The wonderful mandarin

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The wonderful Mandarin ( Hungarian original title A csodálatos mandarin ) op. 19 ( Sz 73) is a one-act dance pantomime by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók based on a template by Menyhért Lengyel . The premiere on November 27, 1926 in Cologne triggered a theater scandal because of the allegedly immoral act . Subsequently, the then mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer , banned the work from being performed any further. In 1928 Bartók reworked the work into a suite , which, like the complete work, is available in various recordings.

Béla Bartók in 1927

Action of the dance pantomime

Bartók's dance pantomime The wonderful Mandarin is set in the present. In contrast to his “optimistic ballet” The Wood-Carved Prince (1914–1916), which takes up fairytale motifs and closes with a happy ending , in this work Bartók addresses the “ugliness and repugnance of the civilized world” with a “ catharsis-like solution” to the conflict .

Only seven solo dancers appear in the work:

  • The mandarin
  • The girl
  • Older suitor
  • Younger suitor
  • Three thugs

The dance pantomime is designed in such a way that the three "thugs" and the girl are present on stage until the end, while the suitors, represented by different dancers, appear one after the other.

The action takes place in a shabby suburban room. Three pimps , called “rascals” in the play, force a young girl into prostitution . Your task is to lure suitors from the window (first, second and third "lure game") who are then robbed by the rascals. After two penniless suitors, the Mandarin , a wealthy Chinese, appears as the third guest . The thugs try to murder the mandarin three times, but he cannot die until the girl hugs him. Bartók himself only briefly described the action of the dance pantomime before going to press at Universal Edition and barely went into the symbolic content of the work, such as the “ alienation ” and the tangerine's vacillation between “absolute coldness” and “a consuming passion”:

“In a poor suburban room, three thugs are forcing a girl to lure men up from the street who are about to be robbed. A shabby gentleman and a shy youth who allow themselves to be attracted are thrown out as poor swallowers. The third guest is the creepy mandarin. The girl tries to loosen her frightening rigidity with a dance, but since he embraces her anxiously, she shudders and flees from him. After a wild hunt he catches up with them, then the thugs rush out of their hiding place, plunder him and try to suffocate him under pillows. But he gets up and looks longingly at the girl. Then they pierce him with the sword: he staggers, but his longing is stronger than the wounds: he pounces on the girl. So they hang him up: but he cannot die. Only when the body has been taken down and the girl has taken him in her arms does his wounds start to bleed and he dies. "

- Béla Bartók

music

occupation

The staged performance of the entire work requires, in addition to the dancers, a mixed choir and a large orchestra with the following cast:

The performance of the dance pantomime is around 30 minutes.

Stylistically

Like Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, the wonderful Mandarin belongs to musical expressionism and is considered Bartók's most uncompromising work, which is “ruthlessly modern”, without “soulful intimacy”. In this work Bartók shows a masterful tone color technique . He uses trombone glissandi and high-pitched signal collages. In the final agony and the “transfiguration” of the mandarin, which is missing in the concert suite, Bartók uses a mixed choir singing vocalises in some places even quarter tones of the violins.

Bartók characterizes the thugs and with them the big city atmosphere with pounding 6/8 chords, the girl with fifths intervals and clarinet solos at the beginning of the three “lure games”. The second suitor, a shy young man, to whom the girl feels affection, has “› positive ‹tone sequences in a new, future- oriented diatonic ”. Finally, the leading interval of the mandarin is the minor third , combined with cutting dissonant chords.

Emergence

Along with the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle and the ballet The Wood-Carved Prince (A fából faragott királyfi) , the wonderful mandarin is one of Bartók's three stage works. After the successful premieres of the two aforementioned works, Bartók initially planned another opera, but waited in vain for a libretto. After reading Menyhért Lengyel's grotesque pantomime piece “The Wonderful Mandarin” in the magazine Nyugat (Abendland) , he took a liking to the subject and in June 1918 reached an agreement with Lengyel to set the piece to music. In the same month he began with the conception of the work, which in his mind should characterize the city and the “anti-nature”: “I'm already thinking about Mandarin; it will be hellish music if it succeeds. At the beginning - a very short introduction before the curtain is still closed - there is a terrible noise, clinking, rumbling and roaring: I lead the audience out of the urban hustle and bustle to an Apache camp. "

Despite the collapse of the Habsburg dual monarchy and the subsequent political upheavals in Hungary , Bartók completed the piano version of the work in 1919, which he performed in a private concert. After the failure of the Hungarian council government and the beginning of the Horthy regime , however, the prospects of a performance initially faded, and so Bartók did not begin with the instrumentation until 1923 , which he completed by 1924, when a performance in Budapest was planned. This plan also failed, and so it was not premiered in Cologne until 1926.

reception

The old Cologne Opera House on Habsburgerring, location of the premiere

The Cologne premiere of the dance pantomime following Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle under the Hungarian conductor Eugen Szenkar in the choreography by Hans Strohbach became a theatrical scandal. According to press reports, many spectators left the hall with slamming doors during the performance of the mandarin, others who had stayed until the end whistled and shouted “Ugh”. The few viewers who applauded were described in the press as “a small group of green boys ” who had done “ ordered applause ”. In the subsequent defamation campaign, which ranged from excessive nationalism to anti-Semitic statements, hardly any attention was paid to the music and the staging. Because of the allegedly immoral act, the then mayor of Cologne Konrad Adenauer had all further performances of the dance pantomime prohibited.

Bartók, who wanted to save the work after the Cologne fiasco and a rather restrained success in Prague, reworked it into an approximately 18-minute concert suite in 1928, taking on around two thirds of the music for the complete work. This suite, in which the final apotheose with the shining mandarin and the choir was omitted, was premiered on October 15, 1928 in Budapest under the direction of Ernst von Dohnányi .

Only after the re-performance of the dance pantomime in the choreography of Aurel von Milloss in 1942 at La Scala in Milan and the end of the Second World War did the work begin to gain international acceptance. The work was not performed in Hungary until 1946, but has since appeared on the program of the Budapest Hungarian State Opera several times .

The musical quality of the work was also generally recognized after the end of the Second World War at the latest. In 1959, for example, in Reclam's concert guide , Hans Renner described the concert suite as “ Brueghel's hellish fantasy ”, but also as “great music [...] by an uncompromising innovator”, in which “rugged atonal clusters of sound amidst impressionistically oscillating color mixtures”. Stylistically, he settled Bartók's work “in terms of sound between Debussy and Schönberg”.

Nowadays the work belongs both to the stage repertoire and, mostly in the version as a suite, to the concert repertoire.

literature

  • Tibor Tallián: Béla Bartók: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, ISBN 963-13-2325-0 , pp. 124-135
  • Annette von Wangenheim: Béla Bartók, "The wonderful Mandarin". From pantomime to dance theater. Steiner, Overath near Cologne, 1985, ISBN 3924953015
  • Daniel-Frédéric Lebon: Béla Bartók's narrative ballets in their musical genre tradition. Köster, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-89574-810-3

records

Total recordings

While the suite from the wonderful Mandarin is available in numerous recordings, only a few recordings of the entire ballet exist.

A version for two pianos is also available on CD.

Film adaptation of the dance pantomime

  • Csodálatos mandarin (The Wonderful Mandarin), director: Márta Mészáros , Eurofilm Stúdió 2001 (35 minutes)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Everett Helm : Béla Bartók with self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1986, ISBN 3-499-50107-4 , p. 85.
  2. ↑ Everett Helm: Béla Bartók with self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1986, p. 86.
  3. ^ Analysis by Leo Black, quoted in: Tibor Tallián: Béla Bartók: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 131.
  4. ↑ Quote Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, pp. 128-129.
  5. ↑ Cast according to information from the Universal Edition .
  6. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, pp. 132-133, with reference to an analysis by Leo Black.
  7. ↑ Peter Petersen, in: Supplement to the CD with the Schola Cantorum New York and the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez , Sony 1971, p. 11.
  8. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 134.
  9. ↑ Hartmut Fladt, in: Supplement to the recording of the complete ballet under Claudio Abbado, DGG 410598-2, 1983.
  10. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, pp. 126-127.
  11. ↑ Quote Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 126.
  12. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 128.
  13. ↑ Vita of Eugen Szenkar  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.archiphon.de  
  14. ^ Klaus Kieser and Katja Schneider: Reclams Ballettführer , Philipp Reclam junior, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 978-3-15-010603-7 , pp. 525-526.
  15. ↑ a b c Wolfgang Lempfrid: Scandal and Provocation in Music, Chapter 4
  16. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 128.
  17. ↑ Paul Griffith in: Supplement to Georg Soltis recording: The wonderful Mandarin (Suite) , CD Decca 430 352-2, 1990.
  18. ↑ Tibor Tallián: Bela Bartok: His life and work. Corvina, Budapest 1988, p. 284.
  19. ↑ Aurel Milloss in the NDB  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / bsbndb.bsb.lrz-muenchen.de  
  20. ↑ Everett Helm: Béla Bartók with self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1986, p. 86.
  21. ^ Hans Renner: Reclams Konzertführer , Stuttgart 1959, edition 1961, p. 650.
  22. ↑ Proof in the IMDb