This Bartók composition is a short opera drama, for two singers. The production in Saarbrücken's opera house uses three (an additional woman narrator who works silently with movement-gestures as well as vocally with a theatricalized voice-narration); the direction of the visual staging is by a well known visual artist – Penelope Wehrli – who teaches design at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. The former director of the Hellerau Festspielhaus, Detlev Schneider, had sent me an invitation to a recent new production by Wehrli – entitled orpheus amorph__ – which looked so intriguing that my interest was aroused. Furthermore, my only opera production dates back to 1992 when i lived and worked in Chicago (USA), and I had created a new experimental version of the Orpheus myth which was then translated into a multimedia opera, Orpheus and Eurydike, produced at Northwestern University's main stage on 1992.

The link to Orpheus was refreshed when I met Schneider at the opera symposium on "Orpheus and Eurydike" held at the Berlin Radialsystem in February of this year.

[Die Erfahrung des Orpheus? Produktivität und Entgrenzung des Mythos]

The conference is dedicated to the theme/topic of Orpheus and investigates the thematical trias of death, love and art. The conference further asks for the aesthetical, art-theoretical and philosophical actuality of myths, and the myth of Orpheus in particular. The focus lies here on Orpheus' mythological qualities as equally singer and poet, as an eventual example for the contemporary delimitation of the arts in general.

Das Symposium fragt nach der ästhetischen, kunsttheoretischen und philosophischen Aktualität der Orpheusfigur: wie ist ein "Fortleben des Antike" in Übertragungsbewegungen zwischen Mythos und Kunst zu beschreiben? Können Entgrenzung und Selbstreflexivität der Künste gerade im Medium des Orpheusstoffes gefasst werden? Und wie wäre mit Blick auf die thematische Trias von Tod, Liebe und Kunst das Verhältnis von orphischer Erfahrung und ästhetischer Lebendigkeit zu bestimmen? Die Vorträge und Diskussionen begleiten die Aufführungen des Musiktheaterstücks "Eurydike hinter den Grenzen" von pazzaCaglia Opera und Liquid Penguin Ensemble (www.eurydike.eu).

Aufführungen am Samstag, 2. Februar und Sonntag, 3. Februar 2008, 20.00 Uhr im Radialsystem V.

Die Tagung wird als Kooperation des Instituts für Theaterwissenschaft und des Peter-Szondi-Instituts für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft der Freien Universität Berlin am 2./3. Februar 2008 im Radialsystem V in Berlin durchgeführt. In Verbindung mit tertium comparationis organisiert, begleitet sie die dortige Aufführung des Musik-Theater-Stücks Eurydike hinter den Grenzen, von Liquid Penguin und pazzaCaglia

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Herzog Blaubarts Burg. Press photo courtesy of Staatstheater Saarbrücken

Talking to him about Wehrli's scenic/visual directorship, I was curious about the concepts she had applied to the Bartók production. The Bartók piece has roughly the same lenght as the projected Bacon oratorio, which Paulo Chagas and I were invited to bring to Belo Horizonte. I was able to see the Saarbrücken production as I was fortunate to meet one of the three vocalists during the Berlin symposium: Katharina Bihler is co-directing the work of Liquid Penguin (together with musical director Stefan Scheib), and she and Stefan kindly gave me a film version of the Eurydike hinter den Grenzen production (the scheduled Berlin performances were cancelled due to the illness of their percussionist).

The Bartók source material is not unfamiliar to most of us, and I had already dwelled much on the underlying myth when I saw Pina Bausch's interpretation in 1985: Bausch had created a Bluebeard tanztheater production with her company in 1978, and it was a most quite riveting performance with Jan Minarik in the lead, acting out the role of the Dike as if he were an aging Samuel Beckett character right out of Krapp's Last Tape – all of the music used in the performance was recorded tape, run forward and backward).

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I enter the opera auditorium, I have good seat, in the 4th row. I notice the stage looks empty, just a dark scrim at the front, and in front of the orchestra pit, right at first row, there is a small elevated platform with a dark red sofa and a chair (for the analyst?). This will be intimate, I figure, the singers will be right there in front of me at arm's length. But when the conductor arrives, the orchestra is continuing to warm up, you know, these odd, disharmonic beautiful sounds an orchestra makes when each instrument is tuning in. This dark ambient sound hovers for a minute, and as we look at the dark screen, slowly one notices a figure standing behind (down light on her), a woman in her 30s, with a large strange hairstyle, blonde, almost Egyptian. She wears a jacket and pants, her clear outlines become visible under the light, especially now as she moves her right hand, there is a ring on her middle finger, and as her starts her narration, all is silent, you can hear a needle drop. On "top of her", all over the black transparent scrim, there is a film projection, a camera POV slowly moving around a deserted area, Blair Witch style jagged camera, directed at the ground, one sees train
tracks....

The woman thus is behind the film/inside the film, so to speak. She speaks with a clear voice(amplified), narrating the Bluebeard fairy taile from the Grimm Bothers. You probably know it well.

(The story of Bluebeard is quite deeply embedded in the darker storytelling of the Grimms. Béla Balázs, influenced by the French Symbolists, wrote a play on the tale which inspired Béla Bartók to create the Hungarian libretto/opera. The powerful music and the incredibly poetic libretto evoke the unfolding of the events that the "walls" of Bluebeard's castle have witnessed, and the story of course is that Judith leaves her fiance to follow the mysterious man with the blue beard, who takes her to his castle. It is dark. She longs to fling open the windows, to let sunlight flood into the castle but gradually she begins to face the truth of what may have happened here -- seeing the traces of treasures, wealth, clothes, dresses, somehow reddened by blood, of the destroyed lives of three previous wives.

The singers tell us the drama, in an emotionally intense dialogue between the two (sung in Hungarian, with German supertitles) -- now what images would one possibly add here? since it is already all in the stark music, the lyrics. How can the (empty stage) become the house of leaves, reflecting the complexity of emotion, of suspense, of love, or passion and the psychological turn-arounds?).

I listen to Katharina Bihler's narrator-character speak the Grimm version (first version) in her clear voice. After two thirds, she stops, and you hear the orchestra again briefly, with disharmonic warm up tuning sounds. Now the narrator appears to have a golden doh, a stick, with which she delineates someting like a map, in the air, the outlines of something we cannot quite fathom (then cites an eye witness report from the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, called the "8th day of creation"). Then she continues with Grimm's Bluebeard. Her hands mysteriouyls flutter, like bird wings, and she makes strange small sounds, gurgling, smuttering, and then her voice is altered (by synthesizer) and as she speaks live, her voice now sounds like a man's, then like a child's voice. Her "postscript" takes us from the "global " (warfare, destruction) into the realm of the private psychosexual, she recounts a case study of a woman who finds one morning that her favorite bird had its feathers all torn off, and it twitches there on the floor of the birdcage, whereupon she collects all the feathers and gives it water to drink. her son refuses to answer her questions. in the evening, when she returns, she discovers her son has strangled the bird, and silently stands there, she is unable to comprehend what happened, when she cries, what have you done? he looks at her silently.

As this story is told, a very tall elegant woman arrives through the auditorium, climbs up the platform and sits on the chair, taking her coat off, opening her briefcase and taking out a notebook. From the other side, "Bluebard", a smallish stout man arrives, in a grey suit, he is the "patient", and lies down on the couch. The psychoanalyst soprano begins to sing, the Bartok opera has begun.

In case you have no recollection of the psychodrama of the story - and I am unable to render to you the incredible, dark beauty of the German in the Grimm -- I at least can give you an English version I found of the Bartok libretto, which Balázs modified:

[pass over if you know]
>>The Balázs version is closer to the psychoanalytic or psychosexual (cf. Bruno Bettelheim and "The Uses of Enchantment"). The setting is a huge, dark
hall in a castle, with seven locked doors. Judith insists that all the doors be opened, to allow light to enter into the forbidding interior, insisting
further that her demands are based in her love for Bluebeard. Bluebeard refuses, saying that they are private places not to be explored by others, and asking Judith to love him but ask no questions. Judith persists, and eventually prevails over his resistance. The first door opens to reveal a torture chamber, stained with blood. Repelled, but then intrigued, Judith pushes on. Behind the second door is a storehouse of weapons, and behind the third a storehouse of riches. Bluebeard urges her on. Behind the fourth door is a secret garden of great beauty; behind the fifth, a window onto Bluebeard's vast kingdom. All is now sunlit, but blood has stained the riches, watered the garden, and grim clouds throw blood-red shadows over Bluebeard's kingdom.
Bluebeard pleads with her to stop - that the castle is as bright as it can get, nd will not get any brighter, but Judith refuses to be stopped after
coming this far, and opens the penultimate sixth door, as a shadow passes over the castle. This is the first room that has not been somehow stained with blood; a silent silvery lake is all that lies within, "a lake of tears". Bluebeard begs Judith to simply love him, and ask no mre questions. The last door must be shut forever. But she persists, asking him about his former wives, and then accusing him of having murdered them, that theirblood was the blood everywhere, their tears those that filled the lake, their bodies behind the last door. At this, Bluebeard hands over the last
key. Behind the door are Bluebeard's three former wives, but still alive, dressed in crowns and jewelery. They emerge silently, and Bluebeard, overcome with
emotion, prostrates himself before them and praises each in turn, finally turning to Judith and beginning to praise her as his fourth wife. She is
horrified, begs him to stop, but it is too late. He dresses her in the jewelery they wear, which she finds exceedingly heavy. Her head drooping
under the weight, she follows the other wives along a beam of moonlight through the seventh door. It closes behind her, and Bluebeard is left alone
as all fades to total darkness.>>

Finally, without being able to fully do justice to the music here, and the very strong and intense characterizations and singing and acting of the two
singers -- i think it's important to say that in this staging, the singing-voice drama and the music now create a re-telling of the story (we
have already heard initially), the actual dramatic and emotional rendering which the music drama perfectly accomplishes in all its nuances and
subtleties and powerful climaxes, it is an intense love drama, obviously, but also a horror story, an uncanny film noir, with the "language" layers
that the inserted texts (plus supertitles, plus citations - undertitles) create, and then with the "installation" that the visual artist has built on
stage: as soon as the narrator disappears in the darkness, the stage slowly begins to become virtually-alive, there is the large front scrim, which
intermittently has large cinemascope images projected onto it, but on the stage there are at least four or five other smaller screens, in various
arrangements, sideways, backstage, midstage, and one plexiglass cruciform shaped screen that can turn around its axis. Projected video is used
(original shoots; mostly of the initial footage extended, the camera moving gingerly into an abandoned house, rubble on the floor, a dog shows up,
hands, and then there are doors, and then we are outside at night again, following train tracks, a road, and grass, and back to a tenement, and a
ruined building that is like a haunted house. These films (black and white, and color) are now doubled and sometimes tripled, at diifferent rhythms, and
with different speeds, onto different screens and thus viewed from different persepctives and through the emotionality of the human voice and music which
envelops us.

The "narration" now moves intomultiple moving images, and the staging of the video installations becomes increasingly complex (even if, admittedly,
monotone, as the actual presence and depth it hinted at, during the lit narrator figure, is less prominent when you only watch the digital screen
projections, but what creates layered intensity here is that Ms Wehrli used the particular video art or theatre-video strategy of in-mixing
citations-filmic references to:

a) film noir (Hitchcock)

b) war documentaries - Hiroshima footage of the bomb's devastation

c) other 50s feature films with particular sexual content (I also spotted "9 1/2 Weeks" [Kim Basinger] – the scene where Basinger and Rourke initially get hot and under way and make love under the falling rain in the cellar staircase, this is before the passion turns into obsession and dark S/M), First World War trench warfare, slow motion footage of birds, cages, tea cups, cigarette smoke, waltzing couples in Vienna, etc.

. . .

layers and layers and layers, also using the digital effects of de-animation (Martin Arnold is a leading exponent of this
technique), using a tiny fragment of a scene from film and reversing it, again and again and again (loop), in the way also Freud made his famous case
study of the Dora case (when he created the "fort / da" theory, this is - the game the child plays with the toy, throwing it away and pulling it back
on a string, to mimic the disappearance and reappearance of the mother as a trauma compensation).

So we are challenged to listen to the voices taking us through this dark psychodrama, Judith eventually gets up, she is horrified by the "dream" she
has to interpret listening to this man, and while we are carried away by the powerful voices -- the stage itself, as we reach the 7th door and last
silent room, begins to open out, spin, uncannily turn (it is a moveablke stage platform) , towards us, almost as if it was going to swallow us, so
the projections of the insides of the rooms (dark images one can barely make out) are gliding around on the walls of the whole opera house, behind us,
above us, as the film projectors on stage are turning in a circular movement shooting at us.

The stage indeed has become a moveing video installation-architecture, the concept of the staging probably was to explore the "scenic" as a dream space
(behind the singers), with the memory of the 20th century (film history) our archive of horrors or of what cannot be looked at (there are citations of
film theory projected as well, and Heisenberg's uncertainty theory, one saying that "suspense", and not being able to see, in Hitchcock, was the
closest the film director came to conjure or imagine death. The Bluebeard drama thus becomes also a drama of the cinema and our large storehouse of
fantasies (traumas) or images (I forget the names of the actress in Vertigo, but she is of course iconic, and a double-the uncanny, so is The Birds, the ravens and what they might stand for when they attack the "safe" bourgeois home and the family).

I was stunned by this production. The video clips do not always work as well as one might think, as they are repeated often, and they border on the
(over-) illustration of the psychosexual subtexts of the Grimm fairytale. Our minds are always stronger anyway, in waht we are capable of imagining, but
movies are part of the unconscious now. But the staging and performance as a whole was so unusual that it will stay with me for a long time.