Five Reasons to love Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin

Based on a scenario by Melchior Lengyel (who would later become a Hollywood screenwriter), The Miraculous Mandarin is a gritty tale that, beneath its sordid surface, explores the power of human passion.

The ballet, or ‘grotesque pantomime’, as Lengyel and Bartók called it, takes place across a single night in an unnamed city. A sex worker has been held captive by three robbers, who use her as bait to attract victims. The first two men she entices from her window – an old rake and a young lad – are penniless, and so the robbers throw them out. The third, however, is a wealthy Chinese man – the ‘Mandarin’ – whose interest the girl gradually arouses.

When at last the Mandarin’s lust reaches fever pitch he is set upon by the robbers. They suffocate, stab and hang him – but this ‘miraculous Mandarin’ simply will not die. Only when the girl relents, giving herself to him, does he finally collapse.

Such a disturbing scenario requires a score of equally disturbing proportions. And boy did Bartók deliver. A ferocious, erotically charged atmosphere pervades the entire ballet. Stabbing, barbaric rhythms, hard-edged sonorities and crunching dissonances combine to terrifying effect.

It signalled the beginning of his so-called ‘Expressionist’ period – roughly 1918 to 1922 – during which he flirted with atonal music and techniques. Writing to his first wife, Bartók described the work’s opening as ‘an awful clamour, clatter, stampeding and blowing of horns’.

But he also found room for humour: the coquettish clarinet solos and louche, sliding trombones heard during each of the three ‘enticement’ scenes, for example.

There are hints of the ‘exotic’, too, as Bartók rode a wave of ‘exoticism’ that spanned literature, drama, music, art and interior design around the turn of the 20th century. Five years before he began work on The Miraculous Mandarin, Bartók had made studies of Arabic music in northeastern Algeria. Elements of that culture seeped into the score. The Mandarin’s Chinese identity is also hinted at via a pentatonic (five-note) melody, first heard in the trombones and tuba.

Bartók felt that The Miraculous Mandarin was one of his finest and most personal compositions. It is easy to see why he was attracted to the scenario: violent erotica was, after all, in vogue, with recent operas such as Richard Strauss’ Salome proving wildly successful, if controversial.

Bartók was also interested in how the story juxtaposed an ancient civilisation – represented by the Mandarin – with themes of Western decay. This mirrored his own musical style at the time, which pitted what he called the ‘clean, fresh and health’ aspects of Eastern European folk music against the extremes of musical modernism.

It’s a magical, desperate ghost story ending with a passionate, supernatural dance.
Barbara Hannigan

The Miraculous Mandarin is divided into 12 sections, starting with the famous introduction, moving through three ‘enticement’ scenes and subsequent interactions with the victims, and ending with a graphic orchestral depiction of the Mandarin’s triple execution.

Bartók uses a series of musical symbols and ‘tone patches’ to denote characters within the action. The Mandarin, for example, is represented by a mysterious sequence of chords; the thugs by a distinctive 6/8 rhythm. Both themes are combined in the final part of the action.

Repetition of themes is also used to ratchet up tension: the three ‘enticement’ scenes, for example, develop the same musical material, and become increasingly frenetic with each iteration.

Although Bartók sketched out The Miraculous Mandarin between 1918 and 1919, he didn’t orchestrate the ballet until five years later, and between 1926 and 1931 he revised it intensively. Only with polishing and refining did the complex symphonic structure take its final form.

When an aggressive musical idiom is placed at the service of a violent scenario, scandal is inevitable. And, sure enough, the premiere of The Miraculous Mandarin – given at the Cologne Opera in 1926 – caused outrage.

Conductor Eugen Szenkar recalled how ‘At the end of the performance there was a concert of whistling and catcalls! … The uproar was so deafening and lengthy that the fire curtain had to be brought down.’ The Cologne mayor, Konrad Adenauer (who later became the first Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany), banned any further performances.

The ballet wasn’t staged in Bartók’s native Hungary until after his death, in 1945. Bartók’s ailing political stock at the time presumably didn’t help. Following a rapid succession of governments, in 1919 the right-wing Miklós Horthy had come to power, and the left-leaning Bartók fell under suspicion for his ethnomusicological work in Transylvania and Slovakia. He was attacked in the press, accused of secretly being a Romanian Nationalist and a traitor to Hungary.

Coming after the huge success of his first ballet The Wooden Prince – which he grew to resent – and given the personal nature of this new work, the relative failure of The Miraculous Mandarin must have irked Bartók. Still, he remained steadfast in his belief of its quality, creating an orchestral suite to ensure its continued life.

Written by Timmy Fisher, sub-editor within the BBC Proms Publications team, co-host of The Classical Music Pod, writer and journalist.