Inside Bartok’s ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ at the ENO

Anyone who has been to the Royal Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty will have seen fairy tale characters appear in the grand finalé, all from Charles Perrault’s folk tales published in Paris in 1697. One of these is Bluebeard, who lives in a mighty castle. The subject attracted the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and his friend, the poet Béla Balázs, who wrote the libretto, to compose a one-act opera.

The story is that Bluebeard has married a new young wife, Judith, who adores him and is determined to light up his gloomy home. By doing so she hopes to change him, and insists that the locked doors to seven hidden rooms be opened. She demands that he hand her the keys.

The first room is a torture chamber, its walls wet with blood. Four more doors in succession reveal the armoury, the treasury, a hidden garden, and Bluebeard’s vast kingdom, all with signs of blood. She ignores his warning to stay away from the sixth door, which she opens to reveal a lake of tears. The seventh door, he insists, must remain shut and she complies until her curiosity gets the better of her, and she questions him about her predecessor. Perhaps the rumours about him are true?

Finally she unlocks the seventh door and all his previous wives are revealed. They are the loves of his dawns, noons and evenings. Judith is now destined to reign over his nights, and as she enters the seventh doorway, Bluebeard is left alone once more.

For Bartók himself, Bluebeard portrays his personal suffering and a reluctance to reveal the inner secrets of his soul. The composer was an intensely private man, and the blood that pervades the story symbolises his suffering. Musically it is a magnificent work, and under the baton of Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, a fiercely committed advocate for contemporary works on the leading edge of classical music, it came over with huge power.

As Bluebeard himself, John Relyea was a brooding presence of great vocal quality, singing in Hungarian. Although the ENO normally performs works in English translation, this was an exception that is only on for two performances — the second one on Saturday 23 March. Since the dramatic mezzo Allison Cook was unwell at the last minute, the company brought in Jennifer Johnston, who bravely sang the role of Judith from a lectern on stage, while one of the production team went through the motions.

The ENO used to have a fine production of Bluebeard’s Castle, but this was not it, perhaps for reasons of cost. It was a semi-staging that involved a very long table stretching almost from one side of the stage to the other. This would have been fine if it were a concert performance, but there was no understudy to portray Judith’s motions on stage, and unfortunately staff director Crispin Lord who devised the staging did the motions himself. This gave us the spectacle of a young man playing the role of Judith with no woman’s wig, and nothing to cover his shaven face or his tattooed arm. My companion for the evening thought it was a deliberate attempt at transgenderism. I don’t think so, but in any case it was a mistake.

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