Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Op. 11, Sz. 48

Program notes

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.