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, Giuditta, 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.
(In Perreault's original version, Bluebeard hands her the key, which, via counter-suggestion, implicates his desire that she'll grow the desire to open the hidden chamber just by hearing, "Don't open the seventh chamber").
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.
Comar's last wife was Santa Trifina, whose son kills Commar (counterpart: MARCO).
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.
Other stories about De Rais were soon in circulation,
however.
We know him to have been estranged from his wife, Caterina, 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.
Or perhaps he dyed it.
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" (shall we call it), 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 male.
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.
Composers as well as writers have also been drawn to the
legend.
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-Maeterlinck'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 (an Italian) to procure him a new wife and is saddled with
a ditsy shepherdess named Boulotte, who is generous with her favours.
In fact she is nymphomaniac.
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 Maurizio 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.
He wanted the composer to be GRIEG, but he said, "No way. The libretto sucks!"
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 Arianna, 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 Arianna
continues to urge their freedom, the wives all elect to remain with their
torturer.
Arianna'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.
(A previous wife was named Melisenda).
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 to liberate BETULLIA.
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 Europe alone in the
coming year, is testament to its pervasive power and the timelessness of its
essential mysteries.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
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