In Search of Truth – Ariane et Barbe-Bleue by Paul Dukas

The night can be starry or impenetrable, sacred or terrifying, silent or filled with screeching demons. In the technological age, night can be turned into day, yet it remains the time of day without the sun, the biological source of energy. When the environment vanishes into darkness, humans are thrown back upon themselves, upon their fantasies, fears and inner perceptions. That is what today’s programme is about.

The depiction of the nocturnal state as existential uncertainty and insight is a speciality of Romantic art. Around 1900, psychoanalysis emerged as a young science, promising to answer existential questions by shedding light on the subconscious: What is a human being? How did they become the way they are? Is their life unchangeable? What is their purpose? The idea that monsters slumber within us all, capable of wreaking havoc if left unrecognised, also evokes the old fairy tales with their archetypes.

One particularly chilling tale is that of the knight with the ice-blue beard – Charles Perrault recounted it in 1697 in his collection of fairy tales, Contes de ma Mère l’Oie (Tales of Mother Goose): The immensely wealthy King Bluebeard marries a young lady from a good family. His castle is open to her – only one locked room is strictly off-limits. When Bluebeard goes away, she opens the forbidden door and finds the corpses of his former wives. Bluebeard returns and realises she has betrayed him. At the last moment, the woman’s brothers manage to kill the king before their sister meets the same fate as her predecessors.

A chilling bedtime story, which Perrault still saw as a warning to all curious women not to delve too deeply into the emotional abysses of their husbands. Yet it is precisely these abysses that interest the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck 200 years later. In his play Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, Ariane leaves her husband at the end, whilst his former wives, even after their liberation from the dungeon, are unable to break free from him. Maeterlinck’s partner, the opera singer and actress Georgette Leblanc, played Ariane at the play’s premiere in 1899. Eight years later, Leblanc once again took to the stage as Ariane at the Opéra-Comique in Paris – this time as a singer in Paul Dukas’s opera of the same name, for which Maeterlinck had written the libretto.

Dukas, a perfectionist plagued by self-doubt, spent years refining this work in order to endow the music with a »symphonic« life of its own. In doing so, he instinctively does justice to Maeterlinck’s darkly murmuring language. »The peculiarities of his musical language operate in the shadows« as his most famous pupil, Olivier Messiaen, put it.

The prelude to Act 3 contrasts the tense, unresolved motif of the woman-murderer Bluebeard with the gently shimmering, liberated timbre of Ariadne. »Why did Dukas choose Ariane?« wonders Messiaen, a devout Catholic. For him, Ariane is a saint who brings light and truth into the world. Yet one can also read the story in a less Christian light: as the emancipation of a woman from patriarchal bonds.

Light and Shadow – Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes

Five years before Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande premiered in Paris, also based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, who was extremely fashionable at the time. In this opera, darkness reigns almost constantly on stage; no light illuminates the inscrutable characters, who seem like the living dead. If one were to seek a counterpart to Pelléas et Mélisande in painting, a work by the American James McNeill Whistler – whom Debussy admired – would spring to mind. This Nocturne in Black and Gold is an abstract painting, inspired by distant night-time fireworks, in which the golden showers of sparks from the exploding rockets barely illuminate the dense black of the night.

Debussy loves this painting because it disregards all classical rules and forms and depicts reality as a person perceives it in that particular moment. He wishes for this same approach in music. »It consists of colours and rhythms«, the composer writes to his publisher Auguste Durand. »The rest is utter humbug, invented by soulless imbeciles riding on the coattails of the old masters.«

Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold plays a role in the complicated genesis of Debussy’s Trois Nocturnes for orchestra. [The third Nocturne Sirènes featuring an additional female choir in the third movement, is omitted from today’s concert]. An orchestral project entitled Trois scènes au crépuscule (Three Scenes at Twilight) likely served as a precursor to the Nocturnes. At times, the idea of adapting it into a concert piece for the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe was also under consideration. By 1899, the Nocturnes were largely complete in their present form, yet Debussy continued to make corrections to the score until the end of his life. The Orchestre Lamoureux performed the first two movements in Paris in late 1900, followed a few months later by the complete world premiere.

Debussy revealed some programmatic details about the Nocturnes to his biographer Léon Vallas – according to him, Nuages (Clouds) is intended to depict a stormy atmosphere over the Seine, with the signal of a steamship imitated by the English horn, whilst Fêtes (Festivals) portrays the procession of the Republican Guard in the Bois de Boulogne. Yet such concrete descriptions merely scratch the surface of this novel music: here, Debussy breaks completely free from the dictates of »motif-based composition«. Admittedly, Nuages still features musical figures such as the languid downward movement of the strings, the »signal« of the English horn with the echo of the horns, or the Far Eastern-sounding motif of the flute and harp in the middle section. But they no longer form a structure, but rather planes and points of light. Following this strange music of stillness, Fêtes brings pure rhythm and a driving movement. The tonal contrasts between strings, wind instruments and percussion are sharply defined; the music is crisply cut – as in the film, which had been invented shortly before in Paris by the Lumière brothers.

Eternal Night – Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók

Once again, Bluebeard and his latest wife take to the stage. This time, she bears the biblical name Judith, which suggests her willingness to make sacrifices, but also her fearlessness. She is determined, at any cost, to bring light into the soul of her taciturn husband. Yet the message of Béla Bartók’s only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, is fatalistic: human destiny, especially that of the sexes, is immutable – and all attempts to break free from psychological constraints destroy love.

This version of the Bluebeard story is by Béla Balázs. Born Herbert Bauer in Szeged, Hungary, he studied in Berlin under the philosophers Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey. After the First World War, Balázs, together with Bartók, played an active role in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic; following its collapse, he fled to Vienna, where he discovered his passion for film. He wrote books on film theory and the screenplay for Leni Riefenstahl’s first cinematic opus »Das blaue Licht«. Balázs spent the years of fascism in Moscow and died in Budapest in 1949.

Even the prologue to his libretto foreshadows the parable: »You look at me. I look at you. The curtain of our eyelids is wide open. Are you looking for the stage? Yes, where has it been unveiled? Within you? Within me? At the rusty pole of time?«

The address is reminiscent of medieval epics. Yet here the focus is not on »external« adventures and deeds, but on Bluebeard’s »inner« state. The setting, an old, poorly ventilated castle, is merely a metaphor for his subconscious, which is encased in an impenetrable armour.

Seven doors lead to the secret chambers of the male ego. Against Bluebeard’s resistance, Judith will open them all with her tenacity, which brooks no secrets. The torture chamber symbolises Bluebeard’s violence, the armoury the warlord, the treasury and the garden wealth and a love of beauty. Judith discovers blood everywhere, yet she continues to ask questions. The fifth door reveals a view of Bluebeard’s estates. Then the mood shifts. A pale lake of tears appears behind the sixth door. When Judith asks which women Bluebeard possessed before her, the seventh door opens. Three women appear in the robes of morning, noon and evening – now Bluebeard adorns Judith with the insignia of night: »You were the fairest of my wives, the fairest of all!« Judith follows her predecessors into the seventh chamber; the door closes behind her, and Bluebeard is left alone in the darkness.

Béla Bartók’s musical language is sparse and focused. Only once, when the fifth door opens, does the orchestra, together with the organ and stage music, burst into overwhelming splendour. Otherwise, the tone remains restrained and harmonically suspended, with an icy breeze running through the score. There are echoes of Debussy’s sensuality of sound, yet Bartók is at his most personal whenever – usually in connection with the title character – he evokes the folk music from Hungary to Transylvania, which he explored on long journeys with his friend Zoltán Kodály.

In the record time of six months, Bartók completed the composition of his first (and last) opera in 1911. But it was not until 1918 that Duke Bluebeard’s Castle premiered at the Budapest Opera House, where it was warmly received, particularly by Kodály. He noted that »the arc of the drama and the parallel arc of the music reinforce one another to form a magnificent double rainbow«. Indeed, Bartók’s opera traces a grand arc through the gradual brightening and subsequent darkening of scene and music in a series of variations. In the end, Judith’s hope of ever penetrating Bluebeard’s innermost being has been shattered: »Now it remains night forever …«

Michael Struck-Schloen

Michael Struck-Schloen, born in Dortmund in 1958, studied musicology, German language and literature, and art history. He works as a freelance writer for newspapers, specialist journals and the public service broadcaster. He is also known to many WDR listeners as a presenter.