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Bartok, Le Château de Barbe-Bleue: New production by Jean-Paul Scarpitta, Soloists and orchestra of the Opéra National de Montpellier, Alain Altinoglu conductor.  Montpellier, France.  27.4.209 (MM)

A major challenge of presenting Bela Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle is making it part of a full evening.  Though the work is huge musically and emotionally, it clocks in at just under an hour.  It is therefore what opera impresarios consider a one-act that must be complemented by an additional one-act so that audiences will feel they have gotten their money's worth.

There can be no question that Bluebeard's Castle will tower over whatever may be paired with it.  Solutions as to what works best are varied.  The Los Angeles Opera sidestepped the problem by putting it together with Gianni Schicchi.   Then there was the German house that simply performed it once and then performed it again.  Maybe the best solution is to let it stand by itself as it well fills an evening - there will be little disagreement that its thematic, dramatic and musical brilliance fully satisfy the operatic appetite.

To avoid clashing musical styles Bluebeard's Castle can be paired with a Bartok ballet for example,  to act as an overture to this much bigger work.  And there is the solution chosen by the Opéra National de Montpellier - program a work that serves as an introduction to Bartok's enigmatic exploration of sexual politics.  This work was a bit of operatic trivia, something called Sancta Susanna, one of the three small erotic operas composed by Paul Hindemith in the early 1920's that Hindemith himself later withdrew from his oeuvre.

Susanna is a nun whose erotic feelings are awakened by the sounds of a May night, and by the virile body of the Man hanging on the cross, his loin cloth ecstatically removed to consummate the scene.  All this was ever-so-tastefully staged frontal nudity by Montpellier's "artiste en résidence," Jean Paul Scarpitta.  While Richard Strauss justifies his Salome with his famous putrid chord, Hindemith primly continues with his flaccid modernized neo-romanticism to the end, leaving a feeling of disgust that such an opera, however brief, even exists (see above that Hindemith too may have agreed).

We were thereby fully advised that Jean Paul Scarpitta's mise en scène of Bluebeard's Castle was to be about the awakening and consummation of erotic urges.  Bartok and Scarpitta were joined by conductor Alain Altinoglu, mezzo soprano Nora Gubisch and bass baritone Willard White to realize the successive revelations that lead to Judith's passage into womanhood, and that they did with artistic bravado.

Scarpitta used an immense black stage space as the nocturnal castle, its inhabitant a black suited black man of quiet primal power, and its ingénue a white gowned woman who vibrantly passed from door to door, and finally passed through the last one.  Illuminated white shapes, door's frames, floated ceaselessly through the space, interrupted by bars of red light, strips of blue lights, sometimes bars and strips of yellow and green lights to mark the appearance of each new vista, though objective images of any of these existed only in musical essence.

Mo. Altinoglu, Montpellier's principal guest conductor, painted Bartok's surreal world with infinite colors, working with his singers costumed in abstracted, almost concert dress to create an essential metaphysical world, in fact a musical world, physically nuanced only by the minimal if continuous movements of its actors.  But each movement, no matter how minimal, a finger lifted for example, a hand held out to accept an imaginary key, was carefully choreographed, as was the 'irreale' slowness of the copulation (manqué ou pas) and the final passage (though these final actions were not at all based on the minimal movements of concert performance).  Scarpitta found the exact delicate balance of music and vision to create the magic of this archetypical dream world. 

Mme. Gubish was the focus of the Scarpitta production, the text carefully delivered with vocal and histrionic mastery.  Mr. White is much appreciated as a Bluebeard; here his usual careful singing and musicianship merged seamlessly into the darker recesses of the stage picture.  The Orchéstre National de Montpellier reveled in the opportunity to perform this orchestral masterpiece, the openness of the Opéra Berlioz' pit revealing a transparency of tone that we miss in the Opéra Comedie [Montpellier's nineteenth century opera house]. 

The production was a technical feat, the continuously choreographed upward-downward, onstage-offstage movements of the doors and strips surely required an army of technicians and precise stage management. Unfortunately these technicians did not share in the applause, though Mr. Scarpitta did take a well-deserved bow at this third and final performance, as the lighting designer, Urs Schönebaum should have done too.

Michael Milenski

Picture © Marc Ginot / Opéra National de Montpellier

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