Calgary Opera’s final offering of its 2024/2025 season consists of a double bill that contains some interesting coincidences and contrasts. By way of coincidences, these two one-act operas, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, both received their first performances in the same year: 1918. However, Puccini’s opera was to be his last fully
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
Article content
Calgary Opera’s final offering of its 2024/2025 season consists of a double bill that contains some interesting coincidences and contrasts. By way of coincidences, these two one-act operas, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, both received their first performances in the same year: 1918. However, Puccini’s opera was to be his last fully completed opera after a long career; Bartók’s opera was his first and only venture into this medium. Bartók’s opera is being performed this year in both Edmonton and Calgary within two months of each other. The Calgary production is Canada’s first production in its original form. The Edmonton production is completely different to the point of being nearly a different opera.
Article content
Story continues below
Article content
Article content
While Bluebeard’s Castle is familiar to opera audiences as a name, its general unfamiliarity caused some issues at the box office opening night. Instead of the usual robust audience, the Jubilee Auditorium had many empty seats, and even the inclusion of one of Puccini’s most amusing operas seems not to have been enough to draw the customary support. This was a pity since both performances are very fine.
Article content
Noon News Roundup
Article content
Much care and effort has gone into the production of both operas. Scott Reid, the set and lighting director, and Heather Moore, in charge of costume, are both Calgary based and provided high quality work. The stage direction by Alain Gauthier, veteran of many successful opera productions, is pointed and astute.
Article content
Jonathan Brandani, the company’s artistic director, led the orchestra, continuing his impressive run of sensitive, highly musical performances as a conductor. As on previous occasions, he coaxed the best from a willing Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra in musical scores of considerable complexity. The orchestra played with impressive authority, delivering the lush, Debussy-style elements of the Bartók opera with keen understanding. The opening prologue, read in impeccable English by local bass Paul Grindley, made for an excellent way to approach the world of dark intrigue in Bluebeard’s Castle.
Article content
Story continues below
Article content
With respect to Bluebeard’s Castle, the meaning of the opera is, to say the least, enigmatic and veiled. Instead of offering some specific director’s interpretation, Gauthier presented the opera as written, leaving the audience to determine what it is all about. On the surface the story couldn’t be simpler: Judith, a naïve young woman, has defied the wishes of her family and has married Duke Bluebeard. As the opera opens, they enter his dark and forbidding castle. Here Judith discovers seven doors. Curious about what is behind them, she presses her new, taciturn husband for the keys to these doors, behind which she finds many things that are clearly symbolic, including a torture chamber, untold riches, a garden, and a lake of tears. The final door (spoiler alert) contains Bluebeard’s three previous wives. In the end Judith joins them, leaving Bluebeard alone in his dark castle, a prisoner of himself.
Article content
Seen in this fairly simply way, it is a simple horror story. Or perhaps is is about the inability of Bluebeard to escape his own self-made prison. By contrast, Judith lacks the restraint not to walk down the road of curiosity, as this curiosity leads to her being imprisoned. These psychological elements, and possibly many others, are read through the lens of turn-of-the century mysticism of the sort found in Maurice Maeterlinck, the librettist for Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande, as well P.D. Ouspensky and other Eastern European mystics. Bartok was known to be fascinated with such thinkers and writers and with the condition of loneliness. As the director, Gautierleaves it up to you. Is it just a horror story, or is there something more?