What does it mean, this tale we are about to read? How shall we understand it, ladies and gentlemen? Soon the music will begin, a movie will unfold. Where is the screen? Within? Without? It tells of matters both bitter and sweet. It tells of the world's conflicts and the soul's mysteries. Who knows where this tale came from? We can only read... and wonder.
Music sounds, the film begins. You may applaud when it's over, ladies and gentlemen. An old castle, an old story.
Read now...
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This, with a few changes, was the prelude I wrote for the libretto of Bluebeard's Castle. Isn't it just perfectly awful? Perfectly cliche? I have never written a more exquisite bit of poetry or prose in my life, but the exquisiteness of this passage is agony. Entirely worthy of my place in world culture.
Sadly it was saved by Bartok's magnificent score, the other Bela, the real BelaH who never used more than seven words a day. He was the one with inspiration, I just lifted the deliberately functional words I wrote to describe the plot in the outline and put it into the libretto.
It is truly amazing how opera can be so compelling while having no literary merit whatsoever. The more insipid the script, the more flights permitted the composer of imaginative leaps that defy all rational consideration that may be articulated by language's concrete definition. One chord can provide a thousand implications where a mere sentence can provide five.
And if music is liberated by bad writing, how much more liberated by it is film? We had thought there to be no total art work more total than opera--a combination of all nine muses. But cinema is the tenth muse: all nine muses work together in opera, but cinema provides the portal through which we may encounter the muses themselves.
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