A scenic sculpture from the ˝echtzeit˝ series With > Katharina Bihler, Dubravka Musovic, Olafur Sigurdarson; Conductor: Christophe Hellmann, Costumes > Ellen Hoffmann, Image composition > Hannah Groninger/Penelope Wehrli; Director/ Space > Penelope Wehrli
Prologue: a long searching walk through a nighttime urban landscape is projected onto a transparent surface in the portal. This landscape: a dilapidated cardboard world of an abandoned toy train. The performer Katharina Bihler moves behind this landscape and declaims the ˝Bluebeard˝ fairy tale with the neutral precision of a scientist. She is interrupted by the orchestra tuning their instruments. A documentary description of the way atom bombs function and a report from a psychotherapeutic office follows: an eight-year-old boy tortures and kills a canary.
The opera: a red couch, an armchair, in the armchair a woman with a notebook, on the couch a well-dressed man with a slightly uncertain facial expression: all are in front of the orchestra pit in the front rows. ˝This is my castle, Bluebeard’s castle,˝ the man sings in Hungarian. ˝Are you coming with me, Judith?˝ ˝Yes.˝ says the therapist.
˝The entire opera as a psychoanalytic therapy session: an equally simple and brilliant thought. It is stunning to see how well, almost self evidently the dialogue between Bluebeard and Judith is integrated into the director’s formal guidelines: it is not the woman who wanders, shivering with fear, through the castle’s dark chambers. It’s Bluebeard. The castle as a metaphor for the soul; the closed rooms, the horrible things that are hidden behind the doors.
Something strange happens during this performance: due to the neutrally told fairy tale at the beginning, through the sober description of atom bomb explosions and the cruelty of an eight-year-old, one enters the opera with a hunger for empathy. And one sees the man’s fear, who is actually supposed to be the monster– and one sympathizes with him. (…)