The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

Bartók’s score for The Miraculous Mandarin is a masterpiece of eroticism. It is true that on first reading Menyhért Lengyel’s scenario, in the Hungarian literary periodical Nyugat in 1917, the composer must have been fascinated at least as much by the exotic figure of the Mandarin as by the sex and violence. But in applying himself to Lengyel’s “grotesque pantomime” - which brings an inextinguishably priapic force of nature into conflict with the evils of the modern city - he had no choice but to give musical expression to the seductions, the lust, the raging frustration, the murderous cruelty that are essential to it. Bartók’s score is as successful in this respect as any from Don Giovanni to Salome.

Given the uninhibited rhythmic energy and the uncompromising harmonies of his idiom at the time, he was uniquely well equipped for the task. It was the ideal subject for Bartók on a deeper, more philosophical level too. His very identity as a composer, his alliance of what is “clean, fresh and healthy” in the peasant music of Eastern Europe with the extremes of modernism, found a clear reflection in a scenario which thrusts a robust representative of an ancient civilisation into the urban decadence of the day. Even so, it took him more than seven years to write what amounts to no more than thirty minutes of music. Sensing no doubt that his ballet (or “pantomime” as he preferred to call it) would meet with censorious opposition, he was in no hurry to complete it. In fact, its first production, in Cologne in 1926, was taken off after one performance. The concert Suite, which consists of the first twenty minutes with two short cuts and a newly written ending, was virtually the only way the Miraculous Mandarin music could be heard during the composer’s lifetime.

The Suite begins (like the ballet) with the dissonant music of the city - “an awful clamour, chatter, stampeding and blowing of horns,” as the composer described it. As the clangour subsides, the curtain rises on a shabby room overlooking the street. Urgent phrases on the violas and then on violins, still in the jangling 6/8 rhythms of the city, accompany the desperate but vain efforts of the first two of three Thugs to find money. The third Thug, with an imperious gesture of rising fourths on trombones orders the Girl to stand by the window to lure men in off the street. A seductive clarinet cadenza attracts the attention of an old roué who is not only penniless but also, a solo trombone suggests, drunk and, to judge by the seedily amorous interventions of cor anglais and cellos, embarrassingly pressing in his attentions. With a resumption of the 6/8 rhythms on trumpets the Thugs emerge from hiding and throw him out.

A second, longer and more explicitly sexy clarinet cadenza, invites the entry of a shy young man. He is rather more to the Girl’s taste and she engages him in a sinuously supple dance in quintuple time with a tender melody on bassoon accompanied by harp and a passionate variant on violins. But he has no money either and is thrown out in his turn. The third and most animated clarinet cadenza attracts a victim who alarms the Girl as soon as she sees him in the street, his exotic provenance identified by a pentatonic melody in dissonant parallel harmonies on muted trombones and tuba.

The actual entry of the Mandarin, signalled by cymbal clashes and glissando minor thirds on trombones and tuba again, provokes a terrifying orchestral climax. But the Girl has to dance for him and does so in an at first hesitant but increasingly demonstrative waltz. As she finally falls onto his hitherto impassive lap, he seems to be electrified in an extraordinarily vivid passage of string tremolandos and excited shrieks and bellows on woodwind and brass. Even more terrified, she runs away from him, provoking much the most dynamic episode in the Suite as he chases after her in a poundingly relentless fugue, catches up with her, struggles with her…

At that point the Suite ends. In the ballet the Mandarin is attacked by the Thugs and killed three times over - by suffocation, stabbing and hanging - but, miraculously, refuses to die until the Girl embraces him.

Gerald Larner ©2004