Bluebeard

Bartók gives me no aria to hide behind — only seven locked doors, a wife who keeps asking, and a castle that breathes when I do. Judith arrives in the dark; I sing against her insistence, knowing each key she takes brings the next sorrow closer. The drama is a slow opening, then a slow closing.

The line sits low and unhurried, the bass-baritone weight pressing the words down into the orchestra's vast pedal. There is no room for ornament — only colour, restraint, and the exact pressure of consonants in Hungarian, where the language itself carries half the meaning.

By the seventh door I am not a villain but a man unbearably understood. The voice must hold that — tender and final at once — until the last wife joins the others and the light goes out.