Auditory Imagination and Narrativization in Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle

Pieter Verstraete’s chapter examines how the interactions between the visual and acoustic elements in contemporary musical theatre create a critical distance that allows audiences to reflect on the effects of theatre itself as a medium. Verstraete extends the existing concept of “auditory imagination” to show how the use of minimalist settings and contrasting juxtapositions between textual and visual elements can draw the audience’s attention to their own interpretative acts of listening and reveal how theatrical events actually occur within the mind of the spectator-auditor.