Salzburg Festival 2022: Bluebeard's Castle

Synopsis

“Truly fascinating […] Outstanding: Mika Kares and Ausrine Stundyte.” (La Stampa) A pinnacle of early 20th-century musical theatre, Bluebeard’s Castle was composed to a text by Béla Balázs in 1911. The story of Bluebeard has its literary archetype in Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and tells of a wife-murderer who forbids his latest wife, who is driven by curiosity, to open a door behind which he has hidden his previous victims. Bartók’s opera develops entirely out of the dialogue between the two protagonists, Bluebeard and Judith, revealing an approach to the drama as a kind of spiritual and emotional force field. ‘Where is the stage: outside or within?’, as the prologue puts it, an invitation to the audience to ask themselves questions about the enigmatic nature of theatre as an allusive reverberation of the real.The Salzburg Festival presented Bluebeard’s Castle in a double bill evening together with Carl Orff’s De temporum fine comoedia. In his staging of the two works, Romeo Castellucci, reveals the profound connections in their juxtapositio between interiority and explosion of violent power.

Additional Info

• No: A04050221
• Composer: Béla Bartók
• Conductor: Teodor Currentzis
• Orchestra: Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester
• Artists: Mika Kares Duke Bluebeard, Ausrine Stundyte Judith, Helena Rasker Prolog
• Production year: 2022
• Run time: 01:05:00
• Director: Stage director: Romeo Castellucci
• Producers: UNITEL, Ö1, Salzburg Festival
• Format: HDTV 16:9