Dvořák’s Seventh and Bartók’s Bluebeard

About the Work

If Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony is sunlit and Brahmsian in its geniality, the Seventh, written just a few years later, is its dark twin: the most tragic, turbulent and tightly argued of all his symphonies, and for many listeners his greatest. It was born of high ambition. The London Philharmonic Society, which had made Dvořák an honorary member after the triumph of his music in England, commissioned a new symphony, and Dvořák, by now an international figure, was determined to rise to the occasion. He had recently heard and admired Brahms’s new Third Symphony, and it spurred him to write something on the same exalted level: a serious, large-scale symphonic statement rather than a display of Bohemian charm.

He composed it over the winter of 1884–85, in a mood darkened by personal strain and by his fervent Czech patriotism at a time of political tension with Austria. The music has an urgency and a tragic weight unusual for Dvořák, and he poured great care into its construction; of the slow movement he wrote to his publisher that ‘there is not one superfluous note.’ He completed it in March 1885 and conducted the brilliantly successful premiere at St James’s Hall in London on 22 April 1885.

The symphony’s stature was recognised early. The great analyst Donald Tovey ranked it, alongside the four Brahms symphonies and Schubert’s Ninth, among the supreme symphonies written since Beethoven. It marries Dvořák’s inexhaustible melodic gift to a Brahmsian density of argument and a genuinely tragic tone, all without losing the Czech accent (the folk-flavoured rhythms and the songful slow music) that makes the voice unmistakably his.

What to Listen For

The first movement begins in shadow: a brooding, restless theme stealing in low on violas and cellos (Dvořák said it occurred to him as a train carrying Czech patriots steamed into Prague station). Listen for the tension between this dark first idea and a warmer, more lyrical second theme, and for the movement’s tautness. It is among the most concentrated and dramatic Dvořák ever wrote, ending not in triumph but in a quiet, ominous fade.

The slow movement (Poco adagio) is a deep, song-like meditation, opening with a serene wind chorale and rising to impassioned climaxes; note the beautiful horn and woodwind solos that grace it. The third-movement Scherzo is the most overtly Czech music here: a lilting, cross-rhythmed dance with the swing of a furiant, framing a gentler, pastoral trio. The finale gathers the symphony’s tragic energies and drives them forward with mounting intensity; listen for the hard-won turn, only in the very final bars, from stormy D minor into a blazing D major, a victory wrested, at the last possible moment, from darkness.

About the Work

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is Béla Bartók’s only opera: a single, unbroken hour of music for just two singers, and one of the most extraordinary psychological dramas in the repertoire. Bartók composed it in 1911, to a Hungarian libretto by his friend the poet Béla Balázs, drawing on the old French folk tale of Bluebeard, the lord whose successive wives vanish behind locked doors. But Balázs and Bartók turned the gruesome legend into a Symbolist parable of the impossibility of truly knowing another person. There is no gore, no on-stage murder; instead the opera becomes an interior journey, the castle itself a metaphor for Bluebeard’s soul.

The new wife, Judith, has left family and a betrothed to follow Bluebeard into his dark, windowless castle. One by one she demands the keys to its seven locked doors, insisting on light and openness, on knowing everything about the man she loves. Behind each door lies a part of him, and the opera traces, with growing dread, how her need to know everything destroys the very love she seeks. It is at once a chamber drama of unbearable intimacy and a vast symphonic canvas, scored for a huge orchestra that becomes the castle’s living voice.

The work had a difficult birth: rejected in competition as insufficiently theatrical, it waited seven years for its premiere, which finally took place at the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest on 24 May 1918, by which time Bartók had revised it, reworking its quietly devastating ending. Today it is recognised as a landmark of twentieth-century music, and it works superbly in concert, where the orchestra, freed from the stage, can blaze and brood at full strength.

What to Listen For

The opera is built around the opening of the seven doors, and Bartók gives each its own unmistakable music and colour; follow them, and you follow the drama.

Listen first to the dark, brooding opening, rooted in a shadowy F♯, and to the spoken or sung prologue’s invitation to look ‘inward.’ As Judith demands the keys, each door reveals a tableau: the torture chamber (door one), with shuddering strings and a stabbing dissonance, blood seeping through every vision; the armoury (door two); the glittering treasury (door three), and notice how a blood-red stain taints even the jewels. The secret garden (door four) brings lush, fragrant music; then comes the opera’s overwhelming central moment, the fifth door: it opens onto Bluebeard’s vast domains, and the full orchestra erupts in a blazing, organ-capped C major of shattering brilliance, one of the great coups de théâtre in all opera. Listen for how Judith, even here, sees blood on the clouds.

From this radiant summit the music darkens steadily. The sixth door reveals a still lake of tears, hushed and desolate; and behind the seventh, against Bluebeard’s pleading, Judith finds his three former wives, not dead but enshrined, and must take her place among them. Listen for the heartbreaking close, as Bluebeard is left utterly alone and the music sinks back into the darkness from which it came, the castle’s brief light extinguished forever.