The Miraculous Mandarin

When the Girl in The Miraculous Mandarin first registers the chilling presence of the Mandarin he is still offstage and invisible to the audience. Bartók could be confident, however, that most of his listeners would recognise the Mandarin even before seeing him. The theme introduced on trombones at this point is based on a pentatonic mode long familiar in European music as a symbol of China. It was so familiar in fact that but for the imposing scoring and aggressively dissonant harmonies - demonstrating that this is no ordinary Chinese - Bartók’s allusion to it would have been a commonplace.

European interest in Chinese music has a long history. An early example that springs to mind, because of its long-term implications, is a pentatonic tune quoted by Jean Baptiste de Halde in a description of China published in 1735. From de Halde it passed, with one wrong note, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who appended it as an “air chinois” to his Dictionnaire de musique in 1768, and then to Weber who made a feature of what he described as “this strange, bizarre melody” in his Overture chinesa in 1806 and again in his incidental music to Schiller’s version of Gozzi’s Turandot three years later. The Gozzi/Schiller play became the basis of Puccini’s opera of the same name in 1926 and the “air chinois” was rescued from oblivion by Hindemith in the Turandot Scherzo of his snappily titled Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber in 1943. By this time the Chinese pentatonic mode had become so familiar - not only as local colour in opera and ballet but in concert works like Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde - that the wrong note unwittingly copied by Weber from Rousseau is a source of sophisticated amusement in Hindemith’s treatment of the tune.

If the oriental influence had been slow to catch on in the first half of the nineteenth century - Berlioz’s reaction to the “cacophonous” Chinese musicians at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 was anything but enthusiastic - it took off in a big way in the second half, not least by way of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. It was there that Debussy and Ravel first heard the Javanese gamelan, an experience that was to be reflected not only in obviously exotic inspirations like Debussy’s Pagodes and Ravel’s Laideronette, Impératrice des pagodes but also in, a subtly pervasive way, in the texture and harmonic vocabulary of their music in general.

For Bartók, who aspired to combine “Bach’s counterpoint, Beethoven’s progressive form and Debussy’s harmony,” the French composer’s openness to exotic influence, Middle-Eastern as well as Far-Eastern, was of crucial importance. He confessed he did not know much about Chinese folk music - fascinated though he was by its relationship, by way of the pentatonic scale, to Hungarian folk music - but he had immersed himself thoroughly in the music of North Africa. The effects of that are clear in several of his works, including The Miraculous Mandarin where the Mandarin’s fugal pursuit of the Girl is based on a chromatic theme of a kind he had developed from Arab folk material.

In the pentatonic scale Bartók found what he called “the most suitable antidote to Wagner” and, in alliance with Debussy and Ravel, he countered “the absolute hegemony of German music” with exotic material of all kinds. If a memory of Wagner’s Flower Maidens lingers in the waltz the Girl dances for the Mandarin it is no less seductive for that.