The Impossibility of Loving
SIMON, JOHN
On Music THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LOVING By John Simon In the field of opera, I can find no more universal tragedy than Béla Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle to a libretto by Béla Balázs. The...
...In translation the opera loses too much, yet when prominent singers memorize the parts by rote their pronunciation usually sounds wrong even to non-Hungarian ears...
...Desmond Shaw-Taylor sums it up: "The fable can be understood...
...But her touching profession of love, rejection of all dread rumors about him, and declaration that if he tried to chase her away, she would remain lying on his doorstep, soften him...
...Adam Fischer's on Sony has excellent DDD sound, but drags a bit: Samuel Ramey sings beautifully but coldly, Eva Marion is fully effective only in the more heated passages...
...As Kodaly aptly noted about Bluebeard's Castle, "The dramatic curve and the musical curve develop parallelly and mutually reenforce each other, like a magnificent double rainbow...
...as a conflict between rational, creative Man and emotional, inspiring, never fully comprehending Woman...
...The Judith of the opera is both Stef i and Marta...
...as a foreshortened process of mutual discovery between two persons...
...the heroine, by a soprano or a mezzo...
...more deeply still, as an allegory of the loneliness and solitude of all human creatures...
...Though written for baritone, Bluebeard was transposed for the great bass Mihaly Székely by Bartok himself...
...Otherwise he stared at me...
...As young Béla once wrote his mother, "Spiritual loneliness is to be my destiny...
...Bluebeard kneels at their sight and sings their praises: they were the loves, respectively, of his dawn (youth), noon (maturity), and dusk (middle age...
...It ends with one of the best recorded versions of Bluebeard, featuring the baritone Siegmund Nimsgern, the mezzo Tatiana Troyanos, and Rafael Kubelik conducting (1981...
...but only in his music could he wholly express himself...
...Bartók, whose own need for inner solitude was imperious, and whose remoteness could be frightening, threw himself into the subject with an intensity which grips the listener...
...He summons Judith to his embrace...
...She must open every door...
...In 1905, he discovered Debussy and his Pelléas et Mélisande, and having collected folk songs from Central Europe, the Balkans and beyond, he learned lasting lessons from them...
...That goes for both the Chester Kallman and the scarcely better Christopher Hassall renderings accompanying one or the other record album...
...But there are compensations in the 11 hours of additional music on this CD set...
...Kodaly ceded it to his colleague and friend Bartok, who enthusiastically seized on it...
...In his early stages, he was under the influence of Richard Strauss...
...An example is the version with the Russian singers Yevgeny Nesterenko and Yelena Obraztsova...
...Kubelik conducts the New York Philharmonic glowingly, the orchestra responds in kind, and the sound (barring a few early coughs) is irreproachable...
...The sound is better on the former, the Judith (Klara Palankai) on the latter...
...Sadly, it remains Bartók's only opera...
...After an unhappy love affair with the beautiful violinist Stefi Geyer, he married his 16-year-old student Marta Ziegler, to whom the opera is dedicated...
...He took it to Zoltán Kodaly to be set to music...
...Neither is metrically and syllabically suitable for singing, though this is partly because every word in Hungarian is accented on the first syllable...
...But most opera houses cannot or will not present an evening that is two thirds ballet...
...Light from five doors floods the hall and fills Bluebeard with hope...
...On Deutsche Gramophon Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau hams it up in poor Hungarian, despite having been coached by his excellent Judith, his Hungarian wife Julia Varadi...
...An important choice must be made before starting: Is the hero to be sung by a bass or a baritone...
...And Bartok empathized with the theme of man's innermost privacy having to remain inviolable even by the woman he loves, as with the tragic notion that only in memory can the women in a man's life attain perfection— a perfection against which the present woman must lose out to survive, in turn, only as a memory...
...not until she dispels his last doubts does the small, iron entrance door close by itself...
...She proposes to let in the sun and breezes, even to dry the walls with her lips and warm the flagstones with her body...
...When, moreover, this must be done in a difficult language, the task becomes daunting...
...The opera's story line is fairly straightforward...
...In succession, Judith uncovers a torture chamber, an armory, a treasury, a secret garden, and a vista of the vast ducal domains...
...Aware of what awaits her, she tries to fight clear of those unwanted riches and offers herself as she is, or was...
...Another difficulty is that Bluebeard is in Hungarian...
...The Bluebeard story derives mostly from Charles Perrault's fairy tale, and partly from a similar Hungarian source that Kodaly used in an orchestral song...
...Bluebeard, mournfully declaring that henceforth it will be night forever, disappears into the all-enveloping darkness...
...When seductiveness fails to obtain the last key, she challenges: Maybe those rumors were true, and the blood she noticed on the treasures, the flowers and garden soil, on the very clouds above the duke's lands, must be that of the murdered wives behind the last door...
...The one-act format has been a hindrance as well...
...Only a young, adoring pupil could have married the grave, withdrawn, taciturn composer...
...The young woman, however, cannot stop...
...And just now DG has issued a new CD with Boulez, Jessye Norman and Laszlo Polgar, utterly spoiled by Norman's bad Hungarian, unsteadiness and uncommittedness, while Polgar is very fine indeed...
...To fill an evening, Bartok allowed Bluebeard to become part of a triple bill with his two ballets, The Miraculous Mandarin and The Wooden Prince, the latter with a story also by Balazs...
...The late Istvan Kertész, with the then married Walter Berry and Christa Ludwig, offered a magisterial version in 1966 (fine playing by the London Symphony Orchestra), marred only by faulty Hungarian...
...Balazs was a minor albeit talented Symbolist writer, and this playlet, or "mystery' as he called it, was written in 1910...
...Seeming to perceive hesitation, Bluebeard is willing to let Judith back out...
...The probably definitive bass Bluebeard, Mihaly Székely, is available either with Antal Dorati and the LSO (1962) or Janos Ferencsik and the Budapest Philharmonic (1956...
...He won't tell her whose, but, of course, they are his...
...Since there is no action beyond the opening and closing of doors, the two singers can act only the emotions, and they require delicate shadings...
...Still, Balazs was first to treat it psychologically, with the main interest focusing on the man...
...To miss this most tragic opera in one of its better CD recordings would be the most tragic of mistakes...
...The first version dates from 1911, but was steadily revised up to 1921...
...it seemed custommade for him...
...Last year Hungaroton brought out on CD the version with Melis and Katalin Kasza, which, if you accept a relatively light baritone, is tops...
...In 1911 he was 30...
...He piles a crown, a heavy gold mantle and jewels upon her...
...The musicologist Antal Molnár, coming for instruction in collecting folk songs, found him speaking in half-words, and not many of those...
...The elderly Duke Bluebeard and his young bride, Judith, enter his dark, dank castle well ahead of her pursuing family and jilted fianc...
...So Bluebeard gets mated with someone else's one-act opera that can't quite stand up to this masterpiece, and the result diminishes both...
...At first he refuses her a single key...
...There emerge three former wives, pale but beautiful and in gorgeous panoply...
...The door opens on a calm, ghostly white lake—a lake of tears...
...All sorts of distressing circumstances surround this roughly 60-minute work, whose text must have struck Bartok as so good that his lifelong search for a worthy successor yielded nothing...
...As Judith opens the final door, the others close again and the light diminishes...
...But Bluebeard rises and proclaims her the love of his night (old age), the fairest of all...
...Artistically, too, Bartok was ready to create a masterpiece...
...Upon her passionate pleading, Bluebeard reluctantly accords her one more key...
...A fascinating set of 10 CDs selected by Sedgwick Clark, New York Philharmonic: The Historic Broadcasts 1923 to 1987, has recently appeared...
...Both are well conducted...
...Balazs was a Communist who escaped to the Soviet Union, and the Right-wing Horthy régime proscribed works bearing his name...
...Solti's version for London is uninspired...
...On EMI, Bernard Haitink leads the Berlin Philharmonic a mite sluggishly, and the remarkable Anne Sofie von Otter disappoints for once, perhaps linguistically hampered...
...Judith cringes, and feels a homely pauper compared to them...
...often for as long as a quarter of an hour, in complete silence...
...Though written for the lower voice, a soprano Judith sounds more girlishly innocent...
...Then she notices seven big, black, locked doors, and insists that Bluebeard show her the entire castle, which symbolizes his soul and its recesses...
...It inspired sundry musical treatments, most notably Paul Dukas' charming but lightweight Ariane et Borbe-Bleue to at text by Maeterlinck, clearly known to both Balazs and Bartok...
...The same singers recorded itunder Pierre Boulez with the BBC Symphony in 1976, much less satisfyingly, because Boulez is not the conductor for romantic passion...
...Nimsgern and Troyanos are masterly save for, once again, the accents...
...As the perhaps finest baritone Bluebeard, György Melis, observed, the choice is between "the baritone's lightness and lovely lyricism and the bass' weightiness and, as it were, otherworldIiness...
...For the castle is man's soul, with all the blood and tears, cruelty and tenderness, and past loves it harbors...
...YET HOW HARD it is to convey the opera's symbolism in a performance, or even on a recording...
...Good enough artists for the two demanding roles who possess the language are not readily found anywhere, including Hungary...
...The unrhymed octosyllabic verse makes for further hurdles, complicated by the translators' evident lack of Hungarian...
...The Debussyan subtlety and folk-song earthiness combined with a touch of Wagner (notably Lohengrin) to yield the masterwork that is Bluebeard...
...Somberly, he hands her the last key, even prods her on when her hand falters...
...Judith is appalled by the tenebrous hall and its humid —weeping—walls...
...In later years, though always serious, Bartok relaxed somewhat...
...More important, she is Woman confronting Man in doomed conjunction...
...In the English text, anglophone opera lovers are deprived of a great deal more than subtleties...
...gallantly, Bartok would not let it be removed until Balazs himself insisted in 1933...
...It could not have helped that although Bluebeard was a success at its much-delayed 1918 Budapest premiere, it was not reprised for almost two decades...
...Georg Solti, briefly his student, recalled: "Bartók presented an austere, forbidding front to the world...
...Her fine British Bluebeard, the bass John Tomlinson, amazes with near-perfect Hungarian...
...Too late: She too is relegated behind the seventh door, which also closes...
Vol. 81 • August 1998 • No. 9
