The wood-carved prince

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The wood-carved prince ( Hungarian original title A fából faragott királyfi ) op. 13 ( Sz 60) is a one-act dance play by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók based on a libretto by József Újfalussy based on Béla Balázs . The world premiere took place on May 12, 1917 in Budapest .

Plot of the dance game

The one-act work deals with a fairytale theme with a princess and a prince as characters. The dance game consists of a prelude ("introduction") and seven dances with the following names:

  • First dance: dance of the princess in the forest
  • Second dance: dance of the trees
  • Third dance: wave dance
  • Fourth dance: dance of the princess with the wooden doll
  • Fifth dance: the princess tugs and tugs at him and wants to force him to dance
  • Sixth dance: She wants to lure him to her with a seductive dance
  • Seventh dance: The princess, frightened, wants to rush to him, but the forest holds her up

The prelude begins with a low organ point in C major with overtones , which introduces the ensuing awakening of nature and shows parallels to the prelude to Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold .

Only after the foreplay does the actual action begin. A haughty princess under the care of a fairy and a prince live in their castles, separated by a forest and a stream. The prince falls in love with the princess, but is hindered by the forest enchanted by the fairy (dance of the trees) and a swelling body of water (wave dance). First of all, all of nature opposes the prince. In order to get the princess's attention, he makes a wooden doll, which he equips with his hair, clothes and crown. Instead of falling in love with the prince, the princess falls in love with the bogey , which the fairy enchants so that it can jump and dance. She dances with him in a pas de deux (dance of the princess with the wooden doll), ignoring the prince. The prince is desperate, but nature, which was previously hostile to him, comforts him. As the doll becomes more and more weak and sinks lifelessly, the princess pushes it aside. Only now does she recognize the prince and fall in love with him. But this eludes her. The forest also opposes her and mocks her with various visages of wooden princes. Only when the princess conquered her pride and got rid of her jewelry and her hair in the final dance did she break the spell. Prince and princess are united, and nature is reconciled too. The work closes with a horn melody.

music

occupation

In addition to the dancers, the staged performance of the work requires a large orchestra with the following cast:

The performance lasts about 45 minutes.

Stylistically

In the tradition of Richard Strauss, Bartók uses a large late-romantic orchestra in the wood-carved Prince , but he is innovative in the instrumentation by also using unusual instruments such as saxophones, celesta and a large drum battery. In terms of tonal language, the work is not late romantic , but rather impressionistic , with a “harsh color” predominating.

Despite the parallels between the prelude and Richard Wagner's Rheingold prelude due to the low organ point in C major with overtones , Bartók's tonal language is independent and the “non- diatonic ” but heptatonic series of notes used is partly based on his studies of Romanian folk music.

In the further course of the work, Bartók's depictions of nature show the closeness to folk music, but "not in the form of folkloric quotations, but in their own, imitated folk song forms."

Emergence

Bartók recording folk music in 1908

After Bartók had submitted his one-act opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, completed in 1911, to a libretto by Béla Balázs for the Erkel Competition and in 1912 for the Rózsavölgyi Competition, it was rejected both times as "unplayable". Because of this disappointment, Bartók withdrew from the New Hungarian Music Society and was mainly concerned with the evaluation of his Hungarian folk music ("peasant music"), which was recorded on phonograph drums, and which represented a counterpoint to popular urban music . In 1912 he read in the literary magazine Nyugat (Occident) Béla Balázs' draft for a narrative ballet that interested him. In 1914 he began to compose what emerges from a letter to his mother: “the ballet is created; because it demands it. ”After the outbreak of the First World War , however, Bartók interrupted his composing work because he saw little chance of getting the ballet to be performed. He did not continue the interrupted composition until 1916, after Béla Balázs had negotiated with the Budapest Opera House that the work should be premiered in the spring of 1917. Bartók completed the work in January 1917.

In 1917, Bartók wrote in retrospect about the emergence of the wood-carved prince that the impulse to compose the ballet arose from the rejection of his opera, which was considered unplayable because of its static plot and not as full-length because of its brevity. In combination with the "spectacular, colorful, rich and variable events" of the dance game, however, he saw an opportunity "to perform both works in one evening."

The premiere was postponed several times, on the one hand because the orchestra had again refused to perform a work by Bartók, and on the other hand because nobody wanted to take care of the work on the stage, so that finally Béla Balázs stepped in as director. The fact that it was premiered despite these intrigues was not least thanks to the Italian conductor Egisto Tango , who had worked at the Budapest Opera since 1913.

reception

According to Béla Balázs, during the premiere on May 12, 1917, there was a “crackling tension”, with many conservative viewers waiting to see the work fail. Ultimately, however, the “gallery” gave the work of the composer Bartók, who is considered progressive, a resounding success. Bartók's Wood-Carved Prince remained on the program and made a major contribution to the successful premiere of Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle in the following year .

Only the conservative music critic found objections. Zoltán Kodály reported in his essay on Béla Bartók : “At that time he [= Bartók] found sounds for the desolation of his prince that made the audience shudder and some critics to remark that the work was a mistake because the music was for a fairy tale too tragic. ”Others recognized“ Bartók's genius in the grotesque dances, especially in that of the wooden puppet, but she [= the criticism] did not want to do justice to the expressive scenes, rather declared them cold. ”

A concert suite composed by Bartók with three dances from the work was premiered on February 23, 1931 under the direction of Ernst von Dohnányi .

Nowadays, the Wood-Carved Prince is overshadowed by Bartók's other two stage works, the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle and the dance pantomime The Wonderful Mandarin , composed between 1918 and 1924 , which also became widely known as a concert suite after the end of the Second World War.

A description of the wood-carved prince is missing in Reclam's Ballet Guide , 2006 edition, although the work is still performed, either as a ballet or as a concertante.

literature

  • Tibor Tallián: Béla Bartók: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, ISBN 963-13-2325-0 , pp. 113-119; 124-125.
  • Daniel-Frédéric Lebon: Béla Bartók's narrative ballets in their musical genre tradition , Dr. Köster, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-89574-810-3

records

Total recordings

Film adaptation of the ballet

  • A faból faragott királyfi (The Wood-Carved Prince) (1970), directed by Ádám Horváth

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Name of the dances according to information from the program booklet of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival from 28./29. July 2007, on the occasion of the complete concert performance of the work.
  2. ↑ a b Wolfgang Stähr: The early days in Hungary. Béla Bartók's dance game »The wood-carved Prince« , in: SHMF program from 28./29. July 2007, no page number.
  3. ↑ a b Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, in: Supplement to CD CBS 1972/1977, without page number.
  4. ^ Orchestral scoring according to information from Universal Edition .
  5. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 119.
  6. ↑ Quote Tibor Tallián: Béla Bartók: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 119.
  7. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 115.
  8. ↑ a b c Tibor Tallián: Béla Bartók: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 124.
  9. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, pp. 115-116.
  10. ↑ Quotations from Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, in: Supplement to CD CBS 1972/1977, without page number.
  11. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 284.
  12. ^ Rainer Aschemeier: Bartók in Märchenland, in: The Listener of March 9, 2008
  13. ^ Klaus Kieser and Katja Schneider: Reclams Ballettführer , Philipp Reclam junior, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 978-3-15-010603-7 , p. 526.
  14. ↑ Proof in the IMDb German [1] and IMDb English [2] .