A Double Cautionary Tale: Bela Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle
I was recently talking to a friend about my newfound love of opera, and he said to me, “aren’t all operas basically overwrought love stories?” I bristled a little at “overwrought,” but in the moment, I said yes. And for a lot of operas, this is true. Think of Carmen, about Don José’s love for the gypsy and her more complicated feelings toward him, or Aida, about the forbidden love between an Egyptian warrior and a captive Ethiopian princess. But, there are always exceptions, and there are many operas whose plots don’t fit neatly the contours of a love story at all.
One such opera is Bluebeard’s Castle, Bela Bartok’s only opera, composed in 1911 and revised in 1912, 1918, and 1921. The story, based on a French fairy tale by Charles Perrault, concerns Duke Bluebeard and his new, young wife Judith. Rumors have been swirling around the mysterious Duke, all concerning one question: what has happened to his previous wives? If the rumors are true, he has murdered them all. Nevertheless, Judith has married him. Newly arrived at his dark and gloomy castle, she notices seven closed and locked doors, and asks him to open them all. Bluebeard is reluctant at first, but eventually all the doors are opened, revealing sights that are awe-inspiring, terrifying, or both.
The drama — concentrated in a one-hour act, unlike most other operas, and following a brief prologue — begins with Judith and Bluebeard’s arrival at the castle. The first room, the antechamber containing the seven doors, is a circular, gothic hall which characters reach via a descending staircase (and the music opens on a descent). Little, if any light reaches here, suggesting a sense of being trapped underground. Bartok’s music in turn conveys a cyclical, static sense of being trapped in a place that seems to exist outside of space and time. Having followed Bluebeard down the stairs, Judith notes how cold, dark and gloomy it is, and vows to be the bearer of light and warmth. It is at this point that she notices seven closed and locked doors, and asks Bluebeard to open them all.
The first few doors reveal spaces that are not too surprising to find in a castle. Behind the first, Judith finds Bluebeard’s torture chamber, and behind the second, his armory. The third door reveals his treasury, containing magnificent jewels, and the fourth reveals a garden, with tall flowers more beautiful than she has ever seen. The treasury, the garden — all this, Bluebeard says, is for her. And, light has started to enter the castle. As each door is opened, a different colored beam of light fills the stage, each new beam intersecting with the others on the stage floor. But something is not quite right. Wasn’t that blood covering the walls of the torture chamber and on the tips of his spears, and also on the jewels and dripped on the rose petals? “Who has bled to feed your garden?” she asks him, disconcerted. But his only answer is “Ask me no questions.”
It is at the fifth door that the opera reaches its turning point. Judith opens the door to reveal Bluebeard’s kingdom in all its splendor. The moment is underlined by a striking set of repeated chords, to which the music had been building and which accent Bluebeard’s comments on what Judith has found, while she replies awestruck in the silent spaces. All this, Bluebeard promises again, is to be hers. Yet again, though, Judith notices something is off: what do the blood-red shadows in the distance portend? And again, Bluebeard ignores the question.
Judith persists in her demands, but soon comes to regret her choice. Behind the sixth door is a lake of tears (but whose?), and behind the seventh, Bluebeard’s three previous wives, living (so Judith comments), but ghostly and silent. Bluebeard describes to Judith how and when he found each of the three: one at morning, one at noon, and one in the evening. As the wives return back through the door, he pauses, and turns to Judith to continue the sequence: “the fourth, I found at night…” as Judith protests, “no more…” But her protests are in vain, and she follows her predecessors through the seventh door, leaving Bluebeard alone onstage. “Now” he says “all shall be darkness… darkness… darkness…” as the stage darkens and the music plays out quietly, repeating a phrase similar to what we heard at the beginning. The opera could almost begin again.
Not the happiest of endings. True, opera as a genre isn’t really known for happy endings, but even this seems particularly dark, leaving the viewer with more questions than answers. Why does Judith marry Bluebeard? Does she really see blood behind the first four doors, or is she only seeing what she wanted to see or suspected she would see? Who were Bluebeard’s previous wives? How and why does he keep them in a ghostly, silent state? But the central question, the one that drives the action of the drama, is this: why does Judith persist in her request, then demand, to open all the doors?
Of course, if she didn’t, we’d have no opera, but let’s go beyond that. And to do so, let’s go back to the very beginning of the opera, before the action even starts. “Once upon a time,” the prologue begins, alerting us that we have entered the realm of “ancient fable,” of metaphor and myth, necessitating a shift in our own way of thinking about what is about to unfold on the stage in front of us. Taking the step into metaphor a even further, the prologue then asks us to consider: “Where did this happen? Outside or within? … Where is the stage? Outside or within?” That the opera opens with this question indicates the latter as more than a distinct possibility.
If we accept that we are to think of the piece in more metaphorical terms, and consider the drama as something interior, then the doors themselves, Judith’s demand that they be opened, and Bluebeard’s reluctance to do so, make more sense. These are, after all, doors within his castle. The drama takes place wholly on his terrain, both literally and now metaphorically and psychologically. From Judith’s perspective, wanting the doors open is a reasonable request, taking their opening to be a metaphorical device for Judith’s ability to know him better. One would think this level of metaphorical openness would be one of the elements necessary for making a marriage work. Bluebeard asks Judith why she is so intent on opening the doors, and her answer always is, “because I love you.”
So why does it end so badly for her? When they first arrive at the castle, we sense an unhealthy level of attachment to Bluebeard, a willingness to sacrifice too much for him. “If you reject me and drive me out,” she says as soon after entering the castle, “I’ll never leave you. I’ll perish on your icy step,” she says early on. We also know that Judith left her family’s castle quite suddenly and married him against your family’s wishes. Even when Bluebeard seems to give her an opportunity to turn back — wouldn’t she be happier in her family’s light, glittering castle? — she says no: “Never! Never! … I no longer crave for daylight.”
That isn’t true at all, of course. One of the first things she notices about the castle is its darkness, and the first reason she gives for wanting to open the doors is to let in more light — to change the castle and by metaphorical extension, to change him. Bluebeard’s response to her observation about the darkness is essentially: no, there is never any light. Is the opera then, presenting us a cautionary tale of an unhealthy devotion, of a naive girl fallen too quickly and too strongly attached to the wrong man who also, it turns out, is actually a monster?
Perhaps, though we should be careful of casting it in such stark terms and making Judith wholly meek and innocent, a victim of her own naivety, especially if we consider the action from Bluebeard’s perspective. While he is monstrous, the opera does allow for other interpretations, or at least, additional dimensions to his character. Not that I am here to defend wife-killing, or wife-prisoner-keeping, but remember, we are dealing with myth here, with metaphor rather than literality. He did offer her the opportunity to turn back, for example, and we do get a sense of Judith as an intruder, coming through heedlessly and demanding that the doors be opened — to see more, to know more. Though Bluebeard gives her permission to open them, he urges her to go with caution, which she sometimes seems to heed but more often does not. She hammers on the first door, and in every case, it is she who does the opening. She does not, for example, stand by and allow him to open one. After opening each door, she demands the key to open the next one.
The fifth door presents the strongest case for Bluebeard. At this point, Judith and Bluebeard undergo a role reversal of sorts. Whereas the opera began with Judith asserting her devotion to Bluebeard, now it is Bluebeard who is begging for Judith’s love. He has shown her what she wanted to see. He has allowed light to come into the castle, and affirmed that the riches and wonders she has seen will be hers. Now, he is at his most vulnerable point yet, waiting for Judith to bestow her love on him. Yet she is unmoved, and persists in her original request: the doors must all be opened. He grants her the sixth key, though implores her not to use it. The tone of the music shifts dramatically here, from the triumph and majesty of Bluebeard’s dukedom to the agitation of their argument over the next door to something mysterious and sad, fitting for the lake of tears.
Judith, however, will not be satisfied until all the doors are open. She asks if he loves her, and who he loved before her. More than once she demands him to “tell [her] truly.” Bluebeard does not answer at first, and won’t give her the key, prompting Judith to unleash a flood of accusations: “I have guessed your secret, Bluebeard… all your former wives have suffered, suffered murder brutal, bloody!” She calls the rumors “truthful, truthful!” then declares she must prove them, “every detail,” demanding to “open the last of your doorways.”
The music builds and builds its tension, growing even more agitated than during their previous argument, until Bluebeard hands her the key, telling her to go ahead. “All my former wives await thee.” Judith does not take the key from his hand right away. Out of fear? Certainly that is part of it. She has just accused him of murdering his wives, and he has given her the key to go and see them. But the music, moments ago agitated with Judith’s accusations, conveys less terror — which might have been expected in a more straightforward tale — and more tragedy. What is the tragic element the music is meant to underscore? The sealing of Judith’s fate? That Judith’s sense of the truth, in which she was just so confident, is about to be unraveled? Could it also be resignation on the part of Bluebeard, a defeat that Judith’s continued demands to see more and know more have brought about? The music’s unexpected mood invites all those possibilities, complicating a straightforward, black-and-white interpretation.
In the end, Judith follows the other wives into a kind of deathless, liminal state, certainly a tragic end, but one that was also tragically inevitable. As the seventh door opens, the fifth and sixth doors swing back shut on their own, and as the third wife returns through the seventh door, the fourth door closes, suggesting this sense of inevitability. Judith’s fate was sealed the minute she set foot over the castle threshold. Bluebeard’s fate is little better, if better deserved. Engulfed in darkness as he repeats the very word, we can assume he won’t emerge from his castle again. Judith, as the bride of night, completes the quadrumvirate.
So with what does all this leave us? A love story gone wrong, depicting a naive girl who seals her fate in the clutches of a monster? Yes, but there is more to it than that. At its core, the opera is really depicting something more universal, that there are elements of ourselves that are fundamentally inaccessible to others, and warns against the consequences both of trying to be let in and of letting someone else in. Fundamentally, it is a cautionary tale, but from both Judith and Bluebeard’s perspectives, a warning against both wanting to see too much into someone — to probe too deeply — and against allowing too much to be seen and probed. We may not like what we find in others, or what the process reveals about ourselves.
