[on his inspirations for
Kékszakállú (2016)] Two years ago I was under the spell of Bartok's feverish opera [
Béla Bartók's "Bluebeard's Castle"], and it was through the lens of a similarly folkloric transfiguration that I began to envision the lives of teenagers who vacationed much as I had as a youth: summers at the coast, in houses leached of color, the heat bearing down, all while inner turmoil lay dormant, perhaps corrosively so. (...) I was captivated by the material essence of iconic architecture and the lives trapped inside it: was this supposed white paradise by the sea not a kind of involuntary hell? One could feel here the circularity of time, the repetition of gestures and the embalming nature of history repeating itself. So it was here that my own operatic dream came to be, an uncanny union of opposing elements - maximum artifice laid bare by a documentarian gaze - unfolding like a fugue.
