I’ve been on a constant hunt for media lately. It’s spooky season, and I’m a committed observer of Halloween rituals, so at least for this month, everything has to fit the theme. Some of the tabs I currently have open:
8 Great Video Games That Capture the Best of the Fall Season (Kotaku)
Alfred Hitchcock Movies Ranked (Rotten Tomatoes)
Quiz: Build a Haunted House & Get a Haunted House Book Recommendation (Book Riot)
So it should come as no surprise that I’ve been looking into the spookiest operas, as well. Last year I scratched the itch with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which on the whole is more tragic than scary—but the blood-covered Lucia’s “mad scene,” as well as the Met production’s eerie Scottish fog and period costumes, were satisfyingly atmospheric.
This year, I tried something a little different: Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, by Bela Bartok. The thing that drew me in (aside from the fact that it was available on Met Opera HD) was the description of the imagery. It’s set in a dark hallway, with seven doors that open onto scenes both beautiful and terrible. It has a deeply gothic sensibility in that there are only two roles, trapped together in an emotionally fraught battle of wills. The castle itself is a sort of character (with lines, even!), and our female lead, Judith, is pushing deeper than may be strictly wise to understand its secrets—and, in turn, her husband’s. Truly, the ~*~vibes~*~ are unimpeachable.
The work is only around an hour long, but it has stuck with me since I watched it. It’s an expressionist opera, so it doesn’t really hew to the kind of structure that you might expect—arias, recitatives, songs with verses and refrains. It was more like one long tone poem that broke open the characters’ emotional experiences across the events of the opera. In some ways, the plot felt like little more than an excuse to paint sweeping, evocative pictures with the opening of each door. But the characters’ reactions to each reveal are so intense, and so changeable, that I kind of want to crawl inside them and reconstruct their motivations like a crime scene.
Bartok and his librettist, Bela Balazs, constructed Bluebeard’s Castle out of heavy symbolism, and it shows. My brain has been running in circles trying to find a unifying theory for the plot that would tie the events and the characters’ responses together neatly. On the one hand, that’s fun, and I’m channeling it into some short-story writing. But on the other hand, I don’t think the work necessarily needs or wants that kind of interpretation, and I’m trying to keep in mind that there’s value in just letting things be. Expressionist art distorts reality to depict subjective experience, especially dissonance and fear. Trying to pry anything objective out of it is maybe the wrong approach—but digesting it, and developing my own emotional response to it, seems more in the spirit of things.