Record of the day: Béla Bartók, “The Wonderful Mandarin”

Béla Bartók, “The Wonderful Mandarin” (CD DG/Universal 410598-2)

Few scores of the twentieth century have had a history as tormented as the ballet-pantomime “The Wonderful Mandarin”, composed by the Hungarian musician Béla Bartók in 1918-19 and based on a story by Menyhért Lengyel. Due to the subject (judged too scandalous) and the difficulties of the score, the opera was not staged before 1926, in Cologne; on that occasion the public reactions were so violent that the mayor of the city prohibited all subsequent performances.

The story of a girl forcibly forced into prostitution by three thugs to attract the attention of men who were subsequently attacked and robbed was in itself enough to create a scandal; the ending in which the protagonist Mandarin was attacked and stabbed but does not succumb due to the strength of his sexual desire which pushes him inexorably towards the girl leading to his death only after possessing her carnally was judged immoral and unacceptable. If you add to this the music of the young Bartók, violent, enthralling, dissonant, dazzling with orchestral colours, constantly kept on the razor’s edge by an electric tension that runs through it from the first bar to the last, you have a sensational failure that has been repeated punctually for almost ten years at every performance.

Bartók, discouraged by the continuous negative reactions (including from critics) tried to save a good part of the music by creating a symphonic suite, which was also capable of shocking the conservative audiences of the concert halls; only when the choreographer Aurelio Milloss created a highly successful choreography that traveled to stages around the world did the work begin to be more accepted by listeners. Today this masterpiece is considered one of the fundamental compositions of its time together with Stravinsky’s “Sacre du printemps” and Schönberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”.

The interpretation given by Claudio Abbado at the head of the London Symphony Orchestra is exceptional in terms of attention to detail, Dionysian power, ability to calculate the myriads of dynamic gradations and colors that the score contains and at the same time in the absolute capacity for abandonment to the telluric momentum rhythm that runs through it.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical topics.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: A record for every day of the year” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.