The Beard

Of all the fairy tales compiled by author Charles Perrault in his Mother Goose rhymes in 1697, it is “Bluebeard” that has lingered most gruesomely in our collective imagination. Three centuries later, the grisly tale of serial spousal murder continues to haunt and mystify new generations. And no wonder: this glimpse into a world of mutilation and blood-soaked chambers hits us where we are most vulnerable — at the point where our yearning for truth yields fatal secrets; where intimacy unleashes betrayal; and love incites death.

Its themes of a locked room, of limitless wealth, of an evil madman have become indelible staples of mystery and horror genres. In its warning about disobeying taboos, Bluebeard also bears similarities to the fables of Elsa in Lohengrin and Eve in Genesis, as well as Eurydice and Pandora’s Box. At its most banal, it can be reduced to the phrase: curiosity killed the cat. At its most uncanny, it is a parable, steeped in our collective unconscious, of man’s obsessive need to penetrate and understand his most primitive impulses.

A vice minister of finance under Louis XIV, Perrault composed these contes for his children (which says a lot about parenting in the age of enlightenment!). Scholars argue over his sources. With Bluebeard, was he simply poking fun at England’s Henry VIII and his six hapless wives (two of which were beheaded)? That scandal had certainly not died down by the time Perrault put pen to paper. But numerous versions of the Bluebeard tale were prevalent in regional folklore, from Brittany to Estonia, and beyond to India (the devious Hindu deity Indra is noted for his striking blue beard). The Grimm Brothers spun their own variation in “The Feather Bird,” about an ogre who imprisons three sisters, only to be outwitted by a cunning young virgin disguised as a chicken.

It became fashionable at the turn of the last century to blame Bluebeard on Gilles de Rais (above), the notorious 15th-century French marshal who allegedly killed over 140 children, most of them boys. A celebrated soldier, Gilles de Rais achieved military reclame as Joan of Arc’s most loyal and fearless supporter. After her execution, he retired to his vast landholdings in Brittany. But like Joan, he would be burned at the stake as a witch. He was only 36 when he died.

At first glance, the characters seem diametrically opposed. How could a pedophile murderer, a medieval John Wayne Gacy, have inspired a legend about a homicidal bridegroom? In fact, Bluebeard has more in common with Comorre, another Breton figure, who preyed on young girls. But upon closer inspection Gilles de Rais is a compelling choice. He was famous for his swallow-tailed beard which turned blue in direct sunlight, for his incredible fortune which he squandered on music (he was known to lug an entire organ along with him into battle) and lavish miracle plays, such as the Saint of Orleans about Joan of Arc. Two of his fiances died before marrying him, inspiring rumors that he had killed them. He eventually did tie the knot, with an even richer noblewoman, and sired a family. But it was his obsession with alchemy and necromancy that led to his downfall, and caused him to withdraw into a private hell of sadistic orgies and spiraling debts. His accusers claimed to have found the skeletons of hundreds of dismembered corpses in a crypt below one of the baron’s castles.

The gory details of Gilles de Rais’ “crimes against nature” were revealed in full at his two simultaneous trials (one ecclesiastical, the other civil). He sodomized his victims and beheaded them after drinking (or bathing in) their blood. By sacrificing boys to black magic, the baron hoped to uncover the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life. Were the charges true? His confession was induced through torture, and is highly suspect. But the legacy of his perversion grew over time and evolved into that of Bluebeard: a man who could not love without resorting to murder. The homosexual aspect became the subtext; the unspoken horror, the underlying cause of aggression. One need look only to a potboiler like Silence of the Lambs – about a transvestite psychopath — to see how such twisted logic is prevalent today.

Even in an age of pop serial killers and mass murderers, of everyday lunatics who slay their wives and kids before embarking on all-too-familiar bloody rampages, Bluebeard still has shock value. In its purest form, the story is about innocence confronting evil, the life force battling Death, light surrendering to darkness. But underneath the allegorical surfaces lurk disturbing truths about conjugal relations, human psychology, sexual repression –what Freud dubbed “civilization and its discontents.” Perhaps this is why the story continues to hold us in its thrall. Bluebeard embodies the essential paradox of the human condition. The need to connect with others while feeling trapped in the No-Exit of existential isolation. No man is an island, but woe to anyone who dares to bridge the gap. The punishment for total intimacy is death.

Bluebeard has thrived in all the arts: painting, pantomime, drama, dance (most memorably in choreography by Fokine and Petipa). There was even an “Ethiopian” minstrel show of Bluebeard that played the vaudeville circuit. Hollywood embraced the libidinous duke early on, with hilarious results. Both Gloria Swanson and Claudette Colbert sent up the myth in the film versions of the comedy, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.

Charles Ludlam revamped the legend as high camp. Richard Burton made one of his worst films (now a cult classic), Bluebeard, opposite Raquel Welch and Joey Heatherton. Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux was Bluebeard in modern drag. Not to be outdone, that nimble sleuth Nancy Drew got into the act, plunging “into a dark world of mystery, romance and terror,” by asking too many annoying questions in The Bluebeard Room.

The theme of a sealed room containing vicious secrets was recycled in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and more subtly in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, where the curious new wife fears her husband is a cold-hearted murderer after the corpse of his previous wife is dredged from the bottom of the sea. Among more contemporary authors, Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut have profited from plying Bluebeard themes in their novels. Perhaps the sliest homage is Sylvia Plath’s eerie poem, “Bluebeard”:

“I am sending back the key
that led me into Bluebeard’s study
because he would make love to me
I am sending back the key,
in his eye’s darkroom I can see
my X-rayed heart, dissected body:
I am sending back the key
that led me into Bluebeard’s study.”

This enigmatic verse took on added significance after Plath’s tragic suicide, leading some to question if “bluebeard” was in fact her husband Ted Hughes.

But it is in opera that Bluebeard really has legs. Jacques Offenbach, above, satirized the duke in his three-act Barbe-bleue (1866), an opera bouffe set to a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy. Here the grotesque is undercut by humor; no one actually dies, they are put away temporarily with sleeping pills. French composer Paul Dukas tackled the subject more soberly in his lushly orchestrated Ariane et Barbe-bleue based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play. A master of symbolism, Maeterlinck added a chilling note of ambiguity, making Bluebeard’s ex-wives remain loyal to their torturer, turning their back on Ariane’s efforts to free them. Other, more obscure composers, such as Gretry and Reznicek, have also retailed the legend.

Bela Bartok’s unsettling masterpiece Bluebeard’s Castle taps into more profound recesses of the psyche. Some see it as a classical allegory about the soul, of man’s inability and unwillingness to understand his Dionysian self. The inquisitive wife represents the light of Apollonian reason, demanding answers, only to seal her doom when her enquiring mind wants to know too much. A Hungarian, Bela Bartok suffused his opera with a stultifying Transylvanian atmosphere of dread and misery. Yet for all its stock stereotypes — the blanket of red light evoking blood; the subterranean “lake of tears” (shades of LeRoux’s Phantom of the Opera); the ghoulish ex-wives trapped in a limbo of ghostly immortality (reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the saga of another Transylvanian ladykiller) — Bartok (and his librettist Bela Balazs) managed to reveal the monster at his most human. Bartok’s brooding study of evil has stood the test of time because his Bluebeard is a sympathetic character: A lonely philosopher who is just as much a victim of his compulsion to kill as his wives are. He and Judith are mirrors of each other, inextricably linked by fate, playing out a danse macabre as old as time.

Balazs was obviously inspired by Maeterlinck’s play. But he simplified the storyline, reducing the plot to one act instead of three. Rather than have Judith be rescued at the end (he changed the wife’s name from Ariane, adding biblical resonances), Balazs lets her die. Bartok was drawn to the libretto’s bittersweet despair, perhaps because it let him fully indulge his fondness for Hungarian folk songs. Some of these are based on actual Transylvanian tunes he recorded and studied. Bartok was eager to paint the two characters entirely through music, as Debussy had in Pelleas et Melisande, another Maeterlinck play. No doubt he was also influenced by Debussy’s lesser known Fall of the House of Usher, based on Poe’s gothic novella.

Bluebeard’s Castle is probably the finest example of an opera that works better in a concert hall rather than on the stage. (Indeed it was rejected when Bartok first submitted it for competition in 1911 because of its static quality, and was not produced until 1918.) Its intrigue lies in its ingenious score. On stage, the opening of the seven doors offers little if any suspense, but musically it is magical. The sensual, Straussian orchestral flourishes create an overwhelming sense of inescapable doom. Bluebeard’s has become part of the repertory, often performed with Schoenberg’s equally somber Erwartung. But it was not always so. In 1955, City Opera staged it with Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole for its New York premiere, while the Met in 1974 paired it with Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi!

It is no surprise that Bluebeard remains a contemporary icon (Charles Ludlam’s camp Bluebeard, above), as well known today as Batman or Beauty and the Beast. The legend plays to our yearnings for ritual and sacrifice, summoning up innate fears of desire and death, wisdom and ignorance, good and evil. Ultimately, like the medieval miracle plays Gilles de Rais himself sponsored, it defies rational comprehension. It was, after all, a tale for children, cautioning us not to ask too many questions.

Note: a slightly edited version of this article appeared in Stagebill magazine.