locking up being
by Douglas Messerli
Béla
Balázs (libretto, based on a story by Charles Perreault), Béla Bartók (music) Bluebeard’s Castle / LAOpera, Los
Angeles, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the production I attended was a matinee on
November 2, 2014
Béla
Bartók’s quite terrifying opera of 1911, Bluebeard’s
Castle, steals from elements of the original Charles Perreault story, but
expands the work into a psycho-dramatic work that shows the influence of Freud,
whose writings on William Jensen’s novel Gradiva,
a work which has links to the Bartok work in the sexual obsessions of its hero,
had just recently been published in 1906-1909.
Indeed, one might make interesting
parallels between the Jensen and Bartok works in how Judith (Claudia Mahnke),
recently married to Bluebeard (Robert Hayward) struggles throughout this short
opera to cure him, in the latter case by attempting to open up all the seven
rooms of his castle which he has purposely locked. The rooms are, obviously,
different aspects of himself, elements of his past that he no longer wishes to
consciously admit in his present life. Her hope is that by opening each of
these rooms, she will bring light into Bluebeard’s castle once again, while
psychologically curing him of his inability to face the past errors of his
ways.
Yet librettist Béla Balázs makes his
story more complex by suggesting that Judith is far more than a naïve do-gooder.
In terms of this version of the story, Judith has been “raped,” carried off by
Bluebeard unwillingly from her family, perhaps when she has already been
promised to another man. Moreover, she has heard rumors of Bluebeard, including
the suggestion that he has murdered his former wives. Despite these facts,
however, she declares that she loves him and that her intentions are all
directed at changing his life for the better.
Even if we ignore the fact that as a “victim” she parallels the behavior
of what we today describe as individuals suffering from the “Stockholm
Syndrome,” wherein the captive bonds with the captor, we cannot ignore that
Judith’s quite obviously tortured love of Bluebeard—quite brilliantly choreographed
under Barrie Kosky’s direction as a kind of brutal dance in which the characters
pull and push against one another, falling, embracing and drawing one another
in opposite directions that reminds me of figures in certain Fassbinder films
or American artist Robert Longo’s paintings of the late 1970s and 1980s—is
inevitably fraught with emotional suffering. Although it might be difficult to
pin down Bluebeard’s major psychosis, he is most certainly a kind of
misogynist, both in his sexual objectification of women and in his violence
against them. He may also be a closet homosexual—he lives, after all, in a
completely closeted world—which also helps to explain Judith’s determination to
“help” him. We all know of women and men who believe that can cure what they
perceive as sexual aberrations in the opposite sex, one of the most noted
examples in literature being Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, who
unintentionally helped to cause the suicide of her youthful suitor. 
Going room by room throughout his castle,
demanding the keys to his empire which he reluctantly but also somewhat
willingly awards her, she uncovers his terrible history that includes torture,
violence, great wealth, but also a secret garden, other vast land-holdings, and
a lake—all built upon the blood and tears of those who have come before. Indeed
every surface of Bluebeard’s castle is described as oozing water and blood.
While in most productions of this opera
the various contents of the six rooms are expressed with corresponding colors—red,
yellow, golden, blue-green, white and black—Kosky has chosen to forego these
for what seem to me as a few cheap tricks such as vines being pulled from the
sleeves of inexplicable male alter-egos of Bluebeard (perhaps also suggesting
Bluebeard’s male companions) for the garden scene and hands full of tinsel
tossed to suggest Judith’s discovery of Bluebeard’s treasury. I have no
difficulty with the round, moon-like sphere upon which the actors circle in
their door-opening treks; the director has presented us with a kind of planetary
manifestation that immediately tells us that this tale takes place outside of
time and space. But the colors might have helped in clarifying what Judith
actually witnesses, while the occasional props Kosky chooses to present are
simply distracting.
The colors also seem to me to be of importance because they represent a
kind of progression of tonal hues we might associate with the morning, noon,
evening, and night which are emphatically reiterated by the three former wives
Judith discovers in the seventh room.
Each is linked up by Bluebeard as
representing the time in which he first met them, and, accordingly, is
associated with the passage of day from sunrise to sunset. In short, in marrying
and then locking away these three women, allowing Bluebeard to gradually close
himself off from any daylight routine in
his determination to “kill time.” If he now lives in the shadow of time, his
only hope of putting an end to it all is to also lock up the night, which he
suddenly reveals is the modality he associates with Judith. Ironically, despite
her attempts to bring light into Bluebeard’s life, she has actually brought him
the one missing element he needs to bring an end to his existence, the pitch
black of midnight. By locking her up as well, he locks away being itself.
Here, once more, Kosky simply fails to
comprehend the story in his directorial decision to keep the stage lit while
the curtain falls. It seems to me that the moment Bluebeard has revealed Judith’s
role, the moon-light orb upon should suddenly be plunged into darkness. But
this is another minor flaw in an otherwise outstanding production of a work
that should be performed far more often.
Los Angeles,
November 4, 2014
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