BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE

By BélaBartók and Béla Balázs

A co-presentation by New Zealand Opera and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Sung in English

Role: Bluebeard (Lester Lynch)

PERFORMANCE DATES

10 August Michael Fowler Centre Pōneke, Wellington

12 August Christchurch Town Hall Ōtautahi, Christchurch

We are pleased to partner with NZ Opera to present a concert version of the trailblazing, psychologically penetrating opera Bluebeard’s Castle.

As Béla Bartók’s first and only opera, this innovative and moving production of Bluebeard’s Castle from Theatre of Sound (UK) reimagines the work as a love story between a long-married couple living with dementia.

Bartók’s music draws deeply from the well of traditional Hungarian folk music. It imbues the opera with novel harmonies and gives its age-old story a twentieth-century injection of loneliness and fear. Described in The Guardian as an opera that “examines a marriage pulled apart by the exposure of secrets, memories and past emotional pain.”