About the work
Béla Bartók's only opera „Bluebeard's Castle" was premiered in Budapest in 1918 — seven years after composition (1911), once Bartók had finally pushed through the performance despite repeated refusals by Hungarian opera houses. The one-act work is based on Béla Balázs's libretto, which reinterprets the Charles Perrault legend of the bloodthirsty wife-murderer Bluebeard in symbolic-psychological terms.
Plot
In Bluebeard's pitch-dark castle Judith arrives, just married to him. She has left her family and home to follow him. In the castle hall she discovers seven locked doors. She demands they be opened — Bluebeard warns but gives her each key. First door: torture chamber (streaming red light, blood). Second: armoury. Third: treasury. Fourth: secret garden — all the flowers are blood-spattered. Fifth: Bluebeard's domain — radiantly bright, full of mountains and clouds — but the sun is covered with blood. Judith insists on the last two doors, though Bluebeard begs her to stop. Sixth: a lake of tears, silent. Seventh: here are Bluebeard's three earlier wives — adorned, alive, in royal dignity. Judith recognises her fate: she will be the fourth. She is dressed with crown and mantle, the other three lead her in, the door closes. Bluebeard is left alone in the darkness: „And now there will always be night."
Cultural significance
Bluebeard's Castle is Bartók's sole contribution to operatic history and is considered one of the most important one-act stage works of the twentieth century. The psychoanalytic reading — Bluebeard as a man with unprocessed traumas, Judith as the woman who wants to know everything — became dominant in the twentieth century. Bartók's Hungarian speech prosody, symbolist sonorities and the strict one-act architecture (the entire tension in 60 minutes) make the work a key position between late Romanticism and modernism. Performances often as a double bill with short modernist works. Productions by Robert Wilson (1989) and Krzysztof Warlikowski (2018) are modern highlights.