Barbablù: melodramma -- Maggio Fiorentino, 1938

Speranza

Bluebeard's Castle, Béla Bartók's only opera, opens with a narrator addressing the audience in the cryptic language that characterises the work as a whole. "The tale is old that shall be told," he informs us, "but where does it belong: within? Without?"
The opera, dependent for its effect on seeking solutions to mysteries, paradoxically refuses to answer its opening question and we are left wondering whether what we have witnessed is a genuine drama that mirrors action in the world "without" or whether the opera takes place "within" someone's psyche - and if so, whose?
There are only two characters, Bluebeard and his fourth wife, Judith, trapped in a psychological duel both tender and destructive. She demands the keys to the seven locked doors of his castle in order to bring light into his dark world. But the longed-for clarity brings with it a series of alarming, unanswered riddles. The contents of the first five rooms are inexplicably covered in blood, while the sixth contains a lake of someone's tears.
Judith finally gives in to terror, accusing Bluebeard of murdering his previous wives - only to find them alive behind the seventh door. In penetrating Bluebeard's ultimate secret, however, Judith has effectively destroyed them both, for she must now join his other wives in their imprisonment. The opera ends with Bluebeard irrevocably isolated as darkness descends once more.
Interpretations of the work are legion and conflicting. Many commentators have fallen back on Jungian language, seeing Bluebeard and Judith as representative of some internalised dialogue between Animus and Anima. The opera has also been read as a feminist parable of the attempted breakdown of masculine barriers, and interpreted, misogynistically, as the tale of a marriage eroded by the wife's invasive behaviour.
In the process, however, many critics have ignored the enigmatic quality of the Bluebird legend that raises more questions than any retelling can ever answer. There is no consensus even as to its origins, which have been traced to two very different sources, though both, significantly, have a serial killer at their centre.
The first deals with Comar, a spurious fifth-century Breton chieftain, who murdered his wives in turn, when each found evidence of what had happened to her predecessor. The second concerns the historical figure of Gilles de Rais, who was executed by the Inquisition in Nantes in October 1440. At his trial, De Rais stood accused of "heresy, sacrilege and offences against nature". During its course, however, he confessed to the sexual assault and murder of more than 140 children, crimes so obscene as to defy belief, though historians have also questioned - and continue to question - whether the charges were fabricated and his confession forced.
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Other stories about De Rais were soon in circulation, however. We know him to have been estranged from his wife, Catherine, but it was soon rumoured that he killed her when she found incriminating evidence in his torture chamber. Then there was the question of his beard, so black that in a certain light it looked blue. It was said that De Rais's actions appalled even the devil so that the latter marked him with the blue beard to distinguish him from all other men.
The rumours surrounding De Rais were doubtless the source of Charles Perrault's tale, published in 1695. Here we find the legend's essential elements: Bluebeard handing his keys to his wife with instructions that she may use all but one in his absence; her breaking of his prohibition only to discover his former wives' bodies; the bloodstained key that betrays her actions; and Bluebeard's determination to kill her as punishment for her curiosity.
Yet even in Perrault, nothing is quite what it seems, for anyone reading his original version, as opposed to bowdlerised children's editions, is in for a number of surprises. The gorefest of the wives' bodies has been a source of endless comment - though it's hard to escape the fact that Perrault, an ardent royalist, is also writing social satire at the expense of the bourgeoisie. Bluebeard is very much the self-made man, whose wealth is attractive to women, who otherwise find his lurid facial hair repellent.
Perrault provides a happy ending, in which the wife is saved by her two Musketeer brothers, who kill Bluebeard in turn. Now his widow, she inherits his entire estate, using the proceeds to acquire a more suitable husband - by implication a docile toy boy.
Perrault adds a scathing verse "moral" to the tale, saying that husbands mercifully don't treat their wives like that any more, and that nowadays it's hard to tell who in a married couple "is really master". In adding that "moral", Perrault ensured that his tale would be read in terms of sexual politics, and its multiple subsequent retellings veered from a number of misogynist appearances in German ballads to the recent feminist interpretations by Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood.
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Composers as well as writers have also been drawn to the legend, however, and Bluebeard's Castle, written in 1911, needs to be compared with the two rival versions it effectively eclipsed - Offenbach's Barbe-bleue of 1866, and Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue, dating from 1907. Though different in tone, they have a number of striking features in common. All three present Bluebeard as either sympathetic or glamorous, while in each opera his former wives, far from having been killed, are kept alive. Bluebeard's effective exoneration can be linked to contemporary thought on Gilles de Rais, interest in whom was undergoing an at times dubious revival.
Barbe-bleue was written in the wake of the historian Michelet's assertion that De Rais's only crime was practising alchemy, though Offenbach also, uniquely, expands on Perrault's emphasis on social comedy. The operetta is essentially a satire about male desire and female promiscuity. Bluebeard, a serial monogamist, sends his long-suffering alchemist Popolani to procure him a new wife and is saddled with a ditsy shepherdess named Boulotte, who is generous with her favours.
Bluebeard soon wants her to go the way of his other wives - namely into Popolani's laboratory, where they are kept in a permanent drugged stupor. Popolani rebels, however, wakes the former wives and brings them to the French court where they cause sexual mayhem. Barbe-bleue was once extremely popular in East Germany where its central images of revivification and liberation, one suspects, struck deep chords.
Liberation is also central to Dukas's version, though its attitudes are much more equivocal. The work's instigator was the playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote the libretto initially with no specific composer in mind in the hope that the resulting opera would become a vehicle for his wife, the mezzo-soprano Georgette Leblanc. De Rais, meanwhile, thanks to a dubious novelisation of his life by Joris-Karl Huysmans, had become a central figure in the Sadean sub-cults that were permeating the French symbolist movement, of whom Maeterlinck was an acknowledged leader. A whiff of sadomasochism consequently pervades his text.
Once Ariane, Bluebeard's new wife, has unlocked the forbidden door, she determines to rescue her predecessors with whom she has been immured in his dungeons. As soon as they have made their escape, however, they are confronted with Bluebeard once more, and though Ariane continues to urge their freedom, the wives all elect to remain with their torturer.
Ariane's name deliberately suggests the Greek Ariadne, who guided Theseus out of the labyrinth, only to find her dreams of freedom crushed by his subsequent betrayal. Maeterlinck's text has often been cited as providing Bartók's librettist Béla Balasz with many of the images for Bluebeard's Castle itself, but in choosing Judith as his heroine's name Balasz brings another set of associations into play, namely the biblical character of Judith, who seduced Holofernes before killing him. Judith was in the news at the time of the opera's creation: Klimt painted her as an erotic icon, while Freud argued that her murder of Holofernes was emblematic of the castration complex.
All this suggests an undertow of misogyny, and it is also to Balasz that we owe the idea that the opera takes place "within" Bluebeard's mind. "Into the castle, into his own soul, Bluebeard admits his beloved," he wrote. "When she walks in it, she walks in a living being." The libretto describes the opened doors, significantly, as wounds. Bartók's music, however, counters some of Balasz's ideas. "Within" and "without" are brought into alignment as Bartók probes the psyches of his protagonists and realises, with astonishing vividness, both the grim castle and the bloody landscapes beyond its doors.
The music suspends judgment on the characters, allowing us to sympathise where we please. There can be no one definitive interpretation of Bluebeard's Castle, because each time we hear it, we find our individual selves reflected back at us. That there are no less than five revivals of Bluebeard's Castle scheduled in the UK alone in the coming year, is testament to its pervasive power and the timelessness of its essential mysteries.