Bluebeard's Castle and Erwartung
I saw Bluebeard's Castle and Erwartung (a double-bill opera) last last week. This was going to be my catch-up post, but I think just talking about the operas is going to be quite long. I also saw Age of Ultron two weeks ago and still haven't written about it.
Bluebeard's Castle is by Bartok and is about Bluebeard and Judith, who leaves her fiance at the altar to go to Bluebeard's castle. Inside the castle there are seven locked doors, and she begs him to open them so that his castle can be lit up, and eventually he accedes to each one individually. Behind the first door is his torture chamber, and it really doesn't get better from then. He has a room full of jewels--Judith is astonished, and then finds out everything is drenched in blood. He has an incredible garden inside his castle, all the flowers in bloom--also drenched in blood. There is the whole world behind the fifth door, which he calls his kingdom--the clouds rain blood on the earth, etc. There is a vast lake, calm and still and white, and Bluebeard tells Judith that they are tears.
Behind the seventh door, which he begs Judith not to open and Judith accuses him of hiding his murdered wives, just as the rumours say, are his three wives--his brides of the morning, noon, twilight. And against protest, then he makes Judith his fourth bride, saying that he met her in the starry night and that she will be the most beautiful of all of them, the bride of the night. She follows the three other brides out the door and Bluebeard is left alone.
STAGING! The stage was surrounded by gold tiles like a picture frame, and the whole front was covered in scrim, so that light could be projected on it--when the fifth door opens, there is the image of the earth projected across, when the garden opens there is the indistinct limbs of trees around the edges. The stage was very simple, but extremely foreshortened; the walls, made to look like brick, narrowed sharply. The seven doors were stage right, and when they were locked a brilliant white light shone from the keyholes onto the opposite wall. For the lake of tears (TEARS, JUDITH--TEARS, says Bluebeard, at least six times when she asks about different things), water poured into a channel close to the front of the stage, which both Judith and Bluebeard dipped hands into.
When the three brides came out of the door, it was actually viscerally shocking. For one, they came out of a trapdoor, not the door, and they came out veiled head to toe in draping, blood-stained fabric. I was sitting orchestra ring, fairly far back, and I can never make out expression, but the redness of their dresses and something about the way light bounced off their dresses made them look just like liquid blood. The morning bride glided up the stairs at a deathly pace and proceeded measured, slowly across the stage, holding up her skirts; behind her the head of the second emerged, then the third. It was terrifying. It was an amazing bit of staging and it was incredibly effective.
It was really well done. The singers were both excellent and the opera's orchestra is irreproachable as always. OK, well, almost; at the fifth door, when he shows Judith the whole world, there are trumpets in the fifth ring, all the way up at the top of the opera house, blasting a fanfare, and they had cleaned up considerably from rehearsal but were just perceptibly a little early. That fifth door is a relief, honestly; it's a sudden BLAST of C major chord after four doors' worth of dissonance. There's the 'blood theme' (which you can imagine was played a lot) and it's the minor second, which is extremely dissonant. Bluebeard had the deepest voice I've ever heard; at the backstage thing I did (earlier, about this opera, it's a 'let's get young people into opera' thing) he couldn't get the key off the ring and broke character to say "sorry, I messed up" and his speaking voice was unbelievable, deeper than his singing voice.
Judith says the reason she came to his castle, instead of to her fiance's (which Bluebeard describes as having a castle where 'sunshine dances on tiled roofs') is so that she could shine light into his castle, basically love him back to healing (in implication, anyway). It's very much the let's reform the rake storyline, except when it's 20th century music you know this is so not going to end well. When Bluebeard, answering some question of Judith's about why he's doing this, says that he loves her, the orchestra explodes into klaxons of--I don't even know what, panic? Disbelief? Near the end when Judith is insisting on the seventh key, Bluebeard starts crawling to Judith, kissing the hem of her gown--a giant white wedding dress, by the way, and I was afraid one of them was going to trip on the long train but fortunately it didn't happen. A lot of the positioning on the stage was really cool too. When they first enter the castle Bluebeard pulls down the portcullis at the end of the stage (the walls narrow to a single doorway) and the shadow of it is clearly visible on the walls; Bluebeard often stands leaning against the wall so that his shadow is kind of menacing. Very cool, rather unsettling. There is nothing soothing or calm about the entire thing, especially nothing that Judith sings.
After the intermission I saw Erwartung, which is by Schoenberg.
It's a lot harder to summarize, this opera. Only one singer, simply called The Woman, is featured; she is basically having a mental breakdown and she sings for half an hour as the landscape around her changes and she relives what happens. The moon rises and she is looking for the Man, running through the forest, and when she finds him she discovers he is dead--then the scene changes and she's just stroking a piece of wood, not a human at all. She realizes he's cheating on her. The scene slowly shifts back as the psychologist returns to sit silently at the edge of the room and she wraps herself back into her straitjacket.
This one is a lot harder to talk about because number one, it was so much weirder and it doesn't have the narrative structure that Bluebeard's seven doors has to sort of hang onto. It's all about the psychological action happening in her head.
There was just one singer, but there were three supporting silent characters, and oh my god. The wall on stage left was lower, so the moon rose up (that was so cool, it was one of the stage lights but it looked like the moon as it moved!) and there was sometimes someone just sitting on the wall watching. The stage would frequently be completely and suddenly dark, and when things became light again the scene would have changed completely. The woman sang about her terror that there were things around her and then horrifyingly behind her one of the other actors was reaching for her. In another scene as she's leaning against the wall a portal opens and hands come out to grope her auuuugh hands coming out walls!! There was a part where the world tilted on its side--the psychologist in his chair tilted, she lay on the floor, the guy on the wall 'sat' on the wall (the non-speaking roles were played by acrobats). It was weird. Then there was the infidelity part, and as she sang about them the guy started rolling down the stage, steadily and slowly and also completely nakedly, then then went silently into the water trough at the edge of the stage, and disappeared without making a ripple. I guess he must have swum out to the side off stage and gotten out there. As she returned to 'real life' the psychologist managed to basically spin head over heels on his chair to come back into position. It was just so bizarre--it is unsettling too, the music is very atonal--and I don't know what to think.
Tonally, in subject and focus and everything, they were a complete 180 from the Barber of Seville, which I watched just a few weeks before that, which I loved to pieces. Of course, since I had two tickets for each opera, I managed to take the friend who likes Wagner to Barber of Seville, and the newbie to opera to Bluebeard's Castle/Erwartung *facepalm*
Crosspost: http://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/168139.html.
Bluebeard's Castle is by Bartok and is about Bluebeard and Judith, who leaves her fiance at the altar to go to Bluebeard's castle. Inside the castle there are seven locked doors, and she begs him to open them so that his castle can be lit up, and eventually he accedes to each one individually. Behind the first door is his torture chamber, and it really doesn't get better from then. He has a room full of jewels--Judith is astonished, and then finds out everything is drenched in blood. He has an incredible garden inside his castle, all the flowers in bloom--also drenched in blood. There is the whole world behind the fifth door, which he calls his kingdom--the clouds rain blood on the earth, etc. There is a vast lake, calm and still and white, and Bluebeard tells Judith that they are tears.
Behind the seventh door, which he begs Judith not to open and Judith accuses him of hiding his murdered wives, just as the rumours say, are his three wives--his brides of the morning, noon, twilight. And against protest, then he makes Judith his fourth bride, saying that he met her in the starry night and that she will be the most beautiful of all of them, the bride of the night. She follows the three other brides out the door and Bluebeard is left alone.
STAGING! The stage was surrounded by gold tiles like a picture frame, and the whole front was covered in scrim, so that light could be projected on it--when the fifth door opens, there is the image of the earth projected across, when the garden opens there is the indistinct limbs of trees around the edges. The stage was very simple, but extremely foreshortened; the walls, made to look like brick, narrowed sharply. The seven doors were stage right, and when they were locked a brilliant white light shone from the keyholes onto the opposite wall. For the lake of tears (TEARS, JUDITH--TEARS, says Bluebeard, at least six times when she asks about different things), water poured into a channel close to the front of the stage, which both Judith and Bluebeard dipped hands into.
When the three brides came out of the door, it was actually viscerally shocking. For one, they came out of a trapdoor, not the door, and they came out veiled head to toe in draping, blood-stained fabric. I was sitting orchestra ring, fairly far back, and I can never make out expression, but the redness of their dresses and something about the way light bounced off their dresses made them look just like liquid blood. The morning bride glided up the stairs at a deathly pace and proceeded measured, slowly across the stage, holding up her skirts; behind her the head of the second emerged, then the third. It was terrifying. It was an amazing bit of staging and it was incredibly effective.
It was really well done. The singers were both excellent and the opera's orchestra is irreproachable as always. OK, well, almost; at the fifth door, when he shows Judith the whole world, there are trumpets in the fifth ring, all the way up at the top of the opera house, blasting a fanfare, and they had cleaned up considerably from rehearsal but were just perceptibly a little early. That fifth door is a relief, honestly; it's a sudden BLAST of C major chord after four doors' worth of dissonance. There's the 'blood theme' (which you can imagine was played a lot) and it's the minor second, which is extremely dissonant. Bluebeard had the deepest voice I've ever heard; at the backstage thing I did (earlier, about this opera, it's a 'let's get young people into opera' thing) he couldn't get the key off the ring and broke character to say "sorry, I messed up" and his speaking voice was unbelievable, deeper than his singing voice.
Judith says the reason she came to his castle, instead of to her fiance's (which Bluebeard describes as having a castle where 'sunshine dances on tiled roofs') is so that she could shine light into his castle, basically love him back to healing (in implication, anyway). It's very much the let's reform the rake storyline, except when it's 20th century music you know this is so not going to end well. When Bluebeard, answering some question of Judith's about why he's doing this, says that he loves her, the orchestra explodes into klaxons of--I don't even know what, panic? Disbelief? Near the end when Judith is insisting on the seventh key, Bluebeard starts crawling to Judith, kissing the hem of her gown--a giant white wedding dress, by the way, and I was afraid one of them was going to trip on the long train but fortunately it didn't happen. A lot of the positioning on the stage was really cool too. When they first enter the castle Bluebeard pulls down the portcullis at the end of the stage (the walls narrow to a single doorway) and the shadow of it is clearly visible on the walls; Bluebeard often stands leaning against the wall so that his shadow is kind of menacing. Very cool, rather unsettling. There is nothing soothing or calm about the entire thing, especially nothing that Judith sings.
After the intermission I saw Erwartung, which is by Schoenberg.
It's a lot harder to summarize, this opera. Only one singer, simply called The Woman, is featured; she is basically having a mental breakdown and she sings for half an hour as the landscape around her changes and she relives what happens. The moon rises and she is looking for the Man, running through the forest, and when she finds him she discovers he is dead--then the scene changes and she's just stroking a piece of wood, not a human at all. She realizes he's cheating on her. The scene slowly shifts back as the psychologist returns to sit silently at the edge of the room and she wraps herself back into her straitjacket.
This one is a lot harder to talk about because number one, it was so much weirder and it doesn't have the narrative structure that Bluebeard's seven doors has to sort of hang onto. It's all about the psychological action happening in her head.
There was just one singer, but there were three supporting silent characters, and oh my god. The wall on stage left was lower, so the moon rose up (that was so cool, it was one of the stage lights but it looked like the moon as it moved!) and there was sometimes someone just sitting on the wall watching. The stage would frequently be completely and suddenly dark, and when things became light again the scene would have changed completely. The woman sang about her terror that there were things around her and then horrifyingly behind her one of the other actors was reaching for her. In another scene as she's leaning against the wall a portal opens and hands come out to grope her auuuugh hands coming out walls!! There was a part where the world tilted on its side--the psychologist in his chair tilted, she lay on the floor, the guy on the wall 'sat' on the wall (the non-speaking roles were played by acrobats). It was weird. Then there was the infidelity part, and as she sang about them the guy started rolling down the stage, steadily and slowly and also completely nakedly, then then went silently into the water trough at the edge of the stage, and disappeared without making a ripple. I guess he must have swum out to the side off stage and gotten out there. As she returned to 'real life' the psychologist managed to basically spin head over heels on his chair to come back into position. It was just so bizarre--it is unsettling too, the music is very atonal--and I don't know what to think.
Tonally, in subject and focus and everything, they were a complete 180 from the Barber of Seville, which I watched just a few weeks before that, which I loved to pieces. Of course, since I had two tickets for each opera, I managed to take the friend who likes Wagner to Barber of Seville, and the newbie to opera to Bluebeard's Castle/Erwartung *facepalm*
Crosspost: http://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/168139.html.