"The Miraculous Mandarin"

In June 1919, just after completing the score of The Miraculous Mandarin , BELA BARTOK wrote: "Who knows when my pantomime will make it to the premiere!". His hunch proved prophetic, as the composer did not witness a Hungarian production. It did not take place until December 1945, two months after Bartók's death. But the composer did attend the first stage performance of The Miraculous Mandarin in Cologne on November 27^th, 1926. On this occasion a German music magazine reported: 'Cologne, the city of churches, monasteries and cathedrals lived to see the first musical scandal. The booing, the stomping, the heckling did not abate even after the composer appeared, and even after the curtain came down. The press protested, the clergy of several denominations, and a large number of citizens intervened adamantly and banned pantomime from the repertoire. Waves of moral outrage swept the city...." Thus, the motive to stop the performance of the work was “obscenity of the subject". The ban was also imposed following the personal insistence of Konrad Adenauer, who was then the mayor of Cologne, later the first chancellor of West Germany (1949-1963) and an important figure in the conservative Christian Democratic Union, of which he was chairman between 1950 and 1966. To give The Miraculous Mandarin a chance to be heard in his home country in 1927 Bartók composed an orchestral suite based on music from the ballet. It was performed on October 15^th , 1928 with the Orchestra of the Budapest Philharmonic Association conducted by Ernst von Dohnányi. As is most often the case with publicly scandalous creations of art, Bartók's pantomime ballet became a "classic" in the repertoire. Today, there are over 100 stage versions, which interpret differently the image of the Immortal Mandarin as the bearer of fundamental ethical questions: the theme of fate, the loneliness of the human soul, the invincible power of love, etc. Among the unforgettable productions of worldwide fame is that of Maurice Béjart and John Neumeier on the stage of the Paris Opera. Indeed, after the fiasco of the Cologne premiere, Bartók was hardly surprised. Eugen (Jenő) Szenkar, conductor of that first performance, wrote in his memoirs, "At the end there was a concert of hisses and shrieks! Bartók was present, seated in the hall, as he was at all the rehearsals. The uproar was so deafening and prolonged that the curtain had to be brought down. However, we were not afraid to appear in front of the curtain, and at that point the booing resumed... There were occasional shouts of 'Bravo', but they sank into the noise!" Bartók was clearly aware of the impact of his music and deliberately sought this effect. In a 1918 letter to his wife, he explains, "This is going to be diabolical music. The prelude before the curtain rises will be very short and will create a sonic association with hell - the audience will thus be introduced to the den of the monstrous metropolis." For Bartók, the idea is brief, but through grotesque situations he tells a parable about the power of love: three vagabond thieves force a young girl to seduce the men they are to rob. They manage to seduce two victims, an old man and a young man, neither of whom have anything to take. Then a mysterious Chinese man appears. The girl awakens in him an unquenchable passion. Тhe bandits kill him once, a second, a third time, all in vain, but his love brings him back to life. The passionate love of the wondrous mandarin purifies the girl, and he dies in her arms after experiencing the delight of love. The roots in the creation of such subjects and music lead mainly to the socio-political situation of the early twentieth century, to the general stagnation after the collapse of Austria-Hungary in the First World War. A consequence of this were the composer's personal health problems. The history of the ballet begins with a publication in the New Year's issue of the literary publication Nyugat ("West") of Melchior Lengyel's (Menyhért Lengyel) pantomime-grotesque of 1916, written for no particular purpose in the author's words. Lengyel was in contact with Diaghilev and knew of his interest in suitable subjects for his ballet company. Bartók found 'his' plot in the publication and composed the music from October 1918 to June 1919. In 1927 he assessed his opus: 'In my opinion it is the finest orchestral work I have written and that so quickly'. Bartók explicitly defines The Miraculous Mandarin as a pantomime-grotesque, believing that the genre of the ballet does not correspond to its essence (it is also rendered as: ballet- pantomime, one-act ballet-parable). Stylistically, it follows the trends of the first decades of the 20th century, the line of so-called barbaric, pagan music, of elemental primal force. With Bartók it begins with his piano piece Allegro Barbaro (1911). This line, reflecting the plagues and defeats of human civilization, their sinister side, led to The Wooden Prince (1916) and The Miraculous Mandarin (1919). In the first ballet, the wooden prince becomes a symbol of qualities such as imperious dispassion, emptiness of character, and human deficiencies. The second ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin , brings out the overwhelming power of passion, cruelty, cynicism. There are other examples of this line in music, and we undoubtedly find them in R. Strauss's Salome (Dance of the Seven Veils). Bartók's music aroused yet another musical trend, new for its time, expressed by the conventional term neofolklore. The label of the new folk presence affects not only the abstract themes whose deepest layers sink into folklore myths and fairy tales, but also the musical language of the composer. He preserves the principle of tonality (as centre and subordination) but adds chromaticisms and 'reads' it in an ancient folk manner. The "barbaric" expressiveness of his music, of course, remains misunderstood. Josef Ujfalusi, his Hungarian biographer, wrote: "European music began to popularize inhuman horrors and apocalyptic monsters. They were created in a world in which the human imagination was provoked by political crises, wars and all forms of threat to life... This exposure of hidden horror, hidden danger and villainy, together with the attempt to portray these evils in all their dimensions, expressed the protest of twentieth-century artists against the inhumanity of modern civilization. Bartók does not see in the Mandarin a grotesque monster, but rather the personification of primitiveness, the barbaric force, the primate whose image so resolutely attracts him." The music achieves the suggestiveness of the plot by all means of expression: motor rhythmics, dissonances, specific orchestration. There is no lack of exquisite expressive moments such as the dance of seduction (in the clarinet intonations), the behaviour of the Mandarin (through keyboard and harp glissandi, celesta and triangle sounds, the cliché of the pentatonic scale as a symbol of the East). Furthermore, after the third attempted assassination of the Mandarin, when he "shines in a bright light", the image is conveyed through shocking sounds. His death is also "voiced" in the orchestra. It is only later in the work that the harmonious language, the unusual relationship between folk and avant-garde idioms and the sensitivity to pressing moral and ethical issues are appreciated.