Maurice Maeterlinck described his libretto Ariane et Barbe-bleue as "a sort of legendary opera, or fairy [opera], in three acts." In 1907, Paul Dukas finished setting Maeterlinck's libretto to music, and the opera's Paris premiere was lauded as a landmark in operatic history. Ariane & Bluebeard: From Fairy Tale to Comic Book Opera offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary look at this historic opera, including its structure, reception, and cultural implications. This lively collection juxtaposes chapters from experts in music, literature, the visual arts, gender studies, and religion and philosophy with vibrant illustrations by comic artist P. Craig Russell and interviews with performers and artists. Featuring material from newly discovered documents and the first English translation of several important sources, Ariane & Bluebeard allows readers to imagine the operain its various incarnations: as symbolist show, comic book, children's fairy tale, and more.

This is the first book-length examination of Bartók's 1911 opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, one of the twentieth century's enduring operatic works. Writing in an engaging style, Leafstedt adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the opera by introducing, in addition to music-dramatic analysis, a number of topics that are new to the field of Bartók studies. These new areas of critical and scholarly terrain include a detailed literary study of the libretto and a gender-focused analysis of the opera's female character, Judith. Leafstedt begins with a short introductory chapter that places Duke Bluebeard's Castle within the context of Bartók's early composing career, his discovery of folk music, and its impact on his later work. The book goes on to explore the composition's troubled history, its failure to win two early Hungarian opera competitions, and the three versions of the ending that resulted, discussed here in depth for the first time. The core of the book is devoted to the musical and dramatic organization of the opera and offers an analysis of the seven individual door scenes, including a detailed analysis of scene six, the "lake of tears" scene, illustrating the work's complex tonal organization and dramatic structure. A separate chapter places this darkly psychological version of the Bluebeard story within the broader context of European history and literature. Throughout the book, Leafstedt draws on original Hungarian source material, much of it newly translated by the author and available here for the first time in English, and he includes a generous selection of musical examples. Inside Bluebeard's Castle is an ideal starting point for research in twentieth-century music, Hungarian cultural history, and opera studies, as well as an invaluable guide for anyone interested in Bartók's only opera.

Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales of all time. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. Astonishingly, this fairy tale was a nursery room staple, one of the tales translated into English from Charles Perrault's French Mother Goose Tales. Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition is the first major study of the tale and its many variants (some, like “Mr. Fox,” native to England and America) in English: from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chapbooks, children's toybooks, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, through the twentieth century in music, literature, art, film, and theater. Chronicling the story's permutations, the book presents examples of English true-crime figures, male and female, called Bluebeards, from King Henry VIII to present-day examples. Bluebeard explores rare chapbooks and their illustrations and the English transformation of Bluebeard into a scimitar-wielding Turkish tyrant in a massively influential melodramatic spectacle in 1798. Following the killer's trail over the years, Casie E. Hermansson looks at the impact of nineteenth-century translations into English of the German fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the particularly English story of how Bluebeard came to be known as a pirate. This book will provide readers and scholars an invaluable and thorough grasp on the many strands of this tale over centuries of telling.

Maria Tatar analyses the many forms the tale of Bluebeard's wife has taken over time, showing how artists have taken the Bluebeard theme and revived it with their own signature twists.

Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. This is a major study of the tale and its many variants in English: from the 18th and 19th century chapbooks, children's toybooks, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, to the 20th century in music, literature, art, film, and theatre.

Béla Bartók, who died in New York fifty years ago this September, is one of the most frequently performed twentieth-century composers. He is also the subject of a rapidly growing critical and analytical literature. Bartók was born in Hungary and made his home there for all but his last five years, when he resided in the United States. As a result, many aspects of his life and work have been accessible only to readers of Hungarian. The main goal of this volume is to provide English-speaking audiences with new insights into the life and reception of this musician, especially in Hungary. Part I begins with an essay by Leon Botstein that places Bartók in a large historical and cultural context. László Somfai reports on the catalog of Bartók's works that is currently in progress. Peter Laki shows the extremes of the composer's reception in Hungary, while Tibor Tallián surveys the often mixed reviews from the American years. The essays of Carl Leafstedt and Vera Lampert deal with his librettists Béla Balázs and Melchior Lengyel respectively. David Schneider addresses the artistic relationship between Bartók and Stravinsky. Most of the letters and interviews in Part II concern Bartók's travels and emigration as they reflected on his personal life and artistic evolution. Part III presents early critical assessments of Bartók's work as well as literary and poetic responses to his music and personality.

This Companion celebrates the extraordinary riches of the twentieth-century operatic repertoire in a collection of specially commissioned essays written by a distinguished team of academics, critics and practitioners. Beginning with a discussion of the century's vital inheritance from late-romantic operatic traditions in Germany and Italy, the text embraces fresh investigations into various aspects of the genre in the modern age, with a comprehensive coverage of the work of individual composers from Debussy and Schoenberg to John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle. Traditional stylistic categorizations (including symbolism, expressionism, neo-classicism and minimalism) are reassessed from new critical perspectives, and the distinctive operatic traditions of Continental and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and United States are subjected to fresh scrutiny. The volume includes essays devoted to avant-garde music theatre, operettas and musicals, filmed opera, and ends with a discussion of the position of the genre in today's cultural marketplace.

The tale of Bluebeard, reenvisioned as a dark fable of faith and truth 1843 is the "last year of the world," according the Elias Fitcher, a charismatic preacher in the Finger Lakes district of New York State. He's established a utopian community on an estate outside the town of Jeckyll's Glen, where the faithful wait, work, and pray for the world to end. Vernelia, Amy, and Catherine Charter are the three young townswomen whose father falls under the Reverend Fitcher's hypnotic sway. In their old house, where ghostly voices whisper from the walls, the girls are ruled by their stepmother, who is ruled in turn by the fiery preacher. Determined to spend Eternity as a married man, Fitcher casts his eye on Vernelia, and before much longer the two are wed. But living on the man's estate, separated from her family, Vern soon learns the extent of her husband's dark side. It's rumored that he's been married before, though what became of those wives she does not know. Perhaps the secret lies in the locked room at the very top of the house—the single room that the Reverend Fitcher has forbidden to her. Inspired by the classic fairy tales "Bluebeard" and "The Fitcher Bird," this dark fantasy is set in New York State's "Burned-Over District," at its time of historic religious ferment. All three Charter sisters will play their part in the story of Fitcher's Utopia: a story of faith gone wrong, and evil countered by one brave, true soul. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In this highly original approach to the study of the construction of culture, this collection of previously unpublished essays explore the topography of the secret and the forbidden, focusing on specific moments in recent cultural and political history. By bringing together writers from different disciplines and different locations, this volume provides a rich and diverse mapping of how the secret and forbidden operate across different subjects and different geographies, extending far beyond physical locations. It is present in domains ranging from language, literature, and cinema to social and political life. This refreshing and thought-provoking collection of essays will prove invaluable for researchers and students.

One of the foremost composers of the twentieth century, Olivier Messiaen wrote widely on his music and on his beliefs. This is the first edition of his early journalism and provides both the original French text and an English translation. The writing in this volume dates from the 1930s, before the composer gained the international reputation that he and his music now enjoy. The pieces he wrote range from reviews of individual performances to essays on particular works or composers and articles that discuss more general themes such as sincerity of expression in music. Many of the articles included in this collection are new to the Messiaen bibliography, and others are available here for the first time in English. A number are, as Broad describes them, 'quietly shocking' in that they force us to reappraise certain aspects of the composer such as his role in La Jeune France, and his wider participation in the debates of his time. This edition, therefore, represents a new source for understanding Messiaen and provides a fascinating glimpse of the composer in the early part of his career.