Bluebeard (operetta)

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Work data
Title: Bluebeard
Original title: Barbel blue
Shape: opéra-bouffe
Original language: French
Music: Jacques Offenbach
Libretto : Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy
Literary source: French fairy tale
Premiere: February 5, 1866
Place of premiere: Paris
Place and time of the action: France during the crusades
people
  • Knight von und zu Bluebeard ( tenor )
  • King Bobèche ( baritone )
  • Queen Clementine, his wife ( soprano )
  • Princess Hermia, daughter of the previous two, still under the name Fleurette ( Soubrette ) in Act 1
  • Prince Saphir ( Tenorbuffo )
  • Popolani, alchemist in the service of Bluebeard ( Bassbuffo )
  • Count Oscar, Minister of the King (Bass)
  • Boulotte, peasant woman (soprano)
  • Count Alvarez
  • Bluebeard's five former wives
  • The Queen's Five Admirers
  • Court society, knights, guards, peasant folk

Blaubart (French: Barbe-Bleue ) is an operetta (opéra-bouffe) in three acts (four pictures) by Jacques Offenbach . The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy . It premiered on February 5, 1866 at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris.

orchestra

Paris premiere version: two flutes (2nd also piccolo), oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion and strings

Viennese version: two flutes (2nd also piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion and strings

action

The operetta is set in the south of France at the time of the Crusades

first act

1st picture: village square

The shepherd Saphir welcomes the new day and his neighbor, the shepherdess Fleurette, with his flute. Suddenly the coarse farmer Boulotte appears and makes the young man beautiful eyes. She knows that he has a mysterious past, but the circumstances are alien to her. She unashamedly compliments him and asks him to kiss her.

Popolani, who is in the service of the knight Bluebeard, and Count Oscar, Minister of King Bobèche, meet in the village square. Popolani has been commissioned by his master to look for a girl to marry, as he has just been widowed for the fifth time. Count Oscar is supposed to look for his abandoned daughter for his master because the later-born son is not suitable for heir to the throne. He feels that Fleurette is the one he is looking for and has her brought to the castle.

Popolani throws a beauty pageant because Bluebeard would like to crown a girl the Queen of the Roses. The choice falls on Boulotte. Bluebeard is taken with her beauty and invites her to his palace. Popolani tries to warn Boulotte about Bluebeard. But she is not afraid and follows the knight.

Second act

2nd picture: Magnificent hall in the palace of King Bobèche

King Bobèche is happy to have found his daughter again. He is determined to marry her to a prince who suits him, but Hermia, as Fleurette is now called, does not fit. The wedding preparations are already underway. Once again, Bobèche was overcome by jealousy when he saw Count Alvarez flirting with his wife. He immediately orders his chief courtier to eliminate the rival. It is now the fifth time that Count Oscar has been asked to carry out such a horrific assignment.

Queen Clementine is dissatisfied with her marriage and doesn't want her daughter to experience the same mishap. She therefore advises her not to get married. But that only pushes in open doors, because Hermia still loves sapphire and does not want to be forced into any strange man. However, when she sees the foreign prince, she is transformed, because he is none other than the one she loves.

Bluebeard comes to visit to introduce Boulotte as his sixth wife to the royal couple. However, this disdains any etiquette: instead of kissing the king's hand, she throws herself on the neck of the adorned sapphire. When Bluebeard sees Hermia, he no longer thinks about his Boulotte, but already sees Hermia as the seventh wife at his side.

3rd picture: Basement of the alchemist Popolani in Bluebeard's castle

The tombs of Bluebeard's first five women are in the cellar. This comes with his sixth and orders Popolani to suffer the same fate for Boulotte. No matter how much she defends herself, she has to empty the glass offered to her. Bluebeard says goodbye to her corpse and withdraws.

What Bluebeard does not know: Popolani did not kill the former wives. He only pretended to his master that they were dead. In fact, the potion he prepared only caused the women to fall into a short but deep sleep. When Boulotte wakes up, she makes the acquaintance of her very lively predecessors. She incites them not to quarrel with their fate, but to leave the cellar and take revenge.

Third act

4th image: Ballroom in King Bobèche's castle

The wedding between Hermia and Saphir is imminent. The party is just about to leave for church when Bluebeard comes. Before the royal couple he lamented that fate had snatched his beloved Boulotte from him and that he could only be happy again if Bobèche gave him his daughter as a wife. Bobèche knows only too well that he mustn't throw himself up with the powerful and influential Bluebeard, and agrees. But with that he did the math without the landlord; because Prince Saphir defends himself and demands a divine judgment. Bluebeard tricked Saphir and walks with Hermia to the chapel.

When the wedding party returns, Bluebeard is horrified to discover that Popolani has his five supposedly dead wives march in the ballroom. Bobèche is no better off: Count Oscar, too, has always disregarded his master's death sentences and now confronts him with the five nobles.

The operetta ends with a mass wedding: Bluebeard's former wives are married to the five nobles. Saphir is finally allowed to lead his beloved Hermia to the altar, and Bluebeard has no choice but to be content with the buxom farmer's wife Boulotte.

Reception history

Offenbach's Bluebeard was nowhere near as popular as other of his works in the 19th century. However, after Karl Kraus had demonstrated the special satirical quality of the material in its implementation by Offenbach and his librettists in his readings, the play experienced its renaissance in German-speaking countries. The director Walter Felsenstein also referred to Kraus as an inspiration for his production at the Berlin Komische Oper in 1963.

Felsenstein and the conductor Karl-Fritz Voigtmann put the work on the stage in an idiosyncratic German arrangement with Hanns Nocker in the title role, Anny Schlemm as Boulotte, Werner Enders as Roi Bobèche, Helmut Polze as Count Oscar and Rudolf Asmus as Popolani, who thanks of their extraordinary success (369 performances until 1992) significantly influenced the view of the work and was also filmed in yet another version. The theatrical version was also played a lot elsewhere, in Frankfurt Felsenstein rehearsed his own production (it was revived from 1983 to 1992 at the Komische Oper, partly with Günter Neumann as Bluebeard and Uta Priew as Boulotte).

A detailed account of the history of reception, especially in Germany and Austria, can be found in Kevin Clarke's essay “Je suis Barbe-bleue, ô gué! Jamais veuf ne fut plus gai! ”Offenbach's Bluebeard (1866) or: The legend of the woman-murdering knight as a frivolous social grotesque from 2014. The work was a great success both in Paris and Vienna. It was subsequently played around the world, as Kurt Gänzl explains in detail in his Encyclopedia of the Musical Theater .

literature

  • Kevin Clarke : “Je suis Barbe-bleue, ô gué! Jamais veuf ne fut plus gai ”. Offenbach's Bluebeard (1866) or: The legend of the woman-murdering knight as a frivolous society grotesque. In: The Tonkunst. Magazine for classical music and musicology. Vol. 8, No. 3 = Bluebeard Operas , July 2014, ISSN  1863-3536 , pp. 393-405.

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