To express so much hope and despair, affection and aversion, longing and frustration, and ultimately deep abandonment in word and music within an hour, Béla Bartók succeeded in a unique way in his one-act opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle.
The austere staging by Opera Zuid powerfully conveys the peculiar relationship between Bluebeard and Judith. In Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Judith, Bluebeard's young wife, wants him to open the seven doors of his castle. She is curious about what is hidden behind them and distrusts him. She makes terrible discoveries and her desire for truth ends fatally.
Against the background of the beautiful resonance that the orchestra provides, there stands a simple little table at the front of the stage and an equally ordinary set of salon furniture, a set that shows an everyday dwelling. Above the orchestra the lighting is suggestively dark with a shadow of a red rose, which possibly foreshadows the passage about the garden at the fourth door, with flowers that also carry a trace of blood.
Director Kenza Koutchoukali chooses an "ordinary" everyday couple that, as it were, walks onto the stage from among the audience. They are clearly in love but once they step through the imaginary door of Bluebeard's dwelling, a kind of emotional roller coaster begins. From scene to scene Bluebeard tries to win Judith's trust in a desperate attempt to finally find love. Judith for her part keeps trying to open another door and finds herself making stunning and frightening discoveries room after room. The last room reveals the previous women, failures of Bluebeard's love. With Judith comes once again catastrophe: Bluebeard experiences that it is impossible to be understood, he is doomed to eternal loneliness.
Bluebeard is not characterized as a masochist or someone seeking extreme eroticism. Thomas Oliemans plays him as a lonely, almost tragic man, capable of tenderness. Not an oddball, but like Judith intensely longing for love. Deirdre Angenent is a Judith who burns with curiosity and wants to penetrate every aspect of Bluebeard's psyche. Their intense search for each other in this staging requires no grand gestures, no extreme touches. They behave as a couple in an intense dialogue of love, they discuss, embrace and kiss and distance themselves again. Also clever in the direction is how the shifts in the emotions of the singers are always in accordance with the tempo changes of the musical passage. Thomas Oliemans puts it well in the programme booklet: "The musicians give voice to the richness of the field of tension between the two of us".
The central conflict of the fundamental distance between man and woman is embedded in the score. The pentatonic scale, which creates an atmosphere of mystery and darkness, the constantly recurring interval of the minor second, the musical motifs that advance a step further towards fear and distance at each door. The musicians master the score down to every detail and each motif is played with full intensity by the respective instrument (oboe, harp, xylophone, celesta), the glissandi are spine-tingling, the outbursts are real explosions of sound. Conductor Duncan Ward, who also recited the – somewhat updated – prologue (in English), masters the score perfectly and inspires the musicians to top level!
Deirdre Angenent sings the role for the first time. She is clearly at home in the character. She performs the role with a powerful, full voice and she masters the difficult parlando style and dissonant sound of Bartók's music. Thomas Oliemans also performs the psychologically and vocally demanding role with perfect stylistic sensibility. The warm baritone sounds occasionally rightly somewhat more acerbic than we are used to from him.
The performance in 's Hertogenbosch received well-deserved applause. Conductor Duncan Ward is right in the – incidentally brief but interesting programme booklet: "If we do it right, it is a fantastic emotional journey that sweeps the listener along". That was certainly the case.
All the more unfortunate, then, that just now this press release was sent out into the world: "Opera Zuid is threatening to disappear due to a serious shortage of subsidies. Our company has learned with dismay of the funding letter from the minister for the coming period 2025-2028."
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