Inside Bluebeard's Castle: Music and Drama in Bela Bartok's Opera (review)

Inside Bluebeard's Castle: Music and Drama in Béla Bartók's Opera. By Carl S. Leafstedt. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [viii, 246 p. ISBN 0-19-510999-6. $45.]

In 1440, Gilles de Laval, Baron of Rais, was burned alive for crimes including the sodomization and murder of some 140 children. De Laval is often considered the historical Bluebeard, the grisly protagonist of the tale in which a man kills a succession of wives for looking into a forbidden room. First published by Charles Perrault in 1697, the story has a long history in musical theater, most memorably as the subject of Béla Bartók's only opera, Bluebeard's Castle. As Carl Leafstedt points out in his laudable study of the opera, "Bluebeard" belongs to a category of folktales known as "forbidden-chamber" stories, which can be found in diverse cultures the world over. (Bartók himself knew the closely related Hungarian folk ballad "Anna Molnár" from his folk-song collecting expeditions.) The tricky task for a musicologist writing on Bluebeard's Castle is to foster a multivalent interpretation in keeping with the spirit of the myth at the opera's core while stripping away the layers of hearsay and lore that have come to obscure important facts about its composition and early history.

Leafstedt does an admirable job with both tasks in a multifaceted book, which, in an apparent reference to the structure of the opera (an introduction and seven scenes corresponding to the castle's seven locked doors), consists of an introduction and seven chapters. The chapters are grouped into three parts. Part 1, "Bartók, Balázs, and the Creation of a Modern Hungarian Opera," traces the history of Béla Balázs's Bluebeard, the play Bartók adapted (with few changes) for his opera, and the relationship between composer and playwright. Part 2, "Music and Drama in Bluebeard's Castle," offers an analysis of each scene of the opera as we know it from the 1917 score, as well as a discussion of the version Bartók completed in 1911. Part 3, "Contextual Studies," presents the history of the Bluebeard myth and considers the importance of Balázs's choice of the name Judith for the heroine of the play.

Leafstedt is a good digger; his demythologizing of Bluebeard's Castle is the result of thorough research. For example, the opera's lack of success in two competitions (one sponsored by a Budapest social club called the Lipótvárosi Casino in 1911, the other by Bartók's sometime publisher Rózsavölgyi in 1912) has generally been taken to signify an unwillingness of the Hungarian musical establishment to accept Bartók's music. Leafstedt's careful reading of the rules of the Rózsavölgyi competition and other surviving documents strongly suggests, however, that the opera was rejected from at least one of the competitions solely on the basis of its libretto. The dramaturges who judged the work untheatrical never forwarded the score to Rózsavölgyi's music jury.

More important for our understanding of the opera is the sleuthing Leafstedt has done on Balázs's literary influences. It is well known that the literary style of Bluebeard owes a great deal to the work of Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck. Leafstedt, however, is the first to argue that Balázs's symbolism differs from Maeterlinck's in ways that suggest the influence of German playwright Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863), the subject of Balázs's doctoral dissertation. In particular, Leafstedt singles out Hebbel's concept of "tragic guilt," the notion that the exertion of individual will disrupts the balance of the world, and though innocent of this disruption, the individual must be punished by being subsumed into the whole. This concept may well lie behind Balázs's treatment of Judith. For, instead of...