Page 39 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book

the story, such as the blood-stained keys, and Bartók’s music. The music is just too
beautiful – it expresses the psychologies of the protagonists, it’s about love and loss and
emotion. Bartók’s score is different to other representations of the tale. It’s more
symbolic. So many productions present Bluebeard simply as a murderer of young women,
but I can’t reconcile the music to this characterisation.”

Daisy Evans

Daisy has written a new English translation for the production and is clearly as immersed
in Béla Balázs’ libretto as she is in Bartók’s score. “At the end of the opera, when
Bluebeard is explaining to Judith, he says of the previous brides, this wife was my morning,
the next my noon, the one after that my evening. You are my midnight. This spoke to me:
we talk of ‘life’ in this way – of middle-life and our twilight years. What if the wives are
different versions of one woman, who can’t recognise her own past self? She and her
husband have been through marriage, the birth of children, loss, and now this terrible
disease is blighting them. The tragedy is taking place all over again. Many people
experience this. It makes the tale more universal, in the way that fairy-tales are universal.”