Bluebeard's Castle & The Miraculous Mandarin

‘Hopes, chimeras, distant mysteries... What does this story tell us?’ The Prologue to Bluebeard’s Castle invites us to consider the work as a mysterious adventure punctuated by the opening of castle doors, each opening on another world, allowing Bartók to write layered and evocative music. The conductor Alain Altinoglu and director Christophe Coppens, who made his opera debut at la Monnaie with a staging of The Cunning Little Vixen, guide our wanderings. After the intimate Bluebeard’s Castle, the same team also presents The Miraculous Mandarin, a torrid pantomime by Bartók whose main character is a prostitute. In the tumult of the city, she attempts to rob one of her clients, an invulnerable mandarin, who will only succumb to the embrace of the woman. Thus, in an atmosphere of violence and mystery, two couples follow one after the other ... unless of course they are but two facets of the same couple?

synopsis

Two works one after the other on the same evening, two works which traverse the caverns of the human soul and its phantasms. In the opera, Bluebeard allows his new wife to enter his castle. She is determined to fathom her husband’s past and expose the hidden crannies of his mind. Eventually she discovers Bluebeard’s three previous wives, asleep, and she joins them in the darkness.
The pantomime ballet The Miraculous Mandarin tells of a prostitute and her client, a vulnerable mandarin. Though her pimps try to murder him, he will only succumb in the woman’s embrace.