1. First door: Bluebeard’s torture chamber
2. Second door: the armoury
3. Third door: the treasury
4. Fourth door: the garden
5. Fifth door: Bluebeard’s vast and beautiful domains
6. Sixth door: the lake of tears
7. Seventh door: Bluebeard’s wives

The Genesis of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Béla Bartók embarked on this his first stage work in 1911, aged 30. He completed it in about seven months. His motivation was a competition for one-act operas sponsored by his publisher Rózsavölgyi. His librettist was the poet and aesthetician Béla Balázs. Balázs had drafted his short play Duke Bluebeard’s Castle during 1908-10. He offered it as a libretto to both Bartók and their mutual friend Zoltán Kodály. The subject held no appeal for Kodály, but Bartók was immediately fascinated – perhaps, as conductor István Kertész suggested, because he recognized himself in the secretive, melancholy Duke Bluebeard.

Balázs’s chief inspiration was Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1899 play Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, which also inspired Paul Dukas’ only opera. This was loosely based on Charles Perrault’s bloodthirsty fairytale of 1697 Barbe-Bleue. However, while Maeterlinck portrayed Ariane as a reluctant bride and focused on her escape from Bluebeard’s castle, Balázs imagined his Judith and Bluebeard as a potentially loving couple destroyed by Judith’s curiosity. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is one of several early 20th-century operas – including Pelléas et Mélisande, Rusalka and Die Frau ohne Schatten – that use fairytales to explore the human psyche. Balázs’s poetic imagery, and his focus on emotion rather than action, reflect his interest in the Symbolist and Expressionist movements.

To Bartók’s disappointment, the Rózsavölgyi Competition jurors rejected his opera as too static for the stage. It was only following the success of Bartók and Balázs’s 1917 ballet The Wooden Prince, and many revisions to the score, that Duke Bluebeard’s Castle finally received its premiere at the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest on 24 May 1918.

The Story
Duke Bluebeard and his bride Judith arrive at his castle. Judith assures Bluebeard that she does not regret abandoning her family and fiancé. However, the damp, dark hall with its seven locked doors makes her uneasy. She demands the doors be opened to let in light. Bluebeard is reluctant but allows Judith to unlock the first door. It reveals a bloody torture chamber. Judith is frightened but presses on to unlock the second door. She discovers an armoury full of blood-stained weapons.

Bluebeard gives Judith the keys to the next three doors. When she opens them, she sees in turn a splendid treasure-house, a beautiful garden and a magnificent view over Bluebeard’s vast kingdom. Bluebeard urges her to enjoy his wealth, which is hers too. But Judith remains anxious: there is blood on the jewels, the flowers weep blood as she picks them and over the landscape blood-red clouds gather. To Bluebeard’s dismay she insists on unlocking the sixth door. Behind it is a still, silvery lake. Bluebeard tells her it is made of tears.

Bluebeard begs Judith to kiss him and love him unquestioningly. The seventh door must stay forever locked. Judith yields briefly before asking Bluebeard about his past wives: does their blood stain the jewels and the flowers, was the lake made from their tears and are their dead bodies behind the seventh door? She orders Bluebeard to open it.

Three women dressed in beautiful robes, crowns and jewels emerge. Bluebeard praises them as his wives of dawn, midday and evening. Despite Judith’s entreaties, he hails her as his wife of night and clothes her in her own magnificent robe, crown and jewels. Judith silently follows the other wives through the seventh door, her head bowed by the weight of her crown. Alone, Bluebeard declares that in his castle night will now reign forever.

The Music of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
The music of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is unmistakeably Hungarian. Just as Janáček evoked Czech speech rhythms in his operas, Bartók captures the rhythms of Hungarian speech through his syllabic text-setting. His distinctive harmonic language – which includes pentatonic, modal and whole-tone elements – reflects his fascination with Hungarian folk music, as does the prominence he gives to woodwind instruments and percussion. Folk traditions also influenced Balázs, whose libretto follows the rhythmic structure of ancient Hungarian folk ballads. The opera’s spoken prologue, often omitted, employs the Hungarian tradition whereby ‘the bard’ introduces his story.

While Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is in effect a sung play – there are no songs or arias, and the vocal style remains syllabic throughout – each character’s part is highly individual. Bluebeard’s plain, declamatory style conveys both his noble dignity and his reserve. Judith’s more restless and wide-ranging part – including a climactic high C as she opens the fifth door – reveals her as extrovert and volatile.

Most striking is Bartók’s orchestral writing. As in a tone poem, the orchestra illustrates the story’s visual, narrative and emotive elements. Among many effects are the high woodwind and xylophone for the torture chamber, the shimmering harp, celeste and solo violins for the treasure-house, flute birdsong for the secret garden and a threnody for low strings and woodwind as Bluebeard greets his wives. Most memorable is the chant-like melody for full orchestra (including organ in the original orchestration) as Judith opens the fifth door: a moment of happiness before the ensuing tragedy.

Growing Acclaim
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was slow to attract widespread attention, not least because Balázs’s exile in 1919 for engaging in Communist activities meant the opera was banned in Hungary until 1936. However, from the 1950s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle has received a steadily growing number of performances, both on stage and in the concert hall. It has also been recorded more than twenty-five times, and filmed twice: in 1963 by Michael Powell, and in 1988 for BBC television by Leslie Megahey. In the past two years, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle has been performed by more than 25 international opera companies – including in four different productions in 2018 at Hungarian State Opera to mark the opera’s centenary, and in 2020 in a feminist production by Katie Mitchell for Bavarian State Opera that had Judith murder Bluebeard. In 2018 Eberhard Kloke created an alternative chamber version of the score, reducing Bartók’s large orchestra to some thirty players while maintaining the composer’s unique sound world: this is the version performed by the LSO.

_{Programme note by Kate Hopkins}