Zemlinsky and Bartók at the Vienna State Opera, directed by Vasily Barkhatov

At the end, the two of them lie down in a beautifully made bed and embrace. The music holds for a moment, as if unsure whether to follow, and then falls silent. Under the slatted base lies the dead man from the first piece.

Vasily Barkhatov stages Zemlinsky’s “A Florentine Tragedy” and Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” as the story of a single couple. The programme promises healing: the two work through their past and find a form that holds. What I saw was closer to a healing from within that only appears to succeed.

Vienna is the right place for this reading. Bartók composed “Bluebeard” in 1911, the year Alfred Adler broke with Freud. The two one-act operas span the years in which two ways of reading the psyche came apart. The evening can be read with either, and only with Adler does it become fully consistent.

Simone and Bianca run an interior design shop; their marriage has gone cold. Bianca brings in a couples therapist, who suggests a role-play and takes on the name of a former lover. Simone at first finds it ridiculous, gets drawn in and finally strangles him. Afterwards the two see each other anew.

Oscar Wilde ends the play with two questions over the corpse. She asks: “Why / Did you not tell me you were so strong?” He answers with a question of his own: “Why / Did you not tell me you were beautiful?” Each sees in the other what they need for themselves. A mirror runs through the whole evening as part of the set, and here it becomes clear what it stands for.

In terms of Individual Psychology, Simone is the merchant beside the prince. He compensates for his inferiority feeling with violence, and Bianca calls it strength. She meets the whole affair with an indifference that even the murder breaks only briefly, and she carries it into the second piece, in the same dress. Adler would have seen this as a form of distance, a safeguard against disappointment. He described love as a task for two people of equal worth. What emerges here is an arrangement in which each gives the other back the image they want to have of themselves.

In this first part the idea carries more than the acting. The direction of the singers remains thin; the characters often move through the space for no apparent reason.

In “Bluebeard” the couple works through its history. The doors stand for shared wounds rather than for one man’s inner life. In Balázs’s libretto the castle is a body that sighs and weeps. Barkhatov turns it into a house that belongs to two people. Judith opens the doors without the passion with which Bartók has her press on. The working-through becomes more ritual than struggle.

At the fifth door, behind which lie Bluebeard’s wide lands and the orchestra opens up at its brightest, the mirror breaks. For a moment the two look outward instead of at themselves. In the text, Judith also sees the blood-red shadow on the clouds there: what lies outside the couple and what it has caused. Then the mirror stands again.

Behind the sixth door, Balázs’s still white lake of tears, there is a white, empty nursery with a cot and toys. The unfulfilled wish for a child is a wound that belongs to neither of them alone. For me it was the most precise room of the evening.

The former wives appear as dresses left behind. They lie behind the seventh door, the one Bluebeard resists opening longest. If Morning, Noon and Evening are earlier phases of the same relationship rather than other women, then discarded dresses are the right image: shed skins. What Bluebeard defends longest is then the memory of who the two of them once were. Judith becomes the present, the night in which the earlier phases are held.

This gives two beds: the cot in the empty nursery and the marriage bed at the end. Each has an empty place: in one, the child who did not come; in the other, the man who may no longer be there. The couple lacks a third, and it gets rid of a third.

The figure of the therapist is decisive. He is the only one who comes from outside and represents the outside view. For Adler, mental health is measured by Gemeinschaftsgefühl (community feeling): whether a life goal points beyond oneself. The couple removes exactly this third and wins back its private logic in exchange. The working-through succeeds, but only on the surface. After all, the two have done away with their couples therapist. Freud would have his own term for the dead man under the bed: the return of the repressed.

What can be seen on stage rarely matches what the text describes, and that is the evening’s method. The production claims happiness; the score does not go along. Bartók’s ending leads back into the darkness of the opening, while on stage two people go to bed, apparently happy.

The evening leaves open whether the programme means the healing seriously or whether the direction is putting it on display. The line that one can very well build happiness on the misfortune of others sounds half like a thesis, half like a provocation. What remains at the end is the image of a couple that has settled in, and music that hesitates for a moment before it falls silent.