Béla Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle / The Magnificent Mandarin
La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2018
Alain
Altinoglu, Christophe Coppens, Ante Jerkunica, Nora Gubisch, Gábor
Vass, Vincent Clavaguera-Pratx, Merche Romero, Brigitta Skarpalezos, Dan
Mussett, Norbert De Loecker, Amerigo Delli Bove, James Vu Anh Pham
La Monnaie Streaming - June 2018
When
you read about the atrocities committed by the real-life inspiration
for Bluebeard, it seems a little tasteless to make his story the subject
of a fairy tale or an opera. Rather than focus on the horrors of what
really took place in the castle of Gilles de Rais, the dark fairy tale
story has become more of a cautionary tale on how a woman attempts to
break down defensive barriers of masculine power and control in order to
engage love and self-awareness but falls victim in the end to her own
feminine weaknesses of curiosity and jealousy. That's one
interpretation anyway, but there is a certain amount of ambiguity played
with there as well as a sense of horror at what can lie in the darker
recesses of the human psyche. Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle does
actually explore that quite successfully.
It's a
beautifully structured and concise piece, gifted with a score from
Bartók that is precisely attuned to its moods and darkness, yet, it's
not so precise that it can't also convey the ambiguity that
allows it to work on a number of levels. That character is very much
emphasised by the diabolically-intoned spoken-word introduction which
leaves it open whether what take place on the inside or the outside.
Are we looking at Duke Bluebeard's Castle as a place of horror or do the
seven locked rooms of the castle rather a symbolical representation of
the inner life of Duke Bluebeard?
The latter, the
symbolical and the allegorical, is very much to the fore in La Monnaie's
production directed by Christophe Coppens, the former artist and
fashion designer who has returned to his theatrical roots and who was
first involved with opera in La Monnaie's version of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, (which they retitled 'Foxie!'). The castle is a
grid of nine rooms, with Bluebeard at its centre unable to move,
unreachable, wrapped in the castle constrictor-like grip. Judit's
appearance and fearless willingness to explore breaks down this barrier
on the opening of the first chamber, but Bluebeard still remains
confined to a wheelchair until he is finally freed. Freeing Bluebeard
however might not be such a great idea.
The set design
highlights that this freedom is one of breaking down barriers to
self-awareness or self-reflection by making this a castle of mirrors.
Every surface is mirrored, but angled and distorting. It's dark, cold
blue, turning to red as Judit recognises that everything in each of the
rooms is covered in blood. The chambers themselves are of course
symbolic of what lies in the deeper recesses of the male psyche, bathed
in violence, avarice and secrecy, closing down human feelings, hiding a
lake of tears and sentiments of love in the seventh chamber. It's the
idea that Bluebeard might harbour those feelings for other women that
proves to be an open door that the woman can never close once she has
become aware of it. Some things are better not knowing.
As
a staging and representation Coppens' direction and designs are
effective enough, if not really spectacular, daring or revealing of any
new ideas or insights. It remains a fairly static production, with only
Judit moving slowly between one room and the next. The lighting brings
emphasis to the music, saving its big moment to chime with Bartók's
grand theme for the opening of the fifth chamber. It's in the musical
performance really that the work lives, and Alain Altinoglu finds that
epic quality in the work, the dark fairy-tale and the dark allegory.
It's a work for great singers too, and Ante Jerkunica and Nora Gubisch
bring out its chilling stridency.
What
is good about the production however is that it doesn't just view the
partnering piece as an entirely separate work, but uses Bartók's The
Magnificent Mandarin - composed in 1924 - to also to highlight and add
further commentary on Bartók's short 1918 opera - his only one - Duke
Bluebeard's Castle. It's a welcome change for seeing Duke Bluebeard's
Castle paired with another short one-act opera like Iolanta or La Voix
Humaine, and even as a ballet-pantomime, The Magnificent Mandarin is a
much more complementary piece than you would first imagine, and perhaps
even allows both works to gain something in the pairing.
If
Duke Bluebeard's Castle is all symbolism of suppressed and internalised
emotions, repressed sexual desire and violence, those characteristics
are made explicit to some extent in The Magnificent Mandarin, where an
unscrupulous brothel manager assaults and robs clients and pays for his
crimes when he murders a Chinese Mandarin. Coppens accordingly revisits
the dark chambers of the castle as the colourful and brightly lit rooms
of a brothel, where we can voyeuristically see those behaviours carried
out in the Technicolor style of Hitchcock's Rear Window. This might
perhaps account for Bluebeard appearing again at the conclusion in his
wheelchair, as otherwise there's no direct overlapping or reference
between the two parts of this production.
I say explicit,
but it's actually highly stylised, very much in the cartoon come to
life quality that Coppens used in Foxie! The Cunning Little Vixen. That
doesn't mean however that it can't get across the intent of the piece,
the sensuality and the violence that rises to the surface, and it's
often quite clever and imaginative in the designs, such as one of the
prostitutes wearing a skirt of legs that dissolve into a blur of body
parts in her tryst with the Mandarin. Again it's Bartók's music that is
highly expressive and it's matched much more precisely to the dancer's
movements and actions, delivered with like precision and expression by
Alain Altinoglu's conducting of the La Monnaie orchestra.
Links: La Monnaie
Leoš Janáček - The Cunning Little Vixen
La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2017
Antonello Manacorda, Christophe Coppens, Andrew Schroeder, Lenneke Ruiten, Sara Fulgoni, John Graham-Hall, Alexander Vassiliev, Vincent Le Texier, Yves Saelens, Mireille Capelle, Eleonore Maguerre, Maria Portela Larisch, Logan Lopez Gonzalez, Marion Bauwens, Kris Belligh
ARTE Concert - March 2017
In theory I like the way that La Monnaie actually take the animals out of their 2017 production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen, since the anthropomorphised creatures of the opera are really meant to teach us about human life. Yes, I'm aware that this seems to go against the whole purpose of the work being an allegory in the first place, but the danger with The Cunning Little Vixen is that the baby animals either make the work too cutesy trying to talk down to a younger audience or risk missing the point entirely. The Cunning Little Vixen can be a good opera for young children, but making the opera suitable for that particular audience can involve some amount of compromise.
In practice however, director Christophe Coppens' modernisation and de-animalisation of the work does also involve some measure of compromise with the original intentions of the work, to the extent that it almost - but not quite - distorts the meaning of the work; if you can even figure out what it is trying to achieve. In recognition perhaps that this version doesn't present the work entirely the way that Janáček intended, and does involve some reworking of the libretto (in the translation at least, but not in the actual sung text), the La Monnaie production of The Cunning Little Vixen is prefaced by the title Foxie!
It's not long before you recognise how much the original storyline is distorted in 'Foxie!'. The Forester in this version is something of a security guard for a school, with monitors in his office to keep an eye on the children going wild outside on a summer evening. The groups of children have their own little groups and cliques that match the creatures of the animal kingdom. Foxie is a young red-head girl phoning home for her 'Mami', but unable to get through, so the Security guy takes her across the way to a cafe. When he sees that Foxie still hasn't been picked up and is somewhat in distress, he brings her back to the control room and leads her to a backroom. Then it all goes a bit David Lynch.
The immediate problem that tends to go against the grain of the original to a worrying degree is that it changes the Forester capturing a fox into what looks like a case of child abduction and molestation. Foxie is introduced not into a yard with hens and a cockerel lording it over them, but some kind of surreal brothel from which she eventually escapes. This is definitely not a 'kiddie' version of The Cunning Little Vixen. Arguably, you could wonder whether that is not the underlying context of Janáček's version, which does indeed have a sexual undercurrent that is often played upon in other productions, but it still doesn't feel comfortable in this presentation. But I don't think it's meant to be comfortable, and Janáček's opera certainly doesn't offer any illusions about the harshness and cruelty of nature, and the nature of men.
While some of the imagery is indeed Lynchian, looking like it is a nightmare taken from 'Inland Empire', it's used to suggest a conflict in generational outlooks rather than attempt to probe split personalities or a mind in conflict with itself. There is also something of a Stefan Herheim feel to the production that is similar to his treatment of Rusalka at La Monnaie, where the water nymph was also a prostitute in an similarly elaborate street-scene production. The key difference however is that Herheim uses such techniques to delve beneath the surface of the fantasy to attempt to probe the underlying source or psychology of the story, either from what it tells us about the origins of the fairy-tale or what it tells us about the author and composer. In The Cunning Little Vixen the allegory is already there to allow us to explore and consider the underlying meaning, so any attempt by Christophe Coppens to change that risks altering its message.
But perhaps that's for a good reason. If there is a way of making sense of this production it's perhaps viewing the older Foxie as someone who is being persecuted by society for living an alternative lifestyle. That certainly is one notable change that is made in the subtitles, when Foxie accuses the poacher Harašta of wanting to kill her simply because she is different. That works with Foxie's back-to-nature fondness for the woods, living outside of conventional society. There also seems to be an emphasis on how her unconventional relationship with Goldie scandalises the neighbours, since there is little attempt here to make Goldie a male fox. You have to wonder whether the composer didn't intentionally score the role for a female to provoke just such a scandalous pairing, so there is validity in the production taking this path. The rather heavy petting that goes on between the two women does push this further than you might expect, so definitely not for the kids this one.
The question of how they produce cubs - such an essential element of the cycle of life that is the central theme of the work - is neatly covered by Foxie going on to become a gym teacher for a sports team of young girls. And it is all about allowing the younger generation to live free from the shackles of the tradition and morality of the previous generation, something that doesn't always come across in a more literal adaptation. Whether you find this all as an awkward attempt to fit an unwieldy, contradictory and often inexplicable concept on top of a work that has no real need to have any additional levels added to it, or whether you view the concept as having something meaningful to say about social change and tolerance being a necessary part of the cycle of life from one generation to the next, it does come up with a number of clever ways to make it work together, even if it takes it all a little further than Janáček might have intended.
The unconventional production certainly doesn't interfere in any way with the quality of the singing and musical performance. If anything, it gives the performances a youthful freshness and an extra edge. The role of Vixen/Foxie is sung exceptionally well by Lenneke Ruiten - one of the best performances I've heard of this role in recent times. The Forester is a rather more ambiguous figure in this production, but even there Andrew Schroeder makes it work and even come across as quite touching. There are no weak points anywhere else, all of the roles sung tremendously well. Antonello Manacorda's conducts the orchestra of La Monnaie and it's a vibrant, detailed and sensitive reading of the score that retains the rhythmic pulse and also recognises the folk elements of Janáček's brilliant, hypnotic score.
Links: La Monnaie-De Munt, ARTE Concert
