When Wagner began work on Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)—the first of his operas to show significant signs of the genius to come—in Paris in 1840, his circumstances left much to be desired. Having fled Riga to escape his many creditors, Wagner and his wife took illegal passage on a ship to London. Storms blew the ship off course, and it temporarily took refuge in the Norwegian fjords. When they finally reached London, the Wagners hastily moved on to Paris, where Richard hoped to arrange a production of his previous opera, Rienzi. The Opéra declined the piece, however, and Wagner scraped by on charity and occasional employment as a copyist and music critic.
Inspired by his tempestuous journey at sea and determined to have an opera produced, Wagner started in on Der fliegende Holländer, based on the legend of a captain doomed to sail the seas for eternity, coming ashore only once every seven years, as punishment for blasphemy. In Wagner’s version, the captain can win redemption only through obtaining the selfless and faithful love of a woman. Though the Opéra also wanted nothing to do with this new work, Wagner was eventually able to have both Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer performed in Dresden. The earlier opera was quite well received, but Holländer garnered little acclaim. Today, however, it is considered markedly superior to Rienzi and is generally thought to represent the beginning of Wagner’s mature oeuvre.
In Der fliegende Holländer, we begin to see Wagner’s legendary system of leitmotifs, identifiable musical themes that recur over the course of an opera to represent characters, items, locations, ideas, and dramatic events. Its overture contains the work’s major leitmotifs and sets the mood for the stormy opera, but it also stands fantastically well on its own. It begins with the fearsome brass theme that signifies the coming of the Dutchman, perched atop rising and falling strings that represent the howling wind and crashing waves of a storm at sea. The soft, pastoral woodwind melody that follows is associated with Senta, the girl who falls in love with the Dutchman and eventually flings herself from a cliff out of love for him, thereby winning his freedom from the curse. These three themes, and fragments taken from them, form the majority of the material for the overture, and Wagner weaves them together in both harmony and opposition to create a turbulent, dramatically taut microcosm of the opera as a whole. One can almost piece together the basic plot, with its moments of hope and crisis and its climax of innocent sacrifice and redemption through love, using nothing more than the music from the overture and a bit of imagination.
—Jay Goodwin
At once radical and traditionalist, Debussy rebelled against the French Wagner cult and the ponderous academic style of establishment composers like Saint-Saëns and d’Indy. Instead, he urged his fellow composers to cultivate the “pure French tradition” represented by Rameau, whose operas Debussy was instrumental in reviving in the early 1900s. “For a long time, and for no apparent reason, Rameau remained almost completely forgotten,” he wrote in an appreciation that revealed just how closely he identified with the Baroque master. “His charm, his finely wrought forms—all these were replaced by a way of writing music concerned only with dramatic effect … Rameau’s major contribution to music was that he knew how to find ‘sensibility’ within the harmony itself; and that he succeeded in capturing effects of color and certain nuances that, before his time, musicians had not clearly understood.”
Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, together with his great piano and orchestral pieces, came to define musical impressionism in the popular mind. Yet although many critics associated him with painters like Manet and Whistler, he maintained that his music depicted not superficial impressions but essential “realities.” Musicians alone, he declared, enjoyed “the privilege of being able to convey all the poetry of the night and the day,” whereas painters could “recapture only one of her aspects at a time.” In Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama about the ill-starred lovers Pelléas and Mélisande, Debussy found an ideal vehicle for his radical musical ideas. “I do not pretend to have discovered everything in Pelléas,” he wrote, “but I have tried to trace a path that others may follow, broadening it with individual discoveries which will, perhaps, free dramatic music from the heavy yoke under which it has existed for so long.”
Although seven years elapsed between the completion of the vocal score and the Paris premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, Debussy declined to drum up interest in his work-in-progress by fashioning a conventional symphonic suite. That task would be left to others, including Austrian American conductor Erich Leinsdorf, who first led Debussy’s masterpiece at the Metropolitan Opera in 1940. Despite his close association with the German repertoire at the Met, Leinsdorf was so enamored of the French composer’s luminous score that he decided to arrange a concert suite based on the orchestral interludes from each of the opera’s five acts. (He made similar distillations of Wagner’s Parsifal and Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten.) The success of this approach hinged in part on the central dramatic role the orchestra plays in Pelléas. As in Wagner’s music dramas, the orchestra is not a mere accompaniment or backdrop but a full partner to the singers and often takes over where the voices leave off. In any case, the essential drama in Debussy’s opera is internal and emotive rather than physical. As he once put it while he was still casting about for a suitable libretto to set to music, “I would always prefer something in which, in some way, action would be sacrificed to the long-pursued expression of the feelings of the soul.”
—Harry Haskell
Judith has come to live with Bluebeard. His secret mesmerizes her—she has heard terrifying rumors about him and fears that she may be on a road of no return, yet she decides to enter his home. The door closes. Judith confesses her love for Bluebeard, believing that it will change him and light up the gloomy home. She repeats her profession of love like a mantra as she asks that the doors to seven rooms be opened. The first one is a torture chamber, the second an armory. These rooms fill her with terror. The next doors conceal a treasury and a garden. Behind the fifth door, Bluebeard shows Judith his empire. She sees blood everywhere: on jewels, weapons, flowers. She doesn’t want to agree to Bluebeard’s demand that she love him and “ask no questions.” Judith responds that she does love him but wants him to open up to her, reveal his inner self, and uncover his fears. She demands that all the doors be opened. At the sixth door, which conceals a silent sea of tears, Judith reaches the limit of knowledge. That leaves the seventh door. Behind it is a space beyond life, on the border of life and death. Here are concealed Bluebeard’s three previous wives. Passing through the seventh door, Judith joins them. She is made a part of Bluebeard’s space forever.
The standard opening to any fairy tale—“Once upon a time”—performs a wonderfully paradoxical function. The words are both generic and specific, applying to all time yet somehow inviting one particular reader to imagine the details of the realm in which the allegorical tale will unfold. And it is this unique dual function that has guaranteed the genre’s longevity, inviting any reader or audience member, from cradle to grave, to find the pantomimic or the profound in its pages.
During the 19th century, fairy tales enjoyed a renaissance thanks to figures such as the Brothers Grimm in Germany and Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, whose new perspectives on these stories provided lyric contrast to the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution. As lives were filled with smoke and steam, the mist and magic of tales handed down from the Middle Ages via the high-Baroque language of 17th-century French author Charles Perrault to the crepuscular never-land of the German forest provided requisite escape. Even if the nursery was but a distant memory to the reader, the idea that, like Hansel and Gretel, one could dodge drudgery and slip into a world of sandmen and sleeping beauties held great appeal.
Given their ubiquity, however, these stories also became the focus of new types of study. They were questioned, subverted, and, through the work of psychoanalysts and symbolists, revealed, as arch-Freudian Bruno Bettleheim wrote in The Uses of Enchantment, to be “a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity.” In short, as a classless reader emerged, thanks to liberal education systems, newly established democracies, and mass culture, the world’s most enduring stories found fresh audiences and revelatory interpretations.
Bartók began work on Bluebeard’s Castle, his sole opera, in 1911, working from a libretto by Béla Balázs. Adapting a particularly violent story from Perrault’s collection—now often omitted from modern editions—Balázs, a leading intellectual in Budapest circles, had created a new, psychological rendering of the tale. He removed the happy conclusion, in which the heroine’s brothers save her from the castle, and, employing Hungarian folk idiom, turned his focus to the strange relationship between Judith and her husband. “My ballad is the ballad of the inner life,” the poet explained. “Bluebeard’s castle is not a real castle of stone. The castle is his soul. It is lonely, dark, and secretive: the castle of closed doors.”
In his score, Bartók likewise presented an inner life, not only pumping musical blood into the veins of the two characters but also presenting a précis of his maturation as a composer. Coming of age at the turn of the 20th century, Bartók began his musical education through his parents’ performances at home, as well as by his own exploration of works by Brahms and Schumann. But in traveling from what is now the borderland between Hungary and Romania to the former’s newly established capital of Budapest, Bartók discovered much richer musical landscapes.
Attending the city’s Academy, he not only encountered the music of Richard Strauss but also that of Debussy, thanks to his meeting with the man who was to be his colleague and companion, Zoltán Kodály, in 1905. Such diverse musical seams fused in the works that Bartók began both to create and to notate. For having announced in 1904 that he would “collect the finest Hungarian folk songs and […] raise them, adding the best possible piano accompaniments, to the level of art song,” his encounter with Kodály made that ambition a reality. Working in collaboration, they were prolific in their collecting activities, and the music they discovered came to infuse their work. But what is so remarkable about Bartók’s output is not its ability to reflect diverse influences but to sublimate the strands into one, as is clear in Bluebeard’s Castle.
Progress with the score was slow. With it, Bartók had hoped to win the Ferenc Erkel Prize in 1911, but he failed both in this and in a 1912 competition run by music publishers Rózsavölgyi, with one judge deeming the work impossible to stage and another thinking it far too dark. Bartók was devastated, but when, after World War I, the opera was finally mounted in Budapest, he refuted the claims of that first judge. Given the incontrovertibly pessimistic nature of Bluebeard’s Castle, however, the second judge’s objection is more understandable.
As musical drama, Bartók’s only opera offers a decidedly bleak resolution to the oppositions at its core: Judith vs. Bluebeard, light vs. dark, sanity vs. madness, tonality vs. atonality. These tensions are immediately apparent as the ambiguous spoken prologue trails into silence and the score begins, low down in the orchestra’s register. Its music revolves around a penumbrous F-sharp chord, spelled out in folksy, pentatonic terms. Quickly, the woodwinds cut across this dark but sonorous sound, centering instead on a triad of C major. The clash between these elements spells out the interval of a tritone, the middle point in the chromatic scale or, rather, the polar opposite of the very first note we heard.
Such a dichotomy is seemingly resolved at the blinding opening of the fifth of the seven doors in Bluebeard’s castle. Accompanied by full orchestra (including an organ), Judith screams in amazement at the vastness of the kingdom she can see beyond, the music resounding with the luminescence of C major. But as with every door she unlocks, there follows a shudder, a strange, angular scale, couched in the same sound world as the clashing semitone that represents the blood covering everything in sight. Once more, Bluebeard coolly thanks Judith for bringing daylight into the castle, but when, inevitably, she unlocks the last door of his soul, following her forebears into that final room, the music returns to Bluebeard’s dark, modal sound world. The light from the fifth room, as well as that granted to so many other figures in the “happily ever after,” has been extinguished. Instead, we are taken back to the primordial “Once upon a time” that is no longer the herald of pasteboard pantomime but the clarion call of eternity.
—Gavin Plumley