Iolanta | Bluebeard ’s Castle at Teatr Wielki - Opera Narodowa, Moniuszko Auditorium

Iolanta
Lyric opera in one act
Libretto: Modest Tchaikovsky after Henrik Hertz
In the original Russian
Co-production: Metropolitan Opera, New York

BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE
Opera in one act
Libretto: Béla Balázs
In the original Hungarian

Lady I. and Lady J.: Iolanta – the eponymous heroine of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s operatic fairy tale, and Judith from Béla Bartók’s opera – passing consecutive sombre rooms in the castle from the title, searching for a mystery.
The former woman is blind. She cannot see but she knows. The other woman sees, looks, but doesn’t notice. Tchaikovsky composed Iolanta at the end of his life, after two suicide attempts, subconsciously dealing with
the homosexuality he was hiding from the world (maybe that’s why this is a story about a young woman held captive in a man’s world). Bartók dedicated Bluebeard’s Castle to his wife Marta, who was twelve years his junior
and just… sixteen on their wedding day (and whom he divorced five years after the premiere of Bluebeard’s Castle, having fallen in love with an 18-year-old student). These two titles will be Mariusz Treli?ski’s debut at
New York’s Metropolitan Opera (January 2015). His original juxtaposition of the two pieces promises a thriller or a horror of the magnitude of Kubrick’s The Shining. The prologue to Bluebeard’s Castle says: “Where did this happen ... Where is the stage: outside or within?”. When Valery Gergiev is conducting and Mariusz Treli?ski directing, the stage is always within.