Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók
Colorado MahlerFest Chamber Orchestra
Kenneth Woods, Condutor
April Fredrick, Judith
Gustav Andreassen, Bluebeard
May 21, 2022
Mountain View United Methodist Church, Boulder, CO
From MahlerFest XXXV, May 17-22, 2022
MahlerFest.org
Hungarian libretto and English translation available at mahlerfest.org/wp-content/upl...
Full program book and notes at drive.google.com/file/d/1uCmT...
Bartók’s opera is based on a libretto by the Jewish-Hungarian writer and critic, Béla Balázs. Balázs wrote the libretto for their mutual friend, Zoltán Kodály. Bartók was spurred to set the libretto by a competition, which he lost. The opera languished without a performance for several years, causing Bartók to lament to his wife, Márta, to whom he dedicated the opera: “Now I know that I will never hear it in this life. You asked me to play it for you-I am afraid I would not be able to get through it. Still I’ll try so that we may mourn it together.”
In Balázs’ and Bartók’s re-telling of the Bluebeard legend, the title character is, in Bartók’s words, “not a murderer. The images of the Castle are allegorical pictures of the soul.” Bartók also said that the work was a “soul ballade” which expresses “the tragedy of a soul destined to be alone.” The work mourns the way in which “the holy feeling of love dies by becoming every-day. His loves live, but no longer in his life.”