In gruelingly long theater weeks, there may be cheerful approval for Gottfried Benn's Aperçu that any artistic performance that lasts longer than an hour is an impertinence.

However, with reference to the brevity of Béla Bartók's Bluebeard opera, which lasts a good hour, Markus Hinterhäuser asked the "extremely important artistic question" of what can or must be added to this work.

In the search for correspondences to the primal conflict "man-woman", Bartók's one-act play was mixed up with Claudio Monteverdi's "Combattimento" and Henry Purcell's "Dido und Aeneas", sometimes with Hindemith's "Sancta Susanna" or, as in Salzburg, with Schönberg's "Erwartung" , but hardly ever so starkly contrasted as now with Carl Orff's "De temporum fine comoedia".

The mystery play with the central idea of ​​final universal reconciliation with God was premiered in Salzburg in 1973, conducted by the commissioner Herbert von Karajan.

The enthusiasm of those in high spirits for Orff's opus summum at the time found its negative complement in the dismay of many critics.

It culminated in the verdict: an "apocryphal world view of the truthfulness of banal horoscopes".

A very daring recourse to the history of the Festival, but in the full trust of the director in Teodor Currentzis and Romeo Castellucci, the "Don Giovanni"-proven successful team of the past year.

Castellucci has always known how to fascinate those who cannot decipher their meaning with his mental and enigmatic images;

and the influential Teodor Currentzis with his messianic credo "Art is a message" fulfills the artistic director's dream of the box office magnet.

Both will succeed in "linking the very different, complementary compositions in a stringent way" (Hinterhäuser).

At the beginning of Bartók's "gloomy Adagio" the whimpering of an infant sounds from the off, like a Castellucci riddle, continued by a woman's lamentations, before the bard, a character omitted in many performances, asks the question: "Old legend, alas what does she mean, men and women.

The curtain of our eyelashes is open: where is the stage: outside or inside, you men and women?” In the darkness of the Felsenreitschule, only the outlines of the two protagonists can be seen at first, approaching the “castle”: a windowless structure, in where, seen through a crack, a fire flickers.

Judith feels that the duke's castle is crying – with her feet.

She wades through a sea of ​​tears.

The castle of the supposed murderer of women is a soul space.

That the chambers, whose secrets Judith wants to fathom, are ciphers of the past - torture,

Armory, treasure, cabinet of curiosities, magnificent garden - the viewer has to recognize with the ear of the imagination alone: ​​Images should appear in the sound and color panorama of the music.

Judith's questions are acoustically visualized - all of this brilliantly realized by the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, who plays with high tension and reacts precisely.