Duke Bluebeard S Castle

Rare edition with unique illustrations. Along with the collections of Andersen, Lang, and the Brothers Grimm, the Fairy tales of Charles Perrault is among the great books of European fairy tales. These stories have been enjoyed by generation after generation of children in many countries, and are here, waiting to be enjoyed again. "Blue beard" is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passe. The tale tells the story of a violent nobleman in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors.

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's curse : repetition and improvisational energy in the Bluebeard tale / Maria Tatar -- Bluebeard, hero of modernity : tales at the fin de siècle / Mererid Puw Davies -- Béla Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's castle : a musicological perspective / David Cooper -- A tale of an eye : revealing the Jew in Duke Bluebeard's castle / Victoria Anderson -- Hidden debates under a Baroque surface : Barbe-bleue by Georges Méliès (1901) / Michael Hiltbrunner.

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.

This volume covers aspects of opera translation within the Western world and in Asia, as well as some of opera’s many travels between continents, countries, languages and cultures—and also between genres and media. The concept of ‘adaptation’ is a thread running through the sixteen contributions, which encompass a variety of composers, operas, periods and national traditions. Sung translation, libretto translation, surtitling, subtitling are discussed from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Exploration of aspects such as the relationship between language and music, multimodality, intertextuality, cultural and linguistic transfer, multilingualism, humour, identity and stereotype, political ideology, the translator’s voice and the role of the audience is driven by a shared motivation: a love of opera and of the beauty it has never ceased to provide through the centuries, and admiration for the people who write, compose, perform, direct, translate, or otherwise contribute to making the joy of opera a part of our lives.

The authors explore the means by which two early 20th-century operas - Debussy's 'Pelléas et Mélisande' (1902) and Bartók's 'Duke Bluebeard's Castle' (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language.