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(Received: 25 March 2006; accepted: 25 May 2006)
Abstract: The intention in this lecture is to explore the means by which Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) transforms the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language, and how this language reflects the psycho-dramatic symbolism of Béla Balázs, Hungarian disciple of the Belgian dramatist, Maurice Maeterlinck. In reaction to the realism of nineteenth-century theater, many authors began to develop a new interest in psychological motivation and a level of consciousness manifested in metaphor, ambiguity, and symbol. The Bartók-Balázs opera represents one of the first significant attempts to establish more profound correspondences between the symbolist dramatic conception and the new musical language. This language is based almost exclusively on interactions between pentatonic/diatonic folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations, the opposition of these two harmonic extremes serving as the basis for dramatic polarity between the characters as real-life beings and as instruments of fate. Also explored are the new musico-dramatic relations within larger historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. Distinguishing features are seen in the formulation of the new theoretical principles and how they serve to conjoin historical and cultural as well as philosophical and psychological issues within the operatic milieu.
Keywords: Béla Bartók, Béla Balázs, Duke Bluebeard's Castle, opera, symbolism
The creation of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1893-1902) and Béla Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) coincided with the beginnings of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychology - Maurice Maeterlinck, Achille-Claude Debussy, Béla Balázs, and Bartók, were contemporaries of Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. The latter two, as clinicians, discovered the psychological effects of traumatic events by listening to their patients and trying to find a way to ameliorate their pain.1 Although using different perspectives, both Freud and Janet viewed the unconscious as a realm that could be understood and rendered less destructive by awareness and new learning. Maeterlinck and Balázs, relying on the philosophical positions of the time, viewed the unconscious as part of fate, a universal will.2
Although enframed within the perspective of destiny, or the unconscious will, both the Maeterlinck and Balázs plays struggle with the notion of a self divided by contradictory impulses and driven by unconscious motivation. It is well known that Balázs exhibited a lifelong...