Béla Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin – Suite

Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin is one of the most complex works in his output—and, more than a century after it was written, it still does not sit in the standard repertoire, at home or abroad. It surfaces from time to time as a stage work or as a concert suite; today, too, we’ll be concentrating on the suite. The work really is complex and many-layered, which is why I thought I’d try to help you take it in and come to enjoy it. The Miraculous Mandarin is Bartók’s third stage work. The first was Bluebeard’s Castle, the second The Wooden Prince.1 All three turn, in essence, on the relationship between man and woman. If we take Hegelian dialectics2 as our basis—on which the workings of the world are seen as thesis, antithesis and the synthesis born of their clash—then these three works can be read very neatly along the same lines.

The first, Bluebeard’s Castle, speaks of the impossibility of the man–woman relationship; The Wooden Prince is its complete opposite, depicting a fairy-tale meeting of two souls; and The Miraculous Mandarin is a synthesis of the two, for it voices, in essence, one of the founding theses of the Romantic era: that in love, in the relationship between man and woman, redemption can come through the woman. The first stage work—Bluebeard’s Castle—is more an intimate story playing out within our souls; it has no real time, and in fact no real setting either, since the castle is more a symbol than an actual building. The Wooden Prince is, if you like, a symbolic fairy tale set in boundless nature, and its dramaturgy is unmistakably fairy-tale-like.

The Miraculous Mandarin, though, is quite different, for it takes place ‘here and now’—or ‘there and then’—in effect a work set in the present tense of the period in which it was written. An everyday story, still a novelty at its premiere. And it is set in its own age, in a real time, which cannot be said of the other two. ¹ Bartók wrote Bluebeard’s Castle in 1911, but it was premiered only on 24 May 1918. He wrote The Wooden Prince between 1914 and 1917, and it was premiered in 1917. The Miraculous Mandarin was premiered in Cologne in 1926. ² Dialectics: the art of debate, one of the seven liberal arts. It examines the phenomena of the world through their interactions, development, contradictions and oppositions. For dialectics, development is nothing other than the result of the struggle of opposites.

In his Logic, Hegel writes that ‘in the course of its development, every concept turns into its opposite, only to merge with that opposite into a higher unity’ (the principle of thesis–antithesis–synthesis). Bartók came across the story—from a libretto by Menyhért Lengyel,3 originally written for a ballet by Diaghilev4—in the journal Nyugat. He found it deeply moving and beautiful, and summed it up like this:

‘In a tramps’ den, three tramps force a young girl to lure men to her, whom they then rob. The first is a poor lad, the second no better, but the third a wealthy Chinese man; the catch is good. The girl entertains him with a dance, and desire stirs in the Mandarin—love flares up fiercely in him—but the girl shrinks back from him. The tramps fall on him, rob him, smother him in a quilt, run him through with a sword, then hang him—all in vain: they cannot overcome the Mandarin, who keeps gazing at the girl with eyes full of love and longing. The woman’s resourcefulness comes to the rescue’—a lovely turn of phrase from Bartók—‘and the girl satisfies the Mandarin’s desire, whereupon he sinks down, dead and lifeless.’

Needless to say, Bartók’s adaptation isn’t entirely identical to this description; the musical realisation differs a little, but we’ll come back to that. Although we essentially know only the dance-drama version of the piece, its genre was originally pantomime,6 a choice Bartók surely made for very clear reasons. There is one crucial difference between dance drama and pantomime: in the former, the dance is chiefly pictorial, built on the dynamics of movement—broad in scope and spectacular. Pantomime, by contrast, is an intimate genre. Against the logic of the dance drama, pantomime works through the small gestures of the performers’ faces and bodies. I don’t know of any staging that truly realises Bartók’s original pantomime, though there are countless wonderful dance versions. The intent of pantomime is, incidentally, very clear in Bartók’s score.

In the chase scene, for instance—the most spectacular and exciting in the piece—there is not a single note about how it should be performed. On the other hand, there are plenty of small markings indicating that the girl stops, the Mandarin freezes in his tracks, and so on. Bartók wrote every tiny gesture that mattered to him into the score. ³ Menyhért Lengyel (born Menyhért Lebovics, 1880–1974), writer, journalist and screenwriter. Many of his films became international hits—such as the Oscar-nominated Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo, or To Be or Not to Be. ⁴ Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872–1929), director of the Imperial Russian Ballet and, after his emigration, of the Ballets Russes. ⁵ Mandarin: in China, officials were called mandarins; they entered the civil service not by birth but through study. Becoming a mandarin offered even the poorest a path to social advancement.

⁶ Menyhért Lengyel uses the term ‘grotesque pantomime’. The work’s fate, incidentally, was extremely eventful—I might even say a hard one. The Budapest Opera scheduled its premiere eight years after it was written, but in the end did not stage it. The actual premiere, in Cologne in 1926, ended in scandal, and Konrad Adenauer,7 then mayor of Cologne—and I quote him word for word—banned further performances ‘for the open display of carnal desire on stage’. We smile at this today, especially as it happened in a Germany whose capital, Berlin, was living through one of the most dissolute, utterly decadent stretches of the twentieth century, in the grip of a complete moral crisis.

In Hungary the work was not staged until after 1945, and the story was moved to China for safety’s sake—which is sheer nonsense, because that left the piece unable to portray the heart of its dramaturgy: the clash between Western civilisation and ways of thinking or cultures outside it. Bartók sensed this work would be the harder to receive, so he very shrewdly—if I may borrow a modern term—edited an orchestral suite. The suite stitches together the scenes of the piece from the beginning up to the end of the chase. It introduces the key characters and figures, and so gives us a complete picture of the composition. ⁷ Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967), Mayor of Cologne (1917–1933 and 1945) and, later, the first Federal Chancellor of West Germany, from 1949 to 1963. In the work, the man–woman relationship rests on a bizarre premise.

On one side, a streetwalker; on the other, an exotic man whose otherness is frightening. This alone must have been so unusual in the 1920s that it stirred resistance. Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin is also an important milestone in the history of art because it dares to speak of love as desire and as physicality. When the work was written, the hypocrisy of the Romantic era was still alive, even though society had long since moved past the moral demands and ossified norms upheld by the Church and the Pharisees. This contradiction shows clearly in the conflict between social morality and art—and the reality that art expresses. Now let us get to know the characters and those around them, and how Bartók paints them in music! The opening of the piece is an interesting, powerful genre scene. We are still in front of the curtain, so we see nothing on stage—which used to be the norm.

Nowadays you can’t even play an overture with the curtain down, because directors are so afraid you’ll get bored that they cook up something out of place to go with the overture. That’s just how it is in the twenty-first century. The introduction to The Mandarin is, then, an overture played in front of the curtain, and its main job is dramaturgical: to set an atmosphere—specifically that of a big city. Listen to this chaotic yet otherwise very, very monotonous 6/8 music, played by wailing strings or by winds about to wail, while the trombone blares out trumpet-like blasts! This is a characteristic big-city image; we know several such examples from this era and later. Bartók was probably thinking of Paris, since, as far as we know, that was the one city whose world he knew at all well.

Gershwin, in his An American in Paris, also depicts this hustle and bustle: he paints the horns and the traffic chaos. It all seems very comical today, as we think, ‘Good heavens, what could traffic chaos have been like at the start of the last century, when there were barely a few cars, a few horse-drawn carriages and a few buses!’ Perhaps it is worth looking at a few photographs from the 1910s and 1920s. There were no traffic rules yet; everyone went wherever they liked, on whichever side of the road they fancied, and turned wherever they pleased. That’s why the vehicles really did honk at one another—but it was nothing more than a way of saying, ‘Watch out, here I come!’ Listen to the start of the track!