Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Bartók’s one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is a tragic masterwork of immense emotional and dramatic power. Yet when Bartók completed it in 1911 and submitted it to Budapest’s Royal Hungarian Opera House (today the Hungarian State Opera), it was rejected as being untheatrical. From a conventional standpoint, the opera is indeed that: there are only two characters, and their story is depicted symbolically, rather than through traditional stage “action”. The libretto by Béla Balázs is a sombre parable of personal and psychological isolation. When Bluebeard brings his new bride Judith into his castle’s hallway, she sees seven huge doors along the walls. She insists on each of these being opened; the first six reveal in turn a torture chamber, an armoury, a treasure-house of jewels, a secret garden, a view of Bluebeard’s vast kingdom and a lake of tears. Bluebeard pleads with Judith to leave the seventh door unopened, but again she insists, and from it silently emerge Bluebeard’s previous three wives; Judith joins them as they process back inside, the door closes, and he is left alone. The music of Bartók’s magnificent score takes in sumptuous late-Romanticism, dissonant modernism and a simpler, ballad-like idiom derived from Hungarian folk music. The Royal Hungarian Opera House eventually staged Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in 1918; and while it is today performed more often in concert than staged, it is regarded as one of the great operas of the 20th century.