Bluebeard’s Castle

Born Herbert Bauer in Szeged in the Hungarian kingdom of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in Hungary) to schoolteacher parents, Béla Balázs was an intellectual, journalist, fiction writer, and most importantly a librettist, writer for film, and film critic and theorist. Adopting his Hungarian pseudonym as a youth, he studied literature in Budapest’s Eötvös Kollegium and became a librettist and scenario writer for the leading figures in Hungarian music Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók; the excerpt here is from his libretto for Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle. Balázs also became a leading figure in the most avant-garde intellectual circles of prewar Hungarian culture, cofounding the avant-garde journal Szellem with George Lukács and Lajos Fülep in 1911 and playing an important role in the Weberian-cum-Marxian philosophical-sociological circle of prewar Budapest that included George Lukács and Karl Mannheim. Following the abortive Hungarian Communist revolution of 1919, he fled to Vienna, where he emerged as a leading film critic and writer for the budding German film scene until the rise of the Nazis made this impossible. Returning to Hungary from the Soviet Union in 1945, to which he had emigrated in 1933, Balázs returned to filmmaking and completed his book Theory of Film.