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Notes from Windy
Mountain |
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3/30/08 |
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Transcending the Given: Bluebeard and his Castle |
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While
there are many versions of the story, (some have Bluebeard charismatic and
charming, a diplomatic Don Juan), the man generally proves himself a
cold-blooded killer, murdering his wives and disposing of them in graphic,
often creative ways. In all the tales, his latest potential victim is a
young and naďve girl whom he takes off to his dark and remote castle. In
the version that I knew, Bluebeard was not a charmer, was disliked by the
girl’s parents, and when she eloped, her father and brother took arms
and rode after them, in the end saving her from certain death. Why
don’t I like this story? Apart from the warning to avoid guys with bad
reputations, I do not find any great depth to the tale, nor much dimension
in the two main characters. The young girl is the next victim, Bluebeard a
sinister villain. The chief attraction is suspense. The
Hungarian composer Béla Bartók took this story and turned it into a
study of a young woman and her complex motives for playing with fire. The
victim is Bluebeard, not her. The work is the opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. How
is the story transformed? What gives extra dimension to the story itself,
to the two characters in it? And what makes it high fantasy in the best
and truest sense? It starts out in the usual way. At curtain rise,
Bluebeard enters his fortress with Judith. The door slams shut behind
them, cutting out the daylight, and the locks grind into place. It
soon becomes apparent, however, that the castle is no literal fortress but
a metaphor representing the man's psyche and in short order this rich and
ruthless and powerful man is under siege. Judith at first comes across as a wide-eyed innocent, simply wishing to open up the castle to let in daylight and fresh air. Until she sees a row of seven doors, all locked. Lightly at first, Judith asks to open them. Bluebeard resists, then gives in. As he does so, there comes a chilling sound, a breath, a sigh, a moan: from the castle itself. As she enters each space, Bluebeard asks not "What do you think?" but "What do you see?" a strange question until you realize that she is not looking into real, physical space but into Bluebeard's mind. The first door leads into his torture chamber (his cruelty). The second gives onto his armory (his ruthlessness, his will to win at any cost). The third to his treasury, (his love of wealth and power). The fourth to his garden, a splendid place all for show. The fifth door opens onto a high place from which she can overlook his vast realm of meadows and mountains and rivers and woods. At first, she is enchanted, even overwhelmed by these spaces—until she sees that each is tinged blood. Not the one behind the sixth door, though. That hides a cavern housing a lake whose water is grey, unreflecting, and emitting eerie light. When she asks what it is, he merely says over and over, "Tears, Judith, tears, tears." Expressing remorse for past actions, maybe, or grief for his wives. In Hungarian, it is "Gurnyac, Judith, gurnyac, gurnyac," and that is what I named Torc's bloody kingdom in The Atheling.
One
after another the reasons come for her desire to pick him apart: she loves
him, wants to help him, wants to lift the darkness off him, is plain
curious, wants to make a change in his life. She's coy, playful,
insistent, coquettish. But as each door opens, she gets more demanding. When
she asks him to open the final door, he balks, and now the claws come out.
Gone is the girlish laughter and coy manner. Her voice is harsh, her face
is hard. She demands angrily that he open it. She knows his secret, she
says, everyone does. The whole countryside is rife with rumor that he
murders his wives—she
locked in there with him! Bluebeard
listens impassively, then all at once, he is resigned. He opens the door
and tells her to look inside. Beyond stand his three former wives alive,
resplendent—and consigned to their places forever. The first, he tells
her, came to him at dawn. The second at noon. The third at evening. And
she, Judith, came in the starry night. Of all his wives, he tells her, she
was the best. And she will rule them all. He crowns her with robe and
coronet and shuts the door on her forever. Neither
character is particularly savory. Bluebeard’s past is dark. Today he'd
be a business baron, an investor or manufacturer making a fortune off
others’ backs. Foreign invasion, empire, occupation, international
profiteering: everybody's had a go at some time or other and it still goes
on, not too far removed from how Bluebeard might have made his pile.
And Judith is no more likeable. She ran out on a secure, loving family and
a fiancé, eloping with a highly questionable man of whom her family did
not approve for all his wealth and power, and knowing full well the
danger. She lost him, of course, taking up her place in the lineup of past
loves. This
is high fantasy at its best, created by one of the finest composers of the
twentieth century, an opera delivering as bonus fifty-some minutes
of riveting sound! For follow-up on Bluebeard, try http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_v108/ai_20438234
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