Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

The story of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Judith leaves her family and returns to her new husband Bluebeard’s castle. Though he instructs her not to open the castle doors, she is insistent. The first door reveals a torture chamber, its walls stained with blood. Though disturbed, Judith – against Bluebeard’s wishes – persists. Each door she opens further reveals her husband’s past. At the seventh door, Judith discovers Bluebeard’s three former wives, all murdered. Bluebeard weighs Judith down with jewels, a crown and a cloak, and she enters the seventh chamber. The door closes behind her, and Bluebeard is left alone.

French roots, Hungarian identity

Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, written in 1911, remains a defining work of the 20th century, and of Hungarian musical history. The origin of Bartók’s Bluebeard dates back as early as 1697, the character found in La Barbe bleue, a story in Charles Perrault’s collection of fairy tales Histoires et contes du temps passé avec des moralités (Stories or Tales from Past Times, with Morals). Among the collection are popular favourites The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella, with Bluebeard recounting the tale of a wealthy and powerful nobleman who has been married six times, and whose six young, and beautiful, wives have each mysteriously vanished.

Belgian playwright Maurice Maeter­linck’s drama Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1901) – later adapted into an opera by French composer Paul Dukas – iterates on the tale. 11 years after the premiere of Dukas’s opera, which opened at the Opéra-Comique in 1907, Bartók’s Bluebeard debuted in Budapest. Though initially rejected (quite literally from a national competition in the composer’s native Hungary), the work – Bartók’s only opera – has since established itself as a contemporary masterpiece, its eerie psychological drama thrilling audiences time and time again. Like fellow Slavic composer Leoš Janáček, Bartók allows the text – by Béla Balázs – to define the music of Bluebeard, flexible rhythms of speech paired with the sounds of traditional Hungarian folk music, collected and studied meticulously by the composer, imbuing the opera with its unmistakable cultural identity.