Bluebeard's Castle

Prince Bluebeard's Castle, a one-act opera to a libretto by Béla Balàzs was composed by Bartók in 1911 but not performed until seven years later, on 24 May 1918 at the Budapest Opera House. The libretto proposed by Balàzs retrieves the figure from the fairytale tradition of the ruthless Bluebeard to cast it in a symbolist frame in the wake of Debussy-Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Melisande. The opera, divided into nine scenes, has only two protagonists: Bluebeard and his wife Judith, who express themselves with a song, mainly recitative, based on pentatonic scales of Hungarian folk tradition. The action takes place in the prince's castle in medieval times. A prologue recited by a bard introduces the first scene describing Judith's resolve to follow her husband into his gloomy and mysterious castle. However, the woman wants to know Bluebeard's past and starts to open the castle's seven secret doors one after the other. With dismay she discovers sinister rooms and places stained with blood, a pivotal element of the opera associated by Bartók with the minor second chord, the most dissonant of all. On opening the seventh and final door, Judith fears to find the corpses of her previous murdered wives, but instead she sees three richly dressed, living women parading before her eyes. They are the women of morning, noon and evening who now belong only to the world of Bluebeard's memories. Judith, as the woman of the night, after being crowned and covered in jewels by her husband, will follow them forever into the seventh room, whose door closes, plunging the castle back into darkness.

La voix humaine

In 1930, Jean Cocteau had brought to the stage of the Comédie-Française La voix humaine, a drama about the loneliness and despair of a young woman abandoned by her lover. The proposal to perform an opera on that subject came to Francis Poulenc from Hervé Dugardin, then director of the Paris branch of Casa Ricordi. The composer, who had already set Jean Cocteau's texts to music, gladly accepted the challenge of adapting an exquisitely theatrical text to the demands of music, and his version of La voix humaine debuted at the Théâtre national de l'Opéra-Comique on 6 February 1959. The only character on stage, the protagonist - generically referred to as Elle (she) - talks on the phone to her lover whose voice we never hear but whose answers are guessed from Elle's change of tone. Engaged in a long monologue attached to the telephone wire, Elle is a complex vocal role, somewhere between prose and musical theatre that requires equal vocal and acting skills. Indeed, everything in Poulenc's La voix humaine is in the voice, in the chameleon-like ability to render every nuance of the protagonist's emotional state: the apparent initial calm, doubt, incomprehension, loneliness, agitation, despair, torment, up to the final heartbroken ‘je t'aime’ that closes the telephone call and the opera in a peremptory and disconsolate manner.

New staging in coproduction with Tiroler Festspiele Erl
More characters TBD (updated: June 30, 2025)

Poster © Gianluigi Toccafondo