Béla Bartók
“The Miraculous Mandarin”, Suite, Sz 73

Béla Bartók had not yet completed his extensive ethnomusicological fieldwork when he turned to an entirely different subject. The premiere of the dance pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin on 27 November 1926 caused one of the most notorious scandals in the history of music. Cologne became the venue more by chance than by design, after plans for Berlin and Munich had fallen through. Bartók’s friend and compatriot Eugen (Jenő) Szenkar, chief conductor of the Cologne Opera, offered the new score a home. One can still sense today the shock that must have struck the audience in the opening bars: the whirling runs of the second violins and the dissonant, shrieking chord-stamping of the winds had none of the refined delicacy usually associated with ballet music. The title, too, may have raised misleading expectations, suggesting an exotic potentate in fairy-tale guise. Instead, the pantomime depicts a destitute girl forced into prostitution by three pimps who intend to rob her clients – a story of radical urban ugliness. The “den-of-vice-and-harlots piece” provoked moral outrage on the Rhine; the music, denounced as “perverse, trivial, morbid”, was likewise condemned. When Bartók appeared before the curtain, he was met with a storm of boos. Mayor Konrad Adenauer immediately banned The Miraculous Mandarin. In Hungary, the work was never performed during Bartók’s lifetime. To save the composition for the concert hall at least, he reworked it in 1927 into an abridged Suite.

The glaring expressionist harshness of the Mandarin music was composed as early as 1918, directly after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which Bartók despised. The speed with which feverish metropolitan modernity spread amid the ruins of a shattered world order seems almost to be anticipated by The Miraculous Mandarin. Here we witness an unleashed sexuality oscillating between libertinage and brutality, seduction and aggression. The work also exposes, without restraint, other new themes of modern art: material deprivation, corruption and crime. Yet Menyhért Lengyel’s libretto still contains traces of romantic redemption imagery. Two of the girl’s clients fail: an ageing dandy has no money, a young man is too shy. The third, the sinister Mandarin, is inflamed with ecstatic desire after the girl’s dance of seduction. The pimps attempt in vain to kill him. The Suite ends with a wild chase. In the full ballet, the Mandarin himself ultimately seeks death – which becomes possible only when the young woman embraces him.

Bartók’s blazing music translates these passions into rhythmic tension and extremes of orchestral colour. The Mandarin’s grand entrance, marked by his “signature interval” of a minor third, and the fierce dissonances of an agitated orchestral tremolo, constitutes the first emphatic statement of Bartók the musical dramatist. Yet The Miraculous Mandarin remained his final stage work. One may well wonder whether he might have continued along this path, had his dance pantomime been received more favourably in Cologne?