Thread by @david_m_wagner

1/ Idk jack about IOLANTA, so I'll write about BLUEBEARD'S. Ultimate existential solitude-angst. B insists there will never be light in his castle, and the final stage direction says: "Darkness creeps across the stage, engulfing Bluebeard." So, when dudes have locked doors, ...

https://twitter.com/MetOpera/status/1325937427966554116

2/ consider seriously letting them stay locked. The 7 doors (number chosen for analogy to 7 seals?):
1. Torture chamber
2. Armory
3. Treasury
4. Secret garden
5. Expansive domains
6. Lake of tears
7. The previous wives - whom Judith, our heroine, must now join, ...

3/ leaving Bluebeard again alone. Musical climax - what I think fans buy tix for - is the 5th door, "expansive domains." Great crashing C major chords, w full orchestra + organ, repeatedly well up. What you see depends on the production: I last saw it in 1975: B and J were inert

4/ on center stage throughout until the end. Visions on the rear screen or cyclorama showed what was behind each door. For the 5th door, it showed Earth as seen from the then-recent Apollo missions. While Door 5 is a great musical moment, so too - in a chilling way - is B's

5/ quasi-aria at the last door. In Kallman's translation:
"She the first I found at morning
Garlanded with early roses
Now the lucid cloak of morning
Decked with hawthorn and with roses
Now its diadem of dew
Are hers forever, hers in beauty!

6/
"She the second came at midday
Bright with raiments of its fire
Now the noon's resplendent mantle
Heavy with the flame that lights it
Now its crown or ardent
Are hers forever, hers in beauty!"

7/ *Now its crown of argent gold

8/And so on through the bride of evening, to the bride of nighttime - Judith, who must now join the three others.

"Living - they are living!" Judith said when the 7th door was first opened.

"Darkness creeps across the stage, engulfing Bluebeard."

9/ Well this production - by Mariusz Trelinski, who is also a film director, as Valery Gergiev mentioned in one of the interviews - certainly establishes that the opera stage is now as much a cgi space as film is. I miss the Apollo Mission Earth from the '70s prodn by Bodo Igesz

10/ and David Reppa, but the way the 5th Door was done here made something clear that, to me, wasn't before: at that point there's a reversal of emotional polarity. Judith had been the clingy one, now suddenly Bluebeard is, as he tries to keep Judith as a real girl so to speak

11/ and keep her from becoming (by what means - never specified) just another revered memory. It's at the 5th Door that light briefly floods the castle - something Judith has said from the beginning she wants to make happen. It would be the natural place for her to stop asking

12/ for those damn keys. But no-o-o-o-o.

Ladies: your love is not going to change him. Marry the nice guy. And especially you, Richard III fangirls: stop letting your inner Judith drive your interpretation of historical sources.

13/ 5th Door, from final dress rehearsal of this production, Jan. 23 1015:

14/ Ngl, BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE gets under your skin if you let it. Dang folklore. Dang Hungarians. Tues night, had weirdest xgf dream ever....

15/ Title in Hungarian: A KÉKSAKÁLLÚ HERCEG VÁRA. Hung. borrows German word for Duke, “Herzog.” Vára = castle, as you quickly learn from watching a perf. in Hung. w subtitles. Kéksakállú = Bluebeard. It also bumps up against “Texaco,” former sponsor of Met Saturday b’casts -

16/ “the longest continuous sponsorship in radio history” - until it stopped. “You can trust your car/To the man who wears the star/The big bright Kéksakállú star!” (Trelinkski’s production starts w Judith being dropped off at the castle by a mysterious car that then departs.)

17/ <Milton Cross voice>

“Kéksakállú presents the Metropolitan Opera....”

“Time now for the Kéksakállú Opera Quiz, with your host, Edward Downes....”