The 2006 season from Washington National Opera finally opened Saturday night with an opera that I was thrilled to see and hear live, Béla Bartók‘s A Kékszakállú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, premiered at the Budapest Opera in 1918). The Ambassador of Hungary, András Simonyi — fresh from a hilarious appearance on the Colbert Report — was so happy that he helped host the opening night WNO gala in honor of the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 125th anniversary of Bartók’s birth.
The Hungarian libretto by Béla Balázs tells a bloody, psychological story based on Charles Perrault’s Conte de Barbe Bleue (1695). Perrault took the story from the actual life of a Renaissance French serial killer named Gilles de Rais. Bartók and Balázs focused the story on one of the wives whom Bluebeard murdered, here named Judith. The operatic version is as much about Judith’s attempt to understand her new husband’s evil nature, casting light into all the dark corners of his blood-stained castle, as it is about her inevitable murder.
For the WNO’s first performance of this opera in its history, it revived the production created by William Friedkin at Los Angeles Opera in 2002. As someone who loves The Exorcist, which Friedkin directed, I was glad to see some references to that movie. Like Fr. Karras in The Exorcist, Bluebeard is doubled by a dark-clothed shadow figure with a pasty white face, supernumerary Neno Pervan, an actor from Sarajevo whose first credit was in Friedkin’s 2003 film The Hunted. He speaks the Prologue while suspended above the stage among clouds, dropping down the red scarf that Bluebeard will use later to strangle Judith (the murder is not as explicit in the libretto). Other than a few mildly scary images, however, like the projected backdrops of skulls and the beautiful flying ghosts of Bluebeard’s dead wives, controlled by puppeteers (designed by Michael Curry), Friedkin has opted for a fairly bloodless production (was that one of Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings behind the fourth door?), I am sorry to report.
