The Prologue Béla Bartók's one act opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára), breaks with precedent. Before the curtain rises, even before the music begins, the ancient figure of a Prologue appears and speaks the opening text of Béla Balázs's libretto. Why is he there? What do his words mean? All too often, opera productions, recordings, academic discussions, even the one video, avoid these questions by omitting the Prologue entirely. Perhaps worse, the published German version of the libretto by Wilhelm Ziegler - based on Emma Kodály's first translation - imputes specific meaning to phrases left vague in the Hungarian. Similarly flawed, the English translation attempts to retain the poetic and rhythmic features of the Hungarian at the expense of rendering a literal equivalent. Even recent scholarship (e.g. Frigyesi and Leafstedt) misrepresents the text, despite the declared intent to be literal. For purposes of further discussion, therefore, I offer here the complete text of the Prologue with my own literal translation:

Not unlike Richard Wagner before him, Balázs (re)constructs the sound and texture of a distant past when poems were recited aloud. The formulaic use of alliteration and lilting rhythm - "Hol volt, hol nem" "Régi vár, régi már" or "Regénket regéljük" - combined with an AABB rhyme scheme and a fifth refrain line (Urak, asszonyságok) evokes a mythic world whose vagueness is underscored by non-specific adjectives ("ancient," "old"). The search for spatial specificity ("where") is similarly resolved only with a generic location ("castle"). By dislocating time and space which, according to Kant, determine cognition, meaning itself is rendered indeterminate and unstable, as the text itself concedes ("oh what does it mean?"). The loss of context and thus meaning becomes even more significant later, but already here serves to undermine the notion of a coherent narrative, a loss compounded when the traditional location of dramatic representation - the stage - is itself placed in doubt ("where's the stage: is it outside or in?").
For those who don't already ignore the Prologue, the "in" has come to mean the stage as representation of Bluebeard's soul. But, if we read carefully, the Prologue never mentions "Bluebeard" or his "soul." Instead, he refers to visual and aural stimuli ("Behold, the song sounds") and he questions the physicality of the stage. Even the conventional theatrical device separating spectator and action is textually eliminated leaving only the "eyelid" to function as "curtain." The Prologue uses the "eyelash-curtain" metaphor twice but with an important difference. The first mention (second stanza) is of "our" eyelash-curtain and the reciprocal gaze between Prologue and audience, a gaze-dynamic repeated at the beginning of the fourth stanza. After the fourth stanza, the music begins slowly and quietly in the low strings, an event noted in the first line of the next stanza: "Music sounds." Upon hearing the music, the Prologue commands the play to commence. Now the "drama" proper may start. The eyelash-curtainmetaphor is repeated, but the pronoun is altered from first person plural ("our") to first person singular ("my"). The Prologue's own eyelash-curtain is now up and, commanding that there be applause when it has fallen, draws our gaze directly into and through his eye. "The camera draws my eye along, deep into the picture," writes Balázs elsewhere.6 Accompanying this process is the music, constructed of four symmetrical four-bar phrases, which fuse the "Hungarian" pentatonic sound with the phrase structure of a Bach chorale, complete with fermatas. Listen how the already low strings playing in unison begin on F-sharp and move downwards, ending sixteen bars later on F-sharp an octave lower (see example 1):

The music pulls the listener in, like a camera slowly zooming in for a close-up. Text and music combined thus suggestively draw our gaze through the surface of the Prologue's eye where the unfolding drama of light and sound appears on the screen of his retina. We no longer see for ourselves but, rather, our vision becomes synonymous with his. We see only what is mediated through his eye: the lens of the camera.

Introduction

Duke Bluebeard's Castle, composed in 1911 and premiered in 1918, has by and large been interpreted as a symbolic journey through Bluebeard's soul, with Judith as the doomed explorer. This reading, loosely based on sporadic utterances by Bartók and Balázs, has been repeated time and again, from Sándor Veress's lengthy 1949 article, to essays by esteemed musicologist György Kroó, through to more recent books by Judith Frigyesi and Carl Leafstedt. To decode this enigmatic work in terms of psychological interiority is powerful and convincing, especially since this approach seems confirmed by the creators themselves. But it by necessity leaves many issues in the Prologue and elsewhere unresolved, and does violence to Balázs's marvelously open-ended text, whose vagueness resists definitive interpretation. This approach also quite literally puts the cart before the horse by using the drama to explain the Prologue rather than the other way around.
"Where's the stage: is it outside or in?" asks the Prologue. The conventional answer "Bluebeard's soul" - is enriched by an important clue from Balázs, not in his comments on the opera itself, but in his later writings on film theory: "Film is a surface art (Flächenkunst), where 'what's inside, is outside'" (emphasis in original). 7 If we refer to Balázs's theory of film, Bluebeard's Castle becomes much more than just a psychological profile of Bluebeard's soul. It seems consumed with the most significant shift in the presentation of drama since the invention of the genre: the advent of cinema and the long-term consequences for the theatrical stage. Bluebeard's Castle is a remarkably early operatic response to film. It ponders the dislocation of the stage as the sole or even dominant locus of dramatic representation; it suggests the displacement of opera as the only genre in which the textual-literary, sonic-musical, and visual-artistic media are combined; it emphasizes the differences between cinematic and theatrical forms of seeing. Why has no one thought to use Balázs's theory of film as a key to unlock the mysteries of Bluebeard's Castle? I can offer three reasons. First, because of their often sheer ludicrousness, opera librettos in general are rarely subjected to careful interpretation. Second, Hungary's status amongst European cultures has coloured investigations of Bluebeard's Castle both by Hungarians and non-Hungarians. Musically it is pigeon-holed as an example of Bartók's new "Hungarian" style. Even Hungarian readers seem unable to consider the work's text as anything but a "provincial" echo of French fin-de-siecle literary movements. Lastly, Balázs scholarship traditionally and, in my view, mistakenly separates the life and work of the young poet/dramatist of the so-called Nyugat (West, as their flagship journal was called) generation, from the later exile period in Germany and the USSR after 1919 when Balázs turned to film and made a name for himself as a scriptwriter and pioneer of film theory. His visionary books and essays not only assess critical differences between film and theatre but also speculate on the as yet unrealized technical possibilities of the new medium. Is it not possible that the monumental impact of film had already begun to affect Balázs's thinking before he formally turned to the new technology?

Inside the eye of the Prologue

Once his words are spoken and the dramatic action commences, there is no further indication of the Prologue in the musical score or the stage directions. Productions and analyses that don't already cut him entirely assume that he exits the stage at this point. But there is no evidence in the score to support such an interpretation. What if the Prologue never leaves? If, as I am suggesting, the drama is mediated through the lens of his eye - the camera lens - then the ensuing action is contingent on his existence even if we are not aware of it. In fact, we must not be "aware" of it, just as we are not aware of the camera in a film. Hence a possible answer to the "outside/inside" riddle.
Balázs explains the basic experiential transformation between stage performance and cinematic representation: in film, "our eye and with it our consciousness" undergoes a shift in identification: "In the cinema the camera carries the spectator into the film picture itself. We see everything from the inside... for our eyes are in the camera and become identical with the gaze of the characters". Perhaps this is why the score makes no mention of the Prologue's "exit".
The directions specify only that there is "total darkness" (teljes sötétség). The setting is a "mighty, round Gothic hall" (hatalmas kerek gotikus [sic] csarnok) which is "empty" and "dark" (üres, sötét) without "any windows or furnishing" (sem ablak, se dísz). Again, "Gothic" here signifies an indeterminate location rather than a specific historical style:

There is, so to speak, no Gothic per se ... only a Gothic ... as we see it. Today, if a Gothic film were made not by an art historian, but instead by an artist with modern sensibility, then that Gothic would take on an "expressionistic" character.

The freedom, even necessity, to interpret, reflected in this 1925 essay, is an important structural element in Bluebeard's Castle, necessitated by the deliberate vagueness of Balázs's stage directions. Today, the question of the stage director's role and responsibility is the most hotly debated issue in the world of theatre and opera. Balázs's text seems to anticipate this twentieth-century development, and his position in the debate is clear:

Enduring works for the theatre can be interpreted anew and in the spirit of the times by succeeding generations of directors and actors. Those works which can no longer be re-interpreted, fade. Only the possibility of renewed misunderstanding guarantees new understanding.

For a host of reasons - sociological, economic, aesthetic - the creation of new operatic works has decreased substantially over the last century and, with that, the emphasis has shifted to the revival of older (canonical) works. The ongoing debate concerns the dramaturgical scope of operatic revival. To what degree must the staging be "faithful" to the "intentions" of the composer and librettist, indeed what does "faithful" mean? The objective futility of the debate has done nothing to dissuade subjective expressions from all sides. All the more interesting then is Balázs's astonishingly early advocacy of what the Germans call "Regietheater" or directorial theatre - the activist intervention of the director in the process of theatrical or operatic revival. Balázs was clearly not the only voice during the 1920s to note theatre's changed circumstances. According to Stefan Zweig, Richard Strauss commented on the "death" of opera; and in 1927 Arnold Schoenberg blamed film in particular for the problem, predicting that with sound-colour-film, "the general public will hardly need to hear an opera sung and acted any more, unless a new path is found" (emphasis added). A year later, in 1928, Berlin music critic Adolf Weißmann echoed Schoenberg, stating that film "sucked the life blood" out of opera and postulated the "new path" as a renewal of operatic staging practice. Weißmann goes on to describe something like "Regietheater" as it was then practiced at Berlin's innovative Kroll Opera under the direction of Otto Klemperer. This "new path" already seems delineated in Bluebeard's Castle. Balázs's dark "Gothic" hall is an empty space waiting to be filled: like a studio before filming; a darkened cinema before the movie has begun or, as filmmaker Hans Jürgen Syberberg hauntingly suggested in a different context: the "black studio of our imagination."

From operatic staging to cinematic representation

Theatrical trappings give way to the dark interior of a cinema as the silhouetted figures of Bluebeard and Judith appear standing in the doorway: "Behold, look: this is Bluebeard's castle. It does not glitter like your father's" (Ime lássad: ez a kékszakállú vára. Nem tündököl, mint atyádé), he sings. The door closes and the interior returns to total darkness while the low strings slowly play a winding cycle again centered on F-sharp divided equally between eighth-notes, each cycle completed within one measure (see example 2).

Again and again, like the steady movement of film winding through a camera, or a warped phonograph each time tracing the same distinct contour, the repeated motif accompanies Judith as she feels her way, her eye getting used to the darkness. We grow acquainted with the castle's interior through her gaze; her eye is our eye: "the moving camera, the panoramic, moving device for the first time allows us to really experience space. ... Space remains continually in the picture, and is only combed, picked through, for the objects in it."

Judith covers her eyes (Eltakarja a szemét); Bluebeard observes: "Wouldn't it be better to be in your fiancé's castle? Roses run up white walls; the sun dances on the tiled roof?" But Judith does not want to go back: "Let me be ... I don't need roses, don't need sunlight," a sentiment she promptly contradicts: "your castle is so dark... Let's open the walls together: wind shall blow in, sun shall shine in. your castle shall glitter" - "But my castle doesn't glitter," he replies. Judith's conflicted reaction reflects the incompatibility between her evident expectations - a "glittering" edifice with white walls, and balconies, bathed in red (roses) and gold (sunlight) - and the reality of the dark, dank, cold environment in which she finds herself. The abandonment of the ostentatious and "glittering" opera house in favor of the austere dark cinema has its historical precedent in Wagner's conception of the festival theatre at Bayreuth, which is often described as the "original Odeon" with its concealed orchestra pit and emphasis on simplicity and complete darkness. For Balázs, too, the rejection of "everything decorative and ceremonial" contains both aesthetic and sociological dimensions: We've simplified... but this simplicity is not merely a matter of artistic technique! It is surely an essential change in taste, a complete transformation in our way of life... This general desire for simplicity stems from the skepticism of today's generation regarding the traditional modes of expression of the feudal and old bourgeois spirit (emphasis added).12 If the "traditional modes of expression" include theatre and opera, then Balázs's argument is that the demise of opera is a historical necessity. How ironic, then, that Balázs's one and only opera "stages" this process of displacement.

A gallery of images

One argument in favor of "Regietheater" is that it mitigates the banishment of opera to "museum art," a metaphor used by Theodor Adorno and others to suggest that opera in the twentieth century becomes a lifeless product placed on display as a gesture of preservation. I will return to the "museum" analogy later, but it is already hinted at when Judith becomes accustomed to the darkness and notices, in the walls of the interior, a gallery of seven large black closed doors:

Like so much else in the opera, this gallery is also inverted. While galleries normally function to present spectators with objects in their "best light," this one is designed for concealment. "You don't know what lies behind them" (Nem tudod, mi van mögöttük), says Bluebeard, and he later repeats: "you don't know what the door conceals" (Nem tudod, mit rejt az ajtó). The motif of "concealment," established in the opening lines of the prologue, is now represented visually by the closed doors. Like the modern consumer, Judith demands access and impatiently bangs at the first door until a deep sigh sounds: "What was this? What sighed? Who sighed?" (Mi volt ez? Mi sóhajtott? Ki sóhajtott?), she asks. Judith's inability to determine the source of the sound mimics our inability to distinguish between live and mechanical (re)production - a line blurred by the technological appropriation of human agency, a modern goal evident in the memorable advertising slogan of a popular cassette tape: "is it live or is it MemorexTM." Judith's oscillation between "what" and "who" sighs thus underscores the shift in sound production between live theatrical performance and recorded cinematic replay:

For us to become aware of a soft, fleeting sigh on stage, the director needs to stress it. ... In any event, the only way he can draw our attention to the soft sigh is by removing its unobtrusive hidden quality. ... On the other hand, the sound camera goes straight to it. And we hear the sound in its concealment as something inaudible.

Bluebeard eventually gives Judith the first of seven keys. The door opens and from deep within a shaft of red light is projected out into the dark hall (Az ajtó mögül mélybôl jövô véres hosszú sugarat vet be a csarnok padlójára). The "projection" of light marks yet another transformation. While theatrical "illumination" casts light to make a previously obscured object visible and thus meaningful, in film all the information is contained within the projected light itself.
"What do you see?" (Mit látsz?) asks Bluebeard. Once again, we rely on Judith's eyes since only the shaft of light is visible. Balázs's ideas about the new mode of seeing occasioned by film are significant: "My gaze and with it my consciousness identifies itself with the people in the film. I see that which they see from their own perspective. I myself have none." "Film is the art of seeing. Its innermost tendency drives towards unmasking and discovery." "Film has dis-covered a new world, which has been covered-up (concealed) from our eyes till now." This process of "dis-"covery is literally enacted by Judith opening the doors. After Judith describes what she sees, Bluebeard explains: "this is the torture chamber" (Ez a kinzókamra). Judith promptly assumes ownership of "the" torture chamber: "your torture chamber is awful" (Szörnyu a te kinzókamrád). She repeats this transfer from general to particular with attendant shift in meaning after the second door reveals what Bluebeard terms "the armoury." Judith continues to demand that all doors be opened, reasoning, despite all evidence to the contrary, that fresh air and sunlight should be let in. George Steiner explains: "We open the successive doors in Bluebeard's Castle because 'they are there'.... We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead." But I would counter that Judith's plea for the "reality" of sunlight is disingenuous. Instead, she is entranced by the seductive aesthetics of the projected light evidently irrespective of their often shocking content: "Here's the other stream, beautiful stream of light. Do you see it? Do you see it?" (Itt a másik patak, Szép fény patak. Látod? Látod?).
Judith goes on to open the first six doors revealing a gallery of images which Bluebeard in turn calls: 1. torture chamber, 2. armoury, 3. treasury, 4. hidden garden, 5. empire, 6. lake of tears. But even after he "identifies" what Judith sees, the significance and meaning of these images remains unclear: facets of Bluebeard's soul, say most interpreters. Maybe. Maybe not. "It is simply a thing per se. The picture in which it appears, doesn't refer beyond itself, neither to another thing, nor to its meaning."17 This is Balázs's definition of "absolute film," a concept he articulated during the silent era for films depicting no event, no invented or personal story, but instead presenting objects freed of all context. "Absolute film" requires the elimination of spatial and temporal specificity, and results in an indeterminacy reminiscent of the Prologue. Like the contents behind the doors, "absolute film" suspends Kantian modes of perception (time and space): "The causal connection is absent. Instead, a thing is extracted from time and space and also from all causality. It is pure appearance, nothing but a vision. We are here in the sphere of absolute film."18 If the images in the gallery are considered within the parameters of "absolute film," the necessary preservation of their meaninglessness accounts for Bluebeard's admonition: "You are going to see, but never ask. Whatever you see, never ask!" (Látni fogsz, de sohse kérdezz. Akár mit látsz, sohse kérdezz!). Judith's self-destructive insistence on explanation sabotages the liberating potential of absolute film, and traps her within the limitations of her own constructed meaning. Her inquisitiveness seals her fate: "Judith, fear not, it's all the same now" (Judith, ne félj, most már mindegy). While George Steiner rightly understands Bluebeard's Castle as a critique of modernity, this sequence recalls the efforts of early twentieth-century filmmakers like Paul Wegener, who tried to resist the coopting of film by those who used cinema to satisfy popular tastes. Their oppositional stance continued theoretically with Adorno's indictment of the Hollywood culture industry, and programmatically with, among others, a group of leftist filmmakers dedicated to the subversive ideals of New German Cinema.
"Absolute film's" utopian potential is undermined not only by Judith's quest for meaning, but by a series of blood stains she subsequently notices covering the images. A musical "blood motif" accompanies her observation. But why does Judith never notice the blood when the doors first open? Balázs provides an important clue:

What is the specifically filmic quality of the close-up, since theatre directors can also carefully point to details? It lies in the possibility of lifting an individual image out of the totality. Thus not only do we see the small atoms of life more clearly than on the stage, the director also takes our eyes along. On stage, we always see the entire image ....but in film, the director focuses our attention using the close-up and shows us the concealed corners within the wide angle shot. The close-up in film is the art of emphasis (Betonung).

It is as though Judith is first presented with a wide shot of the image and then, with the sudden change in music (literally: "Betonung"), sees a close-up of the blood spots. Paradoxically, perhaps, Balázs was the first to theorize the "close-up," a cinematic technique which undermines Balázs's own idea of "absolute film." The close-up manipulates context and intensifies meaning by forcing the eye of the viewer to focus on a certain spot. It exercises an authorial control inconceivable on the stage, and robs cinematic technique of "absolute film's" abstract potential.

The Seventh Door: death and transfiguration

The seventh door deviates from the pattern established by the previous six. Bluebeard tries even more stubbornly to withhold the key, relenting only after an extended argument in which Judith voices her suspicion that his former wives are locked behind the door. To her horror, she discovers not only that she was correct but that the three imprisoned women are still alive, albeit silent and "pale-faced" (sápadt arccal). Are they being "projected," like the pale heroines in a silent film who move but emit no sound? Or are they like actors on a stage, "illuminated" and corporeal? While the preceding six doors suggested a gallery of projection booths reminiscent of today's multiplex cinemas, the seventh door straddles stage and screen. It is literally a "museum" which (dis)plays the moment of transition between two modes of dramatic representation. Bluebeard explains that he found each of the women at a particular time of day: dawn, noon and evening respectively. He now perpetually identifies each wife with the time of day he found her: "Hers is now every dawn (noon / evening)" (Övé most már minden hajnal [dél / este]). The seventh door performs the shift from production to preservation and thus mimics the altered state of opera in the twentieth century which, according to Adorno, becomes "like a museum of bygone images and gestures, to which a retrospective need clings." Using the film analogy, the women, immortalized in Bluebeard's museum of living muses, are only shells of their former selves - all surface, no substance - timeless or sealed in time, captured on celluloid. They cannot age; they cannot change, but instead are condemned to repeat their appointed role in an endless loop. Robbed of their aura, they are immortalized in perpetual replay mode: Marilyn Monroe will be forever young because there are no images of her as an old woman. Balázs observes: in film, "the original artistic intent of the creator. is clearly and immutably 'immortalized'."20 In a sense, both opera and film fit the museum analogy, each engaged in their own particular task of preservation. The difference is that while film is a medium of preservation, the film industry tirelessly produces new works. Increasingly, opera survives largely on the revival of older works; it is a medium which is being preserved. But opera is not necessarily "dead," despite the meaning of "revival." Balázs makes an important point:

That theatre which strove with imperfect means for the illusion of reality, means which colour-sound-film will soon have, that theatre is already redundant. But precisely for this reason, theatre will once again be theatre. ...Sound film will save the theatre.

We need not belabour the point here that, of all theatre, the most distant from reality is opera. To paraphrase Balázs, then, the existence of film allows opera to be opera. His perhaps surprisingly positive evaluation of the impact film technology might have on the future of theatre thus compels a nuanced reading of the final moments in Bluebeard's Castle.
After Bluebeard introduces each of the three women, he turns his gaze to Judith: "I found the fourth at night ... yours will now be every night." He leads her to join the other three while Judith cries in futile desperation: "Be quiet, listen, I am still here" (Hallgass, hallgass, itt vagyok még!).22 Judith is not being killed but instead undergoes a process of transfiguration. She literally loses her"self" (i.e. despite her protests, the "I" is no longer still here). Yet, paradoxically, she continues to exist. In film, Balázs points out: "The person is integrated as a mechanized part into a mechanical system and alienated from his individuality." Judith, the insatiable consumer, is consumed, swallowed up and yet preserved for future consumption: forever lost, yet retained.
The seventh door closes and Bluebeard, enveloped by darkness, disappears with the words: "and now it will always be night" (És mindég is éjjel lesz már), as the music gradually withers away. Bartók's musical instruction - perdendosi, literally: losing itself - sonically accompanies Judith's fate.
The curtain falls and we too see only darkness, no Prologue. Have we the audience, the modern spectator, also become trapped - "integrated into a mechanical system" - our mode of viewing forever transformed by the advent of the camera?

Concluding thoughts

The thematic ambiguity of loss and retention at the conclusion of Bluebeard's Castle mitigates the presumptively tragic ending. The textual, musical and visual darkness, commonly interpreted as representing "the tragedy of Judith and Bluebeard's lost love," or as an expression of "complete resignation," also functions as the state from which the opera began. The cycle from darkness to light to darkness re-enacts on stage the common experience of the audience in the (movie) theatre. Bluebeard is now self-sufficient in his home theatre, endlessly free to gaze at his gallery of images or his archival collection of preserved representations appropriate for any time of day or night.
The distinct modes of stage and screen which meet behind the seventh door continue to exist despite the suggestion of darkness. There, they perform the particular hybrid form of living death which distinguishes one medium from the other. While film is by definition not a "live" medium, it nevertheless serves as the dominant representational form of the contemporary and the current, no matter how thematically escapist. By contrast, although operatic performance is necessarily "live," the medium conveys outdatedness and, indeed, seemed outdated even at the beginning of the twentieth century accounting perhaps for the spate of operas retrospectively devoted to opera. This outdatedness becomes the pervasive aesthetic of works like Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (1916) and Capriccio (1942) which avert their gaze from the present and, instead, indulge in nostalgic reverie for the bygone age.
Bluebeard's Castle instead looks ahead and responds to opera's crisis by suggestively hedging on the finality of death. The performance of an opera entails an interpretation - dependent on the director's own temporal and geographical context - an interpretation which the audience in turn must interpret. Films deliver the director's interpretation as an essential component. While the audience's interpretation of a film may change at each screening, the director's remains fixed. "Liveness," lost to film through mechanical reproduction, is retained in opera by the "liveliness" of interpretation combined with the "liveness" of performance. Balázs does not see the ascendance of one medium at the expense of the other. Rather, he advocates the full exploitation of the possibilities unique to each art form. This is certainly true for his later theoretical work and, in retrospect, also for his one and only opera.
Bluebeard's Castle mediates with marvellous ambiguity between the two forms of dramatic representation new and old: while film preserves in suspended animation what it embalms and repetitiously projects, opera retains its vitality through the transfigurative process of staging. In Bluebeard's Castle, there is room for both.

Nicholas Vázsonyi
is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature
and Director of German Studies at the University of South Carolina.
He is currently writing a book about Richard Wagner.