The German and the Italian prologue of the Hungarian Bard

Abstract

The theme of the paper is highly relevant with the looming 100th anniversary of the first performance of Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard's Castle, which originally took place at the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest on May 24th in 1918. The paper takes a special approach to the archaic Prologue, interpreting it as a symbolic key to the opera in its entirety. It is shown how the Prologue makes the many layers of possible connotations – corresponding to various psychological, sociological, aesthetic-metalinguistic and philosophical-cognitive interpretations – more easily accessible to the recipient, and how it focuses on the inner stages of the soul. Accordingly, it is argued that in any staging of the world-famous opera outside Hungary, it is a sine qua non for the success of the show to open with the prologue of the bard. The intertextual and metalinguistic-phatic references in the varying quality Italian and German text-versions also point to the importance of the prologue.