Paul Dukas (1865-1935) has always had something of a reputation amongst those in the know for being an unrecognised genius. Quite apart from the flair for orchestration and melody that everyone knows from L'apprenti sorcier, the epic Piano Sonata (a favourite of John Ogdon's and recently recorded too by Marc-André Hamelin on Hyperion) and his single symphony are spoken of with hushed reverence. The same can be said for Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, yet as far as I'm aware, it has only been recorded once before, in 1984 by Armin Jordan on Erato. That version is now superseded in most respects by the new Leon Botstein recording on Telarc. In fact, comparison between this new version and the Erato is more or less academic, since the latter has long been out of the catalogue.
Suffice to say that the main advantage Botstein has over Jordan is the refinement of the orchestral playing and the recorded sound. The BBC Symphony play beautifully, relishing Dukas' virtuosic orchestration - an intoxicating mix of Debussy and Richard Strauss - and it is all captured in with the kind of unobtrusive but realistic engineering that's become hallmark of Telarc's recordings. The central performance by Lori Phillips (a soprano, rather than the mezzo that Dukas specifies) is commanding, even if she gets a little strident at some moments and her voice is not as sensual as Katherine Ciesnski on Erato.
I'd imagine the main question people will ask before buying this recording, though, is whether or not Ariane et Barbe-Bleue is really all it's cracked up to be. On a musical level, one can safely say that is a work of the highest quality. Dukas, a perfectionist who like Brahms destroyed great swathes of his unpublished work in the belief that it was worthless, was justifiably proud of the score for Ariane, undoubtedly his masterpiece, which took him seven years to compose.
There are numerous passages which are highly convincing dramatically - and no doubt hugely effective in the theatre. Act I sets the scene of the great hall in Bluebeard's castle with chilling skill, an unseen crowd chanting from outside ominously vowing revenge on the Duke for what they see as the inevitable death of the sixth wife. That wife is Ariane who makes her entrance with her Nurse, sung here idiomatically, if not vocally immaculately, by Patricia Bardon. They sing of the seven keys they've been given – six for the sanctioned doors, one (with a hint of Lohengrin's Frageverbot) which opens a forbidden door. The first six doors contain various jewels, of increasing preciousness. The sixth opens to reveal diamonds which prompt an extended song of praise from Ariane. Here even Phillips, as a soprano, is tested by the high tessitura, before she sets off to open the seventh, presuming correctly that they will lead to the other wives.
In this episode the Nurse, for whom Bluebeard's rules seem to hold more significance, grows more and more anxious as Ariane gets closer to the seventh door, with mysterious subterranean chanting adding to the tension. It is truly expert and a dramatically taut build up, which brought to mind some of the dramatic juxtapositions Verdi was so fond of creating. This leads to the entry of Bluebeard who sings just a handful of lines before the angry mob break in. One of the factors that has undoubtedly added to the opera's marginalisation in the repertory is the fact that the role of Bluebeard, here sung with authority by British bass Peter Rose, is so small. At his only other appearance, at the end of Act III, he sings nothing.
This means that we are left for the rest of the opera with Ariane, her nurse and from Act II, Bluebeard's previous wives, who having been locked up in his dungeon have become a pretty weedy bunch. It is the actions of the other wives that might well also have contributed to the opera's neglect. In his liner note, David Murray writes of 'Ariane's heroic struggle for women's liberation' but this is undermined in the third act. When having escaped from the dungeon Ariane prepares the other wives for freedom she dresses them up in the jewels from Act I, and with the words 'we are going to be free and we must look beautiful' gets one to let her hair down, another to bare her arms. She says to them that she doesn't wonder why Bluebeard wanted 'a hundred wives… he was only seeing your shadows.'
So even Ariane, who treats them with a mixture of Sapphic lasciviousness and sororal concern, seems complicit in Bluebeard's misogyny. It is she who, after the angry peasant mob – complete with pitchforks, scythes and zombie-like chanting – have wounded and bound the Duke, claims that she and her fellow wives will deal with him themselves. Only to have them all fawn about him as, we could imagine, the Valkyries might around a wounded Wotan. Dukas himself said 'no-one wants to be liberated'; perhaps he was an existentialist avant la lettre, but it does mean a rather dramatically inconclusive end to the opera. Of the wives, whose roles vary in their importance, outstanding American mezzo Laura Vlasak Nolen is in sensuous voice as Sélysette and Ana James (formerly a Young Artist of the Royal Opera House, interviewed by us here) sings beautifully as Ygraine.
Without doubt Dukas' opera has suffered from comparison with Debussy's Pelleas et Mélisande (likewise to a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck) and Bartók's Bluebeard, a dramatically much tauter treatment of the same legend. Unlike Pelleas, Maeterlinck actually produced his Ariane as a libretto - initially destined for Edvard Grieg - and despite the slight issues with it outlined above, it provides several scenes tailor-made for the opera stage, all of which Dukas rises to admirably in a score of real stature. It's probably a bit optimistic to hope that this opera, which has had some pretty high profile champions in the past, will finally find its place in the operatic canon that it fully deserves. This excellent new recording from Telarc though can only help its cause.
By Hugo Shirley