About the production
The two short operas Eine Florentinische Tragödie and Herzog Blaubarts Burg are linked by a central theme: the progressive recognition of the only seemingly familiar counterpart.
In Zemlinsky's Eine Florentinische Tragödie, the murder of Bianca's lover by her jealous husband Simone leads to a dialog between the two spouses that surprisingly signals a new beginning of love.
In Bartók's one-act opera, however, Judith's journey to the inner depths of her beloved Duke Bluebeard - symbolized by the opening of seven mysterious doors - ends in darkness and loneliness.
Eine florentinische
Tragödie/
Bluebeard's Castle
Storyline
The wealthy Florentine cloth merchant Simone and his wife Bianca seem to have lost all affection for. One day, Simone unexpectedly returns home from a business trip and catches Bianca with a young strangerman. A romantic relationship is clearly beginning to develop between the two, but Simone, who has suddenly become jealous, pretends not to notice anything.
Rather, he entangles the rival—who turns out to be Guido Bardi, the only son of the ruling duke, in a refined exchange of courtesies. To Simone, he successfully plays the role of the obsequious merchant, driven exclusively by mercantile interests, eagerly touts his wares and sees in the “guest” nothing more than a potential, high-ranking customer. In truth, from the very first moment, he wages an extremely subtle and sophisticated battle: Simone ignores the provocative behavior, the defiantly unambiguous insinuations of her arrogant opponent, and even invites him todinner together.
But at the very latest, when Guido Bardi wants to set out late at night and Simone then proposes a duel disguised as a friendly contest of strength, it becomes clear even to the prince that this is truly a matter of life and death. The battle between the two comes to a dramatic head in a matter of moments: Soon Simone is wounded, and Bianca now frequently takes her lover’s side, encouraging him to finally kill her husband. Nevertheless, Simone finally manages to overpower Guido Bardi and strangle him with his bare hands. The prince’s death, however, brings about a surprising, cathartic transformation in both of them: In the height of their ecstasy and with a newly kindled passion for one another, Simone and Bianca fall into each other’s arms.
Judith has fallen in love with the enigmatic Duke Bluebeard. She brushes aside all the dark rumors spread about him—especially those regarding the fate of his former wives— and, without hesitation, leaves her parents, her brother, and her fiancé for him.
Upon arriving at Duke Bluebeard’s castle, she is deeply shaken by the silence that reigns there, the massive, damp walls, the darkness, and the icy cold. But she decides to stay and, through her love, transform the inhospitable surroundings. There she sees seven locked doors and demands, so that she may permanently uncover all that is hidden, key after key from the Duke, which Bluebeard hands over to her reluctantly. Shuddering all over, she thus uncovers the castle’s secrets piece by piece: Behind the first door she comes upon a torture chamber, behind the second a weapons chamber, behind the third, a treasure chamber; behind the fourth, a wondrous garden —and each time she discovers with horror that everything she finds is soaked in blood.
Even the vast, magnificent, light-drenched landscape—the Duke’s magnificent realm—which unfolds before her when the fifth door opens, becomes, for Judith, a distressing experience due to the unsettling, blood-red shadows cast by passing cloudsexperience. Despite the Duke’s urgent warnings, she then demands the key to the sixth door as well, behind which a still, white lake of tears comes into view. Now Judith can no longer be stopped. She thinks she knows what awaits her behind the last door: The corpses of Bluebeard’s three murdered former wives. Deaf to every plea, every declaration of love, every admonition from the duke, she, in a state of utmost excitement, compels him to reveal the final secret —and to her great horror, after the seventh door is opened, her former wives, magnificently dressed and adorned,: alive. For Bluebeard, they symbolize morning, noon, and evening—just as Judith, added as the fourth wife, will from then on represent the night.
Director Vasily Barkhatov conceives the evening as the story of a single couple, whose highly emotional relationship—and the work they put into it—we, the audience, are allowed to follow: In *The Florentine Tragedy*, we are introducedto Bianca and Simone. Very briefly, in fast-forward, the beginning of their marriage is depicted, the happiness they found in each other and in the upscale interior design business they founded together.
But everyday life and routine soon caused their initial passion and joy to fade, and so the two now find themselves at a dead end in their life together. To give the relationship one last chance, Bianca hires a psychotherapist. And he sugests a role-playing game—on the shop’s premises. The tenor here isn’t one of Bianca’s secret lovers, but rather someone who comes to help get their relationship back on track. As is often the case in similar situations, the husband, Simone, finds this role-playing simply ridiculous and pointless and only goes along with it out of necessity.
However, without even realizing it, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the situation. Not least because, in this game, the therapist takes on the name Guido Bardi—one of Bianca’s actual former lovers— and in this way stirs up Simone’s jealousy to such an extent that everything spirals out of control. Finally, Simone snaps and kills the therapist. But it is precisely this relapse into animality, this murder comparable to the rage of a Stone Age warrior, reignites Bianca’s former passion, and Simone, too, sees Bianca anew with fresh, admiring eyes. The therapist was thus successful, but pays for that success with his life. For the intermission between acts, the production claims that behind the closed curtain, as the culmination of their reunion, Bianca and Simone experience a liberating sexual.
As they emerge from the sensory frenzy they have just experienced, Bartók’s *Bluebeard’s Castle* begins after the intermission. In light of this extreme situation, in light of what has happened, the couple is now ready to finally lay all their cards on the table. And so they force themselves, as a couple, to work through all the earlier stages of their relationship once and for all. In this production, the seven locked doors do not merely point to Bluebeard’s inner life alone. On the contrary: they are about uncovering shared traumas, and to bring to light all the repressed, mutually inflicted wounds.
The necessary process of symbolically opening the doors thus takes on nightmarish characteristics. But it is precisely this painful—for both—tearing through this shared past that heals what has been in the very moment they face it head-on.
At the end of the play, the couple will discover themselves on a new level of relationship—one that is permanently sustainable. Bluebeard’s final line—“And from now on, it will be night forever...”—is thus not to be understood in the usual-disillusioned sense, but rather as a positive definition of the new status quo. So we see a happy couple going to bed together after a long day. And that, too, is one of the takeaways from this evening: those who believe that happiness cannot be built on the misfortune of others are mistaken. The protagonist couple builds its happiness on the death of a third person. And this third person is simply shoved under the bed …
Although composed at almost the same time, the two pieces of the evening, A Florentine Tragedy and Bluebeard's Castle, offer completely different soundscapes, which gives this combination an additional appeal. In Bluebeard 's Castle, described as a mystery by the librettist Béla Balázs, one can hear the influence of the French Impressionists as well as Béla Bartók's preoccupation with Eastern European folk music. There is a particular focus on the orchestra, which takes on the actual leading role here and depicts the emotional ups and downs of the protagonists as well as the actual narrative of the drama. The two protagonists, Judith and the Duke, take on the role of a commenting declamation for long stretches.
In Alexander Zemlinsky's Eine Florentinische Tragödie, the audience is treated to an extraordinarily lush orchestral splendor inspired by Oscar Wilde's richly pictorial poem, which oscillates between late Romanticism and modernism and was clearly influenced by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.
Eine florentinische Tragödie and Bluebeard's Castle were each only produced once at the Vienna State Opera: Eine Florentinische Tragödie came to a single series of performances in 1917, the year of its premiere, and Bluebeard's Castle only achieved nine performances between 1985 and 1989. The new production thus brings both works back into the theater's repertoire after a long break. And with a cast of almost iconic singers from the world of opera. Asmik Grigorian will take on both female roles, creating an additional link between the two pieces. Florian Boesch returns as Duke Bluebeard, and Christopher Maltman will take on another role on this stage as Simone.
This production is sponsored by
»Eine florentinische Tragödie« is supported by the Alexander Zemlinsky Fonds bei der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien.
