WQXR/Carnegie Hall: Budapest Festival Orchestra Performs Bluebeard's Castle

After having attended a concert on Friday evening given by the Budapest Festival Orchestra under the baton of its Music Director Iván Fischer I tuned in Saturday evening to WQXR, New York City's classical music station, to hear a live broadcast of another all-Bartók program that featured the same ensemble.  Once again, Maestro Fischer seemed intent on displaying to the audience as many facets of the composer's genius as possible.

The program opened with performances of  the Romanian Folk Dances, Sz. 56, BB 68 (1915) and the Hungarian Peasant Songs, Sz. 71, BB 79 (1914-1918).  As is well known, Bartók was not only one of the twentieth century's greatest composers but he could also lay claim to being the world's first ethnomusicologist.  Together with his fellow composer Zoltán Kodály, Bartók traversed the Central European countryside in the early years of the twentieth century recording the regiou's indigenous folk music before it was lost to modernization.  It was from these recordings that Bartók derived the two present pieces.  They were not, however, simply transcriptions of those recordings but rather were reimagined by the composer in his own idiom.  In order to demonstrate the degree to which the original Romanian Folk Dances were reworked by the composer, Maestro Fischer had the orchestra first perform the original dances, even going so far as to make use of the traditional folk instruments that had originally accompanied them, before then playing Bartók's own interpretations.  The conductor did something very similar with the Hungarian Peasant Songs but in this instance brought onstage a Hungarian folk singer, Márta Sebestyén, to sing several of the original songs before the orchestra again went on to Bartók's arrangements.   In both cases it was extremely enlightening to hear the degree to which Bartók adapted the originals and transformed them into something entirely new.

After intermission, the program concluded with a concert performance of the one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle, Sz. 48 (1911-1912, rev.1917) featuring bass Krisztián Cser as Bluebeard and mezzo-soprano Ildikó Komlósi in the role of his latest bride.  This dark work is a thoroughly modern piece whose intensity owes as much to the psychological depth of its libretto as it does to Bartók's fascinating score. The Prologue makes this clear when it asks: "Where is the stage: outside or within, Ladies and Gentlemen?"  As Judith moves from one locked room to the next, the listener understands her horror as she penetrates ever deeper into Bluebeard's subconscious and forces him to reveal to her his innermost secrets.  The use of only two characters heightens the drama and at times creates an almost unbearable sensation of claustrophobia.  The audience begins to feel that they too are confined with a protagonist who may very well be a sadistic madman.  Even if the sinister overtones of sex and violence are never made explicit - the work was, after all, written in 1912 - they still lurk in the shadows and contribute to Judith's growing trepidation.  All the while, Bartók's music enhances the atmosphere of gloom and foreboding.

The libretto, based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault, was written by Béla Balázs, a friend of both Bartók and Kodály.  Significantly, Balázs based the verses in his libretto on Hungarian folk ballads, a form already of deep interest to Bartók from his ethnological research, and this was no doubt one reason the composer was attracted to the project in the first place.  The references to folk music do not, however, account for the symbolism of the different colored lights each time the door to a new room is opened (with the exception of the sixth), and I've never been able to find a satisfactory explanation for it.

While Bluebeard's Castle is undeniably one of the greatest operatic works in the twentieth century repertoire, I did not think it a good choice for a radio broadcast.  Without being able to see a staged version, or at least the supertitles available to the Carnegie Hall audience, this was an extremely difficult piece to follow, all the more so as it was performed in the original Hungarian.  All the radio audience had to go on was the brief synopsis given by the station's hosts.  At any rate, the archived performance is currently available for listening on WQXR's website.