BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE, 2007

Bluebeard’s Castle is Bartók’s one and only opera house. It was written in 1911, on a libretto by Belá Balazs, after the tale by Perrault. This one diverted the original story towards something dark, massive, indistinct, which questions above all the question of the man and the woman in love. There is no action strictly speaking, but an essential experience, full of mystery and uncertainty, whose climate sometimes recalls that of Maeterlinck’s plays.
The work can also be read as a metaphor for human loneliness. Bartók had a craving for inner solitude himself and his absences could be frightening at times. Musically, the work demonstrates an impressive economy of means and efficiency. By its brevity, as by the concentration that it implements, it gives to each word, to each sentence, to each silence, a particular weight. Each “door” conceals a musical image with a very strong evocative power. At the same time, Bartók demonstrates great audacity in the orchestral sound, freed from any harmonic or melodic constraint. So much so that the work was initially deemed «impossible to perform» and, at first, refused by the Budapest Opera.

Ambitious, but also very sober, is the staging of Bluebeard’s Castle, making extensive use of video. During the prologue, images of Judith, the heroine, ascending and descending endless stairs as if in homage to the Dutch artist Escher and his vertiginous engravings, set a bluish tonality of nightmare. The fact that the images were filmed at the Palais Garnier places the spectators directly in the problematic of the work, that of a man who, walled in his solitude, punishes with death all those who want more than what they granted. Multiplied by the use of physical clones on set, the hide-and-seek part of Judith and Barbe-Bleue is directed with rigor and imagination by Alex Ollé and Carlos Padrissa, wedged like never before on the score: the curtains of rain or words fall like cleavers, beautiful escapes take shape in spirals.

Stage directors: Alex Ollé and Carlos Padrissa (La Fura dels Baus)
Video : Emmanuel Carlier

(more credits) : http://www.alexolle.com/work.php?id=46

Le Château de Barbe-Bleue / Bartók from Emmanuel Carlier on Vimeo.