Marital mayhem

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is proving to be one of the enduring operas of the 20th century, despite its inconvenient length, or brevity, and thus the problem of what to pair it with for a full evening. I have always tended to think of it as a work of extreme orchestral sumptuousness, which provides a background to the ritual-cum-drama being worked out between Bluebeard and his latest wife Judit, ending, as it begins, in tears. Their mode of communication, Judit a kind of mythic nag, Bluebeard stonewalling, is almost elevated chanting, which gives an emotional distance to the incidents we watch, and means that, however much we register the pain on both sides, we aren’t much moved by it. That, anyway, is how I have usually responded.

But the wonderful revival of the Royal Opera’s production, which wasn’t at all wonderful when it was first mounted in 2002, has made me feel that it is a more immediate work in its impact, and a more subtle one, than I had realised. The impressive Russian conductor Kirill Petrenko clearly takes an individual view of the orchestration, making the normally rich sounds harsh and lean, and eschewing the gigantic climax when the Fifth Door opens and Bluebeard’s realms are revealed (in this production we see only a dirty moon anyway). What comes after can seem an anticlimax, but Petrenko holds a lot in reserve, so that the opening of the Seventh Door, and the emergence of Bluebeard’s three previous wives, is quite staggering in its tragic force. The truth that Bluebeard reveals is not that we must remain opaque to one another however hard we try to understand, but that we are all too comprehensible and what is discovered is unbearable — it doesn’t matter precisely what was hidden, when it comes to light it is robbed of its interest.