Bartók and Dukas

Balázs must have encountered the latest manifestation of this spirit of adaptation, shaping, creating versions and ringing the change in Paris, where the Opéra Comique in 1907 staged Paul Dukas's three-act opera, based on a work by Maurice Maeterlinck, a musical tale entitled Ariane et Barbe-bleue. He may have gone with Kodály to see the new opera, whose libretto Maeterlinck had expressly intended for a musical setting ("une sorte d'opéra légendaire ou féerique destinée avant tous ŕ la musique") and called a "simple libretto" ("Un canevas pour le musicien").

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A similarly concrete musical link exists between the music of Dukas's opera and that of Bartók. Their common folk-song character creates a similarity between Bartók's above quoted four-line pentatonic melody and the complaint of the earlier women in the Dukas's opera. Dukas's melody is also strophic, with two different lines being repeated to make up a verse, and the verse with the keynote of D sharp being repeated in full, starting from F sharp. Its archaism springs from its modal colour. Originally, in the 1911 first version of Bluebeard's Castle and even in the 1912 second version, Bartók repeated his folk-song imitation, though not transposed, simply with a different orchestration and harmonization (Ex. 2).

In fact the tonality of Dukas's and Bartók's operas is also the same. Ariane et Barbe-bleue opens and closes in F sharp minor as does Bluebeard's Castle. If in Dukas one separates the first act from the body of the opera and compares the episode of the opening of the seven doors with Bartók's one-act opera, one finds another, highly important analogy on the plane of the musical and dramatic relationship between tonality and lighting. On opening the sixth door, Dukas's music is filled with the radiance of the diamonds behind it. The story, started in F sharp minor, here switches to F sharp major: "L'irradiation est intolérable (Ex. 3).

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