The Rite of Spring + Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in Concert

’Are you frightened?’ Newlywed Judith leaves her family and returns to her husband Bluebeard’s castle. Though he instructs her not to open the doors to his castle, she is insistent. The only opera by Béla Bartók, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, written in 1911, remains a defining work of the 20th century, and of Hungarian musical history. The tale of Bluebeard dates back as early as 1697, the character found in La Barbe bleue, a story in Charles Perrault’s collection Histoires et contes du temps passé avec des moralités. Belgian playwright Maurice Maeter­linck’s drama Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1901) – later adapted into an opera by Paul Dukas – iterates on the tale. But it was Bartók’s work that brought the eerie psychological drama to the public eye. 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 work with its unmistakable cultural identity.