Apart from ‘Cav and Pag’ double bills are hard to sell. Audiences that like one half don’t like the other and too often stay away. The ‘downside’ of this is that there are a good many short operas that don’t get aired, amongst them some very witty eighteenth-century pieces.
      Duke Bluebeard is a ‘one-half’ piece, and ENO decided to pair it with the Rite of Spring. It might seem odd, even bold, to combine a gloomy, psychological work with an extrovert pagan extravaganza, but it works wonderfully. The departing audience buzzed with which piece, let alone which production, it preferred. No one left unstimulated, and rightly so. This was a magnetic evening, but not without some difficult questions.
      Let’s start with the Rite of Spring, a work as well known in the concert hall as the opera house and thus to be judged from several points of view. First, the orchestral playing of this once notoriously hard score was good, but not perfect. I could not work out how, but the opening bassoon solo sounded as though it was being played on a saxophone so full of vibrato and wide-tone was it. It was only the first slightly strange acoustical effect that followed. I checked the programme for some notice of re-orchestration but there were none. Moreover, the opening was not as secure in intonation and control as nowadays one would expect from a first-class concert-orchestra. Throughout the performance, the playing had energy, but sometimes, from where I sat, the balance was not quite right and the ensemble not perfect. That said, the overall performance had so much energy under Edward Gardner that to ‘hear was to forgive’. And it’s good to know the Rite is still difficult to play as the day when it received its premiere. The day the Rite sounds easy is the day it has lost its impact.
      Impact is the word for the dancing and choreography. ENO’ production was a joint venture with Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, and let’s hope it’s the first of many. The elements of the Rite are simple. A pagan feast is crowned with a human sacrifice. Musically it is full of heterophonous textures and pounding discords often across the beat. It seethes with sexuality, and this is what the director and choreographer, Michael Keegan-Dolan picked up. Not content with one sacrifice, or rather brutal rapes and killings, there were two; a boy in the first half, a girl in the second. Nudity and even cross-dressing played its part. Animal heads and various weapons decked the stage and sometimes dancers’ bodies. The Rite is an ensemble piece and this was brilliant achieved, so much so that it is hard to single out any performance for special mention. But Nathan Attard as the boy in the first half was spectacularly energetic in, seeming to be driven half-crazy by the attentions he was receiving. And Daphne Strothmann as the Chosen One in the second half was equally, but not similarly, impressive in her wild vulnerability. Rae Smith’s designs and Adam Silverman’s lighting added to the brilliant effect of this production. This half of the double-bill was spectacularly successful and memorable.
      Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is harder to stage, and harder to bring off. Musically, ENO’s production is excellent. Edward Gardner drew magical sounds out of the orchestra, though sometimes too much care underplayed some of the work’s great moments, such as the great, Straussian C major chord when the fifth door is opened, or the sumptuous effects Bartók conjures up for the flowers of the fourth door and the tears of the sixth. The singing however was terrific. Both Clive Bayley as Bluebeard and Michaela Martens were on top form both vocally and dramatically. Given the ‘interiority’ of the work the singers need to act as much with their vocal colours as their movements, and both Bayley and Martens proved masters of the vocal nuance. What they caught best was the ambivalence of the two characters. Who is the villain, who the victim, of the work? In Perrault’s fairy story it is clear. Bluebeard is an arch-villain who has captured a new wife against her will. He slowly prepares her to join her predecessors in death, being driven by curiosity to open doors forbidden to her. In the nick of time, she is rescued by her relations. It’s a terrifying story but clear-cut story: Bluebeard bad, his new wife good, the ending happy. But Béla Balázs libretto is not so clear-cut, and in this he follows Maurice Maeterlinck (whose libretto served Bartók’s antecedent Dukas for his Arianne et Barbe-Bleu) and precedes some twentieth-century re-tellings of the story. In the gloom of Bluebeard’s Castle the ingénue Judith goes on a frightening journey of discovery. But in Balázs’s play it is Judith who leads Bluebeard to engineer her unwitting sdestruction. He would not have opened the doors if she had not begged him to. He knows what she will find, and tries to prevent her discoveries. For Judith, knowledge brings destruction, but on almost all occasions she pleads that what drives her on is her love for Bluebeard. He cannot resist because of the salvation she might be about to bring. Each door brings light (enlightenment) to the gloomy castle, but each revelation is tinged with blood, i.e. its past. There’s no escaping the symbolism of each door, each move. The descent into the castle is almost overtly Freudian, and from some angles Bluebeard could almost be viewed as reluctant counselor, even psycho-analyst, to the hysterical Judith. Yet, the rooms and their contents were Bluebeard’s creation. He is as guilty of concealment as Judith is of naivété. This creates an evolving and consuming tension between them, and in the end there are overtones of the Flying Dutchman and Senta, though here the ending is less happy (if Senta’s self-destruction can be seen as happy). In this work there is no final reconciliation. Judith joins the line of wives imprisoned by Bluebeard.
      Like Stravinsky’s Rite, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is both a product and a representative of the exciting period of ideas and artistic experiment that preceded the First World War. Both are masterpieces. However, I found Daniel Kramer’s interpretation of Bluebeard less convincing than Keegan-Dolan’s Rite. Kramer casts Bluebeard as a menacing psychotic luring Judith further and further to her destruction. Her fate seems sealed from the beginning. But here Kramer seems to have overlaid his version of the story on top of the Balázs/Bartók work. This is so much so that when instead of Bluebeard’s kingdom being revealed behind the fifth door (when discord resolves to concord, and the tonal opposite of the prevailing F# is reached in C major) the families of his previous wives emerge from couchettes, I had the uncomfortable feeling that what was heard and what was seen had parted company. Sometimes the action seemed to be for another opera. Of course, it was intended to be ironic. What Bartók portrays as magnificent is nothing of the kind. But in spelling this out, and maintaining a kind of Dr. Caligari nightmare approach, some of the ambivalence and tension between Judith and Bluebeard was lost. Judith’s pleas that she does what she does because she loves Bluebeard loses their meaning. It was hard not to lose sympathy for both characters, and just see Judith as the victim of a horror story, which was the very thing Balázs seems to have wanted to avoid.
      This was a challenging evening full of surprises and insights. I recommend it very highly indeed. It’s another in the growing line of imaginative and successful ENO projects. Long may they last.
Roderick Swanston