Bluebeard's Castle - Opéra National de Lorraine (2024) - Héroïne : A kékszakállú herceg vára (Le Château de Barbe-Bleue) - Opéra National de Lorraine (2024)

Description

New production.

"As the season opener, this evening, dedicated to the transgression of the forbidden, brings together three rare works in a single artistic gesture. Sancta Susanna is a meteor that crossed the sky of lyric art one evening in March 1922. Driven by a burning desire, a nun strips naked and embraces the statue of Christ. This thirty-minute work, never performed, caused a scandal when it was created at the Frankfurt Opera and provoked the fury of the Church.

The sulphurous gesture of Sancta Susanna is matched by Judith's thirst for knowledge: Bluebeard's Castle is like a disturbing closed-door play, a confrontation between Bluebeard and his wife who forces her lover to open the doors of his castle one by one until the point of no return... To accompany this plunge into the unknown, Bartók composed a captivating music of the night, imbued with a dreamlike Hungarian folklore.

Another little-known, if not unknown, work, Honegger’s La Danse des morts completes the evening. In this choral work composed on a poem by Claudel, the dead become a joyful and subversive community. The composer plays with the border that separates classical and popular music, integrating into his hell unexpected songs such as Sur le pont d’Avignon."

More information is available on the official website of the opera house.