Maurice Maeterlinck wrote his libretto for Ariane et Barbe-Bleu for Grieg, who rejected it, but Paul Dukas was delighted when it was offered to him. Completed in 1907, Dukas' opera appeared five years after Debussy's Pelléas, which it resembles in some of its text setting and in its sense of mystery. (Mélisande appears in the Dukas as one of Bluebeard's wives, but it's impossible to know if Maeterlinck had her back story in mind when he wrote the 1892 play on which Debussy based his opera. Dukas directly quotes Debussy's ...
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Maurice Maeterlinck wrote his libretto for Ariane et Barbe-Bleu for Grieg, who rejected it, but Paul Dukas was delighted when it was offered to him. Completed in 1907, Dukas' opera appeared five years after Debussy's Pelléas, which it resembles in some of its text setting and in its sense of mystery. (Mélisande appears in the Dukas as one of Bluebeard's wives, but it's impossible to know if Maeterlinck had her back story in mind when he wrote the 1892 play on which Debussy based his opera. Dukas directly quotes Debussy's opera in connection with his character of Mélisande.) Like Debussy's opera, Dukas' is mysterious and psychologically troubling; after Ariane succeeds in freeing Bluebeard's five previous wives (a sixth wife -- "the black fairy" is ominously unaccounted for), the wives choose to remain in captivity in Bluebeard's dank prison. The music of Dukas' opera is more overtly dramatic than Debussy's and has a Wagnerian grandeur filtered through the delicacy of a thoroughly French sensibility....
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