Abstract
Andrea Fábry discusses in her article, "A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle," the image of Bluebeard as a metaphor for gender relations. Béla Bartók's opera and its libretto represent a prime example of the metaphor that in turn can be found in a range of text types, from fairy tales through novels to films. In the article, Fábry analyzes Bartók's contribution to the metaphor, namely with his opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle. She relates the opera to the text of the opera's libretto, written by film theoretician Béla Balázs, and places her analysis in the larger historical framework of audience research in modernity. The analysis reveals that in a pronounced misogynistic artistic climate of the time and working from a libretto whose tragic ending denies transcendence to the female character of the opera, Bartók's opera can be understood as the representation of simplistic domesticity where the real story remains un-mediated and un-narrated.
Recommended Citation
Fábry, Andrea.
"A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
1.4
(1999):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1056>
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