Puccini and Bartók nightmares at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome

There are dreams that can turn into nightmares, but also realities capable of being so. When I was a child, among the fairy tales I most feared for this pulling power towards the nightmare was that of Bluebeard's wife and the Seven Doors. As soon as I learnt that the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, upon the suggestion of conductor Michele Mariotti, was going to perform Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle together with Puccini's Il tabarro, I had a feeling that such a pairing would make me discover something more than the more traditional readings of the two operas, both composed in 1918 but different in setting and writing. And so it did. 

Director Johannes Erath takes the riverside reality of Il tabarro to the backstage area of a theatre. The dockers of that time are the theatre workers of today and the Seine is just the painted backdrop of some show we will never see. Giorgetta (the graceful yet dramatic Maria Agresta) moves sinuously in a world that does not belong to her: she is surrounded by the slow and repetitive gestures of river barge work – lifting the ropes, discharging the barrels – that the director, with brilliant intuition, assigns to a troupe of mime artists. This variegated background humanity painted by Puccini is portrayed by Mariotti with caricatured accents, bright, attentive and precise even to the noisy personalisations so typical of the Italian composer, from the “Oh! Issa! Oh!” to the self-quotation of Mimì's theme from La bohème.

In this desolate world, whose stage is only a white curtain on which the stage lights are reflected, when Giorgetta dreams of Paris she does so with the curtain closed, then materialising the desired Belleville in a triumph of dresses, colours and lights. It is a shimmering yet faint illusion, destined to fade away like the light from the disco ball that two lovers, sitting with their backs to the audience, hold in their hands for the duration of that dream. Everything precipitates in a split second: the idyll of love between Giorgetta and Luigi soon succumbs to the brutality of her husband Michele. Gregory Kunde gave Luigi an excellent performance, especially in the duet, just as Luca Salsi in the role of Michele perfectly balanced the character's firmness and the suffering he is hiding (the loss of a child).

In the second opera of this particular diptych, Erath's choices prove to be even more sophisticated, his imagery fitting perfectly with the evocative score of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle and Béla Balázs’ symbolic text. After all, it is a dream that turns into a nightmare for Judith as well. But here, where the seven doors should be, they are not: we only imagine them, thanks only to the terrified movements of the woman, who is dressed in a bright blue. It is the only light among the greys of the ghosts that the screen shows behind her and opposite of the aseptic Bluebeard, who wears plastic gloves, arranges jewellery in a bag, an omen of his violence. The mime artists we have already met in Il tabarro also return, now as human personifications of the black curiosity that progressively grips the woman in the castle: until her final disappearance in the night, falling asleep in Bluebeard's arms.

Mariotti's conducting also became more refined in Bartók: he guided the orchestra without smearing in the continuous and ethereal sound mixture written by the Hungarian composer. At times he froze the vibrato of the violins, keeping the strings still. The music exploded with colour when Judith passed through the first door, and C major is finally heard. Szilvia Vörös (Judith) was an invaluable stage presence: she captivated and showed a powerful, dramatic voice. Mikhail Petrenko was a Bluebeard with shades of grey, also vocally perfect.

In Il tabarro and Duke Bluebeard's Castle, we witness the fulfilment of a feminine downward spiral: Giorgetta is captured together with her lover's corpse by her husband's cloak, and Judith pushes herself into the last room to become Bluebeard's Night. Both slide towards an absent death (it is only suggested) and that is precisely why it never ceases to question us. And to haunt us, until after the last note has been played and the last light has been extinguished.