Bluebeard      Kolos Kovats
Judith         Petra Lang
Narrator       Sandor Eles

Conductor      Bernard Haitink

London Philharmonic Orchestra

This performance of Bluebeard's Castle was part of the LPO's International
Series with the theme of folktales and fantasy. The traditional Bluebeard
story, as narrated by Perrault and also in Angela Carter's The bloody
chamber, explores the pleasures and dangers of a woman's sexual curiosity,
and has order restored when her family rescues her from the murderous
Bluebeard. A version a few years before Bartok's, Dukas' Bluebeard and
Ariane, had the woman as a feminist failing to persuade imprisoned wives to
free themselves from Bluebeard's bondage. Bartok's version, although
organized around the repetitions of the folk tale, with colours, times and
seasons, and tonalities in the music, building up a mythical cosmology, is
less about sex or gender than about the need for intimacy and the
impossibility of love. Judith opens the doors because loves Bluebeard and
wants to understand his past and inner life. She discovers not, as the
blood in the rooms suggests, simply that he is a murderer but that knowing
someone completely destroys your own separateness, which is essential to
desire and indeed to love.

Written in 1911, Bluebeard's Castle belongs in some ways in the same
emotional world as Rosenkavalier, where possession of the person you love
is impossible and you have to make do with nostalgia or illusion. But
Bluebeard evokes the inner life of its characters, a conjunction of desire
and pain, in a way which anticipates Freud's identification of the death
wish in Beyond the pleasure principle, published in 1920. And in its use of
mythic narrative to explore the emotional complexities of real-world
marriage it also anticipates Die Aegyptische Helena (though domesticated
Strauss has a happy ending).

Tonight's performance was beautiful and very sad. The singers, Petra Lang
and Kolos Kovats, were not quite big names, but they delivered the music
dramatically. Lang's voice sounded a bit strident on top and slightly soggy
in her lower range. But she gave an impassioned performance, and looked
shattered at the end. Kovats looks perfect for the part, lugubrious and
perhaps in pain, with a still, opaque presence. His booming voice made a
couple of small children giggle at the beginning, and certainly isn't
beautiful. But, like Lang, his performance worked, suggesting almost
unbearable sadness. (I saw Kovats sing Zaccaria in an extremely tatty
weekend matinee of Nabucco at the Erkel Theatre in Budapest about a year
ago. He had amazing dramatic and professional integrity then in spite of
everything.)  The singers stood on either side of Haitink, trying to
interact, suggesting two people struggling with forces they can't control.

Bernard Haitink and the LPO brought out all the detail of the music, making
the performance into something like a tone poem with voices. This is
probably about right: Bartok was inspired in part by Debussy's Pelleas. The
colours and moods of the seven doors were wonderfully clear, with an
overwhelming climax for the blissful fourth door, the garden, and a
melancholy, subdued dying away at the end as Bluebeard is left in darkness.