative man's inspiration. But as
living women, they cannot share his life. They
exist only as idealized memories. Without
being a wife-killer in the material sense,
Bluebeard does kill his women on the "inner"
stage. Tragic man can find no fulfillment in
woman. This is the hidden "meaning" of the
old tale.
Bluebeard's Castle is not often encountered in
the opera house, partly because it must be paired
with something else to make for a full evening
and it is difficult to find an ideal companion, and
partly because its true power does not depend on
stage effects, but on an uncompromising delivery
of the music. During the composer's lifetime,
Bluebeard's Castle was rarely performed. As soon
as the score was finished, Bartok entered it in an
important national competition; the prize, a staged
production, was denied because the jurors thought
the work unperformable. Bluebeard's Castle was
not staged for another seven years. Shortly after
the premiere in Budapest in May 1918, Bluebeard
was banned throughout Hungary because its
librettist, Balazs, was now a political exile. A
production was announced to celebrate the
composer's 50th birthday in 1931, but it did not
materialize. Eventually the opera was recognized
as a work of singular power and brilliance, but the
difficulties Bartok had endured getting Bluebeard's
Castle produced soured him from writing for the
stage ever again.
Program notes by Phillip Huscher, Program
Annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.