Romeo Castellucci and Teodor Currentzis return to Salzburg for an unusual programme: Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle coupled with De temporum fine comoedia by Carl Orff — two works that in formal terms seem complete opposites. A pinnacle of early 20th-century musical theatre, Bluebeard’s Castle was composed to a text by Béla Balázs in 1911. The story of Bluebeard has its literary archetype in Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and tells of a wife-murderer who forbids his latest wife, who is driven by curiosity, to open a door behind which he has hidden his previous victims. Bartók’s opera develops entirely out of the dialogue between the two protagonists, Bluebeard and Judith, revealing an approach to the drama as a kind of spiritual and emotional force field. ‘Where is the stage: outside or within?’, as the prologue puts it, an invitation to the audience to ask themselves questions about the enigmatic nature of theatre as an allusive reverberation of the real.

By contrast, the subject of De temporum fine comoedia is the Last Judgement, in a reinterpretation rooted in Carl Orff’s personal religious beliefs. The writing of the text in Ancient Greek, Latin and German took the composer a wholedecade, from 1960 to 1970, with the essence of the work being increasingly determined by the apocalyptic vision of the Alexandrian theologian Origen, in which at the end of time even demons will be granted forgiveness and salvation.

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