This week we present Bela Bartok's one act opera, Bluebeard's Castle. Bartok wrote the opera in 1911 to a libretto by by Béla Balázs based on the Perrault fairy tale but more immediately on a play by Maeterlink. It is Bartok’s only opera.
The setting is a huge dark hall in a castle.
Judith has impulsively married Bluebeard against the wishes of her family. When they enter Bluebeard's dark castle, Judith wants to let light in. Bluebeard tells her not to open any of the seven doors in the castle, but she persists, and the opening of the seven doors determines the seven sections of the opera after the prologue. One by one the opened doors reveal a torture chamber, the armoury, the treasury, the garden, Bluebeard's kingdom, the lake of tears and finally, at the seventh door, his former wives appear. Bluebeard then weighs Judith down with jewels, a crown, and a cloak, and she enters the seventh chamber, the door closing behind her and her three predecessors. Bluebeard is left alone in darkness.
The opera is sung in the original Hungarian, with Sir Williard White as Bluebeard and Elena Zhidkova as Judith. Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra.
