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His'n'hers expressionism

London
Covent Garden
02/27/2002 -  1, 5, 9, 11 March 2002

Béla Bartók: Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Katarina Dalayman (Judit), Willard W. White (Duke Bluebeard)
Andrew Litton (conductor), Calixto Bieito (director)

Arnold Schoenberg: Erwartung

Inge Nielsen (The Woman)

Lothar Zagrosek (conductor), Willy Decker (director)

Royal Opera orchestra

The Royal Opera's expressionist double bill is not for the emotionally fragile. Duke Bluebeard's Castle is at best a stately tale of horrible murder. But it is probably a heartbreakingly realistic account of the despair that emerges from intimacy in marriage when the other person's alluring and comforting presence turns out to be the surface of an abyss. Erwartung is a study of the alienated delusion required to maintain desire. The message that you are destroyed both by love and by rejection is the basis of most opera plots, but these two works expose the raw subjectivity of the experience in modernist formats.

Willy Decker's production for the Royal Opera stages both operas on the same dark, ruined set, dresses Judit and the woman in Erwartung alike and introduces a silent man (a clean shaven Bluebeard) as the addressee and victim of the woman. The light of the fifth door in Bluebeard becomes the Pierrot Lunaire-like moon over the woods in which the woman wanders, and the second-door flowers reappear. The payoff is not either work making more sense in the light of the other -- the staging makes it even clearer that they are deeply different -- but a nightmarish recurrence of things that are no longer the same. Where Bluebeard has a cosmological shape, like the seven days of creation ending in stillness, Erwartung is unstructured, an operatic scena reduced to its implicit hysteria with only inconsequential shards of narrative left. The long (thirty-five minute) interval between the two works makes the much shorter Erwartung seem even more dislocated from Bluebeard, but the puzzling connections are still haunting.

Musically there is also little connection between the two operas. Bluebeard has an original musical world, structured by speech and ideas and coloured by folk music, while Erwartung these days sounds conventionally expressionist. Lothar Zagrosek and the orchestra made the music of Bluebeard solid and appropriately architectural, but short on mystery or ambivalence. Katarina Dalayman was similarly a rather bourgeois Judit, warm and attractive but lacking a personality on the scale that Bluebeard would have wanted to posses. Willard W. White as Bluebeard was consistently sinister, sad and mysterious, attractive mainly because getting through to him was so obviously impossible. In Erwartung Inge Nielsen was glamorous and lusciously musical as the woman, while the orchestra delivered scrappy angst.


H.E. Elsom

 

 

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