The folk tale of Bluebeard is at least 400 years old. I am amazed it has persisted into the public consciousness to this day, as it is a very simple, and rather repulsive, story. It has been made into a movie many times over. There is not enough material to warrant the length of a feature film, so each version I have seen had to stretch the plot so thin as to nearly break.
Having now seen 1963’s adaptation Bluebeard’s Castle, I realized the perfect medium for this tale is opera. That medium serves simple ideas well as, at performances, I have found my mind wandering without ever losing the plot. It is almost like meditating.
It has only been in the past couple of decades that I have discovered how much I love opera. Still, it isn’t often I attend a performance, and my appreciation is limited to only a few works, all of which are the classics. I doubt anything will better the staging of Verdi’s The Masked Ball which was my introduction. Conversely, Nixon in China was so interminable that I suspect I may be in the audience watching it still, and I am only hallucinating everything I think has happened since then.
Though quite modern in all regards, Castle is far less like Nixon, in that it is as enjoyable as the works of Verdi. When I say “modern”, I mean that in relative terms, as it was composed by Bartók in 1911. Given the source material, it is no surprise it is a somber work, though only an hour long. The material is made even weightier through a libretto by Béla Balázs that makes this more of a journey into the title character’s psyche than a literal series of discoveries in the castle’s rooms.
This work was not well-received in its own time, and the brevity of the piece led to it being seldom performed in the decades that followed. So, this 1963 presentation for German television is the ideal way to stage this unusual opera that has only two performers.
Norman Foster assumes the title role, and his acting and bass-baritone are equally flawless. In his crude leather jacket (think early Vikings), I believed this was a man who could kill each woman he loves. Foster believed so much in the project that he was the one to initiate it. I feel a bit bad he was a producer, as all things opera famously fail to recoup their investment, and this was no exception.
But it is Ana Raquel Satre as Judith, his latest wife and consequent victim, who steals the show. That is surprising for a retelling of a story that is deeply misogynist at the surface. Despite her inevitable fate, it somehow feels she has achieved a strange sort of victory in the end. At least, she is the one who has dignity at the end, unlike Bluebeard, who has to live with his ever-deepening shame. Judith has succeeded in plumbing the psyche of her husband, even if it is to her detriment.
I wouldn’t call what happens to Judith a spoiler since, once again, this story is an archetype that is nearly half a millennium old. Very curiously, the BFI seems to think otherwise, as the first line in the accompanying booklet is a spoiler alert. If there is anybody willing to read this booklet who doesn’t know this story, then I have a great joke for them about a chicken and its motivations for traversing a motorway.
The design of this production is astonishing. Each of the castle’s rooms Judith enters are parts of her husband’s subconscious. The first couple are the most intimidating and these, one with torture devices and the next with weapons, reflect the superficial harsh demeanor he uses to keep her and others at arm’s length.
These objects are covered in blood, conveyed by bathing the set in red light, but she brings daylight, and corresponding yellow light, into these dark corners. And so she proceeds to additional rooms, though she seems pretty beaten down by the time there’s only a couple of rooms remaining. Her spirits may have been broken by his room full of original Star Wars action figures unopened in their original packaging. Sorry, I was just seeing if you were still paying attention.
Vivid colors are used throughout, and the visual elements are quite abstract. It is like one of those super-artsy classical album covers of the 1950’s was somehow rendered in three dimensions. Somehow, it was quite unnerving to see objects that just barely resemble the mutilated bodies of the past wives. The lighting on these is deep teal, only reinforcing the weirdness. But what I may have liked most in the visuals were the seven doorways that resembled nothing other than tombstones, and seriously ancient ones at that—they are covered in what appear to be runes.
It was no surprise to me this was directed by Michael Powell, who had previously brought the epic opera Tales of Hoffman to the big screen. While that film is astonishing, I will concede it is extremely long and not something I would recommend to those who are not familiar with opera. Instead, this hour-long work would be a far better introduction.
I watched Bluebeard’s Castle in an astonishingly pristine presentation on a BFI blu-ray. In addition to the film, there are a couple of welcome supplements, such as a documentary on the background of both the original work and Powell’s adaptation. There is an option to watch the film with the libretto sung in English. Though I welcome that option, I recommend watching this in the original German. I don’t know what it is, but opera always seems a bit daft when not sung in one of the older European languages. OK–Nixon in China would have been crap in any language, but it probably would have helped if I hadn’t known what they were singing about.
Dir: Michael Powell
Starring Norman Foster, Ana Raquel Satre
Watched on BFI blu-ray (region B)