© Cowell College, 2008
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Dizikes Event: Bluebeard's Castle

Cowell College Presents the John Dizikes Music Event: Bluebeard's Castle

Sunday, March 9th, 2008
Theater Arts Second Stage Theater
University of California, Santa Cruz
2:00 PM

A concert performance of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok's one-act modernist opera (1911). Libretto by Bela Balazs. Sung by Amyrose McCue Gill (soprano) and Richard Mix (bass), in Hungarian with English supertitles. Accompanied by Skye Atman. Conducted by John Kendall Bailey. Pre-concert introductory remarks by John Kendall Bailey and Tyrus Miller begin at 2:00 PM. Light refreshments to follow.

Only a few years before World War I and the final collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, composer Bela Bartok and poet Bela Balazs collaborated on the richly symbolic one-act musical drama Bluebeard's Castle. Looking both to Grimm's folk-tale of the notorious serial wife-murderer Bluebeard and to the modern psychological theories of their contemporary Sigmund Freud, Bartok and Balazs explore the dark, inner fortress of the self. Out of the tragic story of an aging, weary, repressed Count Bluebeard and his young, beautiful, vibrant new wife Judith, they sought to craft a musical "mystery play" about the enigmas of marital love and sexual desire. Cowell College is delighted to bring to the UCSC community a live concert performance of this masterpiece of modern music and poetic imagination.

The curtains of our eyelids are raised:
Where is the stage, within or without,
Fair ladies and lords?
Prologue, Bluebeard's Castle

Download the flyer (220 KB)

For more information, please contact Jason Jacobs at .