Your Kingdom is Beautiful and Vast
One quick reminder: There will be no post on Monday because of Yom Kipur. That Supreme Alive-ness will return as scheduled on October 5th.
One of the great harmonic moments in classical music occurs about halfway through Bluebeard’s Castle, the claustrophobic Symbolist opera with libretto by Belász Béla and music by Bartók Béla. The plot, such as it is, has the eponymous Duke Bluebeard bringing home his new wife, Judith, who proceeds to open a series of doors in his castle, each of which reveals some vision of beauty intermixed with horror — a crystalline lake full of tears, roses whose stems leak blood. At first, Bluebeard resists the opening of each new door, but around the fourth one, his attitude changes, and he starts goading Judith on. At the fifth — which reveals a broad and bountiful landscape under clouds shadowed by blood — he’s at his proudest and most boastful: “Lásd ez az én birodalmam,” he sings, “messze nérő szép könyöklőm.” — “Look at my kingdom, the vast, sweeping vista! Isn’t it beautiful and vast, a vast country?”
Up to this point, the music has been largely contrapuntal, individual melodic lines twining around each other in a haze of equal exchange. The rhythmic pulse is often obscured as notes hang, shiver, and dart about with unpredictable inner life. Chords emerge from this tapestry only ambiguously — it isn’t always clear which pitches belong, and which are extra ornamentations. But when the fifth door is thrown open, everything snaps into alignment: The whole orchestra slots into rhythmic unison, pealing out a chain of unaltered triads — C major, E major, D major, C major again — massive blocks of sound that land with seismic force. All of Bluebeard’s violent joy is on full display here as he reels off the landscape’s glorious features, its meadows, forests, rivers and mountains. The power of it all could shake the foundations of the earth.
And then it all gets snatched away. In the dead silence, without a single instrument sounding, Judith sings a few quiet, quavering notes, less a melody than a stutter. “Szép és nagy a te országod.” — “Your kingdom is beautiful and vast.”
