Béla Bartók - Bluebeard's Castle (1911)
Béla Viktor János Bartók (25 March 1881 - 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.
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Duke Bluebeard's Castle (A kékszakkallú Herceg Vára), opera in one act, Sz. 48, BB 62 (Op. 11)
Librettist: Béla Balázs (1884-1949
Christopher Hassall (1912-1963), English text
Gwynne Howell, Sally Burgess
BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Mark Elder
Description by Michael Rodman [-]
The year 1911 was, from one perspective, exactly the wrong time for a young, albeit respected, composer to be making his initial foray into opera. As Bartók labored on his first and only essay in the genre, he must have been aware that entertainment-seeking European audiences were then enjoying the efforts of a formidable cadre of established, wildly successful operatic composers. Still active as Bluebeard's Castle took shape were crowd-pleasers Puccini, Giordano, and Mascagni in Italy and Humperdinck and Richard Strauss in Germany, among others. It is not too surprising, then, to learn that when Bartók submitted the imaginatively dark-hued Bluebeard to the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, the opera was rejected for a prize with a time-honored dismissal: "unplayable." It took another seven years for Bluebeard's Castle to receive its first staging; the work was finally premiered with much success by the Royal Hungarian Opera in May 1918. Its promising reception was, however, curtailed by the political intrigues of wartime Hungary. Librettist Béla Balázs (1884-1949) was inclined toward political views contrary to those of the government. After Bartók, whether out of loyalty or personal conviction, refused to suppress Balázs' name at subsequent performances, he himself withdrew the work, and it remained unperformed in Budapest for another 20 years.
While at the time of Bluebeard's composition Bartók was continuing to absorb the influence of other composers (including Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, and, then very recently, Debussy), the composer was also engaged with other, more deeply rooted musical concerns. The best-known and perhaps most important of these was his long-standing interest in the folk songs of his native Hungary and surrounding lands, which he spent several years collecting and transcribing together with his associate Zoltán Kodály. Particularly attractive to the composer were this music's exotic modes and scales and flexible, speech-inflected rhythms.
This latter aspect in particular proved central to Bartók's conception of Bluebeard's Castle at a time when his experience as a vocal composer had been limited largely to concise forms such as those he had observed in his travels to peasant villages. "I wanted to magnify," he later wrote of the opera, "the dramatic fluidum of [composer] Székely's folk ballads for the stage. And I wanted to depict a modern soul in the primary colors of folk song." Bartók uses mostly pentantonic scales as Bluebeard's wife Judith opens the doors of his castle and comes to the realization that she is one of his gruesome prizes. The climax of the arch form of the work is achieved in tension, volume, orchestration, and lighting at the opening of the fifth door, where the tonality changes to a new chromatic scale that stands in sharp contrast to all that has gone before. The score uses only one musical motif: a movement of a semitone symbolizing the omnipresent blood.
The composer was further attracted to the project by the story of Bluebeard itself, which had already attained several incarnations by the time of Bartók's setting. Originally recounting the crimes against children perpetrated by the fifteenth century Marshal of France Gilles de Retz, the story was spun into a fairy tale by Charles Perrault and later fashioned into a play/libretto (for Paul Dukas) by Maurice Maeterlinck. Bartók employed Balázs' symbolist version, in which fantastic elements provide metaphorical associations with Bluebeard's entrapment in loneliness and his wife's ultimately unsuccessful attempts to free him from this fate. The plot is totally allegorical and lacks action.
Пікірлер: 52
Fantastic performance! I really enjoyed the English translation, thanks for uploading!
First door: 18:47 Second door: 23:18 Third door: 27:36 Fourth door: 29:53 Fifth door: 34:46 Sixth door: 41:33 Seventh door: 55:25
@Dylonely42
9 ай бұрын
Thank you.
Thank you for uploading this
Thank you for the effort !!!! Great to be able to read the score at the same time! Such mystical music!!!!
This was very enterprising of you. Thanks so much. And a tremendous performance!
What a masterpiece... Never thought that recitatives can be so emotional
Fantastic! Love the music on the screen following the performance. Bartok had such a wonderful musical vocabulary - tonal, atonal, polytonal - whatever he wanted. One of the few modern composers who doesn't sound like he is trying to be modern.
@GizemSucu
4 жыл бұрын
what is mean poly?
@theocaratic
4 жыл бұрын
@@GizemSucu Polytonality is when you have more than one key going at once - for example, you could have a piece that is in E major and C major at the same time
It was interesting to listen to it in English. It is a rare occasion that I understand the original better :) It is a nice performance
It is a beautiful performance! Nearby all instructions are played/sing like written from Bartók. It is mostly not the case by other performances. So, I like it very much. For me personally is equal in which language, if the actual singed one close enough to the original sense. I think, this recording is really close to that. Sometimes I miss a bit more direct accentuation but all in one: very nice version of this beautiful work. Thank you for the upload!
Wonderful music, beautiful Hungarian language.
Bartok is awesome
Thanks.
fabulous.
Wonderful
Пролог 0:08 Вступ 03:25 "Ми прибули" - 4:50 Перші двері: 18:47 "Чуєш, чуєш?" (Юдіт) Другі двері: 23:18 "Що там? - Безліч гострих списів, шабель..." Треті двері: 27:36 "Скільки скарбів тут! Скільки багатств!" Четверті двері: 29:53 "Ах! Дивний сад" П'яті двері: 34:46 "Землі ці мені підвладні" Шості двері: 41:33 "Тихе озеро я бачу" Сьомі двері: 55:25 "Там мої жінки колишні"
34:50 The Fifth Door! Whew!
@ryandavies7929
5 жыл бұрын
I played this years ago with one of the London orchestras on trombone. I don’t remember much of the piece except the fifth door. It’s still one of the most memorable moments of orchestral playing throughout my entire career.
the mezzo cracks in JUDITH'S high c! (34 mi. 46 secs) What a pity....the baritone and the conductor are impeccable...Let's listen Shirley Verret's high C on Met 1974's version.... ;)
Nice.
52:13 there's an odd pause in the vocal line. Probably due to translation into English
@nikitalvov40
6 жыл бұрын
There were a bunch of miss-timed phrases by soloists in that part. The pause that you are talking about happened because the soloist rushed and ended the previous phrase much earlier than needed. so instead of jumping in the next part she waited for a second to time her part correctly c:
did this for a school assignment
I listened to it in Hungarian with English subtitles - the version with Sass and Kovats directed by Solti. Compared to their interpretation and phrasing, the English version is just mundane. Have to agree with several others here: this masterpiece loses all its mystery when sung in English. Has to be done in Hungarian - and by Hungarian singers.
@bartjebartmans
4 жыл бұрын
Again, upload it the way you want it, nothing to be done about my upload which is just perfectly fine with me and a LOT of work, I hope you have some kind of understanding of that.
The English translation completely destroys the mystery of the beginning, what a crass idea!
@fbridge
7 жыл бұрын
Think of it as an interpretation not the definitive version maybe and you can enjoy the performance for what it is.
@michaaelraysson5785
7 жыл бұрын
For you maybe. Not for me.
@marinacaracciolo3161
5 жыл бұрын
I agree!
후기조성 Ex. 2-5 / 34:46 - 35:18
Wow, 14:45 what is that! Great stuff
Why is it sung in english? Wasn't it originally written in hungarian language?
@bartjebartmans
8 жыл бұрын
Yes in Hungarian and German but maybe they sang it in English so more people can understand it. That's my guess.
@celloguy
7 жыл бұрын
It was performed in England by a company that only sings in the vernacular. Old fashioned these days, but it still exists and has its place! Great recording!
18:55
35:54
Pangea Castle OnePiece
3:14
The idea of singing the original text in an English translation is not the happiest: the music and the sound of the Hungarian language are here one!... But on the other hand it is not bad to be able to follow the work in progress reading the musical score.
@bartjebartmans
5 жыл бұрын
Either you stick to the Hungarian, and the vast majority of viewers would be utterly clueless about the contents or you post it, like I did, in English so pretty much anybody can follow it. That's pretty much how to sum it up. But... this version also had no copyright issues something I watch carefully for as I don't want a strike against my channel.
@marinacaracciolo3161
5 жыл бұрын
@Bartje Bartmans - I agree with you, but it is the same matter as singing Wagner in Italian (!): it is difficult to understand what the characters say on the scene, and at the same time a good half of the beauty of the work disappears. This is what I wanted to say.
@daryakiryushko2246
4 жыл бұрын
@@bartjebartmans Not really. The third (in reality the first) option is Hungarian with English subtitles. Fully agree with Marina about the translation.
@bartjebartmans
4 жыл бұрын
@@daryakiryushko2246 well get to work and upload what you thinks needs to be done..
Why is it in English though ?
시작 03:16
Bella esecuzione, ma deve essere eseguita in lingua originale
This work sung in English just sucks the big one; phrasing of the vocal line is skewed, and the 'music of the language' in which it was conceived and written is destroyed. It doesn't take much to read a decent translated libretto and listen to the piece in its original... the only real reason to present this in English is a combination of language jingoism and laziness on the part of the listener. Bah.
@bartjebartmans
7 жыл бұрын
OK why don't you upload it the way you want it. Let me know when you are done, so I can check it out and give you my critique.
12:46