Miraculous Mandarin - Bela Bartok
Harmonium - John Adams
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonium_%28John_Adams%29
Emily Dickinson’s Wild Nights
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpJKsF4JJ8U[/youtube]
Pandora, thank you for posting the link to the Chicago symphony’s presentation of Beyond the Score: Bartók Miraculous Mandarin from 2009. I will have much to say about it later. In the meantime…
When I indicated that I liked Bela Bartok, a friend of mine, a great music lover and expert, sent me this message and link.
“If you like Bartok, the recording to hear is the mid '50s Chicago Symphony performance of the Concerto for orchestra and Music for Strings, Percussion & Celeste. It’s one of the earliest experiments in stereo and just superb.”
cso.org/ListenAndWatch/Details.aspx?id=7053
To modern dance: youtube.com/watch?v=T9m1Ysa2Zfs
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCl33gDtalA [/youtube]
This Chicago Symphony production, Beyond the Score: Bartok and The Miraculous Mandarin, was an absolutely magnificent tour de force. As I watched it, I took notes and did a little research, as follows.
Bartok’s The Miraculous Mandarin falls in the genre of the pantomime grotesque, the pandemonium of the modern megalopolis. Bartok’s prelude is hellish stuff — dissonant, with discordant music from the symphony. The scene is an Apache’s den. There are a girl Mimi and three thugs, who are cold and starving – Mimi is to lure men in for money. For Bartok, the authentic music of the poorest in society and the source for his own original ideas was folk music, and that music had a strong eastern influence.
Thre is a reference to Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, and to the Hungarian poet, Endre Ady:
Your eyes are mirrors of blessed miracles
because they looked at me
You are the wisdom, master woman of embraces
Be blessed a thousand times, dear womanliness,
You are the woman, the most beautiful
Bartok saw an influence of the Arab culture on Hungarian folk music. (Links between Persia, Iraq, and Romania are missing, but the area was ruled by Turks for awhile.)
1 The first man Mimi lures is The Old Cavalier, an aging peculiar figure with a waxed mustache, dressed like a down-at-the-heel dandy. He has no money and says what counts is love, and he sings a love song in 4 time, like a little march – The three thugs throw him out.
-
Next to come in is a young innocent shy youth, again with no money. He and Mimi dance to sinuous sensual music. The thugs throw him out.
-
Then The Miraculous Mandarin, a Chinaman, is enticed. Here Bartok uses the oldest folk music from the poorest area of Hungary, which is pentatonic (on a five-note scale). It sounds Far-Eastern (from the Chinese and Mongolian pentatonic center). A trombone melody introduces the Mandarin coming up the stairs, colored with harsh and frightening harmonies of fear and excitement – (cf. the Yellow Peril, the Sax Roma character of Dr. Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man) – The music is sinister; the Mandarin represents the strangeness of someone from another world – not 4, not 5, but 7 tones.
He stands in the doorway. Mimi says come in, but he makes no move. To make herself desirable, she begins to flirt and play. There is no reaction, the Mandarin just looks at her. Awkwardly, she starts to dance a waltz around the room to the rhythm of a Viennese waltz, 3 beats in a bar. This is the girl’s rhythm to attract the staring stranger. The Mandarin still stares with no movement in his eyes. – cf. Frank Wedekind and his Parisian girl – The thugs have no time for niceties; they urge Mimi on to find another way of flirting with this man – cf. Georg Simmel’s “On Flirtation” (innocent) – So Mimi dances faster and faster, and comes closer and closer to the Mandarin. There is still no reaction – she starts to laugh which makes her stumble. The rhythms of the waltz become uncomfortable. Suddenly she hurls herself in the stranger’s lap – at this a violent change comes over him, he begins to tremble with excitement. Mimi hears a gurgling in his throat and he grips her by the arm. Terrified by the strength of the Mandarin’s embrace, Mimi struggles to escape – the music becomes ever more rich and complicated, filled with details, moving from a simple Mandarin Chinese melody to one crushed and recomposed in the excitement of his desire.
Mimi struggles and escapes, but the Mandarin soon comes after her desperately. –- In contrast to western nations like the British and Americans, who so strongly feared the alien Oriental man, Hungarian intellectuals of Bartok’s generation were fascinated by their close connection to the east and by the supposedly exotic and barbaric ancestry of their own people. In their works of art, they celebrated their warlike forebears – the Magyars, fierce warriors, had arrived less than a thousand years ago in Europe from the east which was their home. (cf. Bartok the piano player with his Allegro Barbaro – how close this music is to The Miraculous Mandarin (music plays)
Mimi slips and slides among tables and chairs, desperate to escape the clutching hands that follow her. – The poet Endre Ady wrote: “I will tell you everything that springs from the soul of a Hungarian man today and drives him forward as the belt drives the machine. I have the right to say what I believe to be the conscience of our nation and our Hungarian culture, and you cannot expect that conscience to be clean.” – The Mandarin springs forward, stumbles, falls, gets up again, and finally he catches her. She struggles wildly to get free. (music) The 3 thugs leap from their hiding places. They are terrified. The Mandarin is Dr. Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man. They are terrified the Mandarin will kill the girl. They throw themselves on the monstrous figure and drag him to the floor. Then they strip him of his money and his jewels. Now he must be killed.
— Why was Bartok so attracted by the violence of this story? – In the music of the past, we find just lofty feelings, enthusiasm, love, sorrow and despair. Only in the music of our times has there been a place for other kinds of feelings: vengeance, the grotesque, the bitter and sarcastic. The music of today extends honestly to all human emotions without excluding any.
(music) – The 3 thugs grab the Mandarin like a bag and hurl him on the bed. They seize everything they can find to smother him, pillows, blankets, clothes, a mattress, piles of rags.
– The frenzy of murder was almost absurdly fashionable in European culture at this time. In Arnold Schoenberg’s opera, Erwartung, a woman wandering through a forest at night stumbles across the body of her murdered lover. The novelist and poet Hermann … wrote an epic drama in which the chorus cried “Murder is the way of men. Murder upon murder upon murder.” The mist sits screaming over the dying world. –- And the painter Oskar Kokoschka wrote a tiny four page play, “Murder Is the Hope of Women,” in which a group of women plot to kill the man responsible for their suffering. “He strangled my little sister in the temple, he tortured animals to death, he made birds blind, he smothered fishes in the sand. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Kokoschka
(music) – The 3 thugs looked at one another. He’s dead. Suddenly there’s a movement. The Mandarin’s head emerges from the blankets, still staring at the girl.
– When Melchior Lengyel first dreamed up this story, the carnage of the First World War was at its height. But just two days before he published it, a scandalous event took place in Russia, the story of which soon spread across the world: the murder of Rasputin, the pseudo-monk, the illiterate and mad-eyed peasant from a village in Siberia who held the Emperor and Empress of Russia in his grip, and who was possessed of super-human powers of healing, religious insight, monumental strength, and monstrous sexuality. – By the time Bartok wrote this music, people everywhere had heard this tale. It was said that when they killed him, Rasputin survived poison, gunshot wounds, and a savage beating before he was finally drowned in an icy river by a group of desperate rich young men trying to save themselves and others from the coming revolution. – The story of The Miraculous Mandarin it seemed had prophesied a real event.
(music) – What keeps the Mandarin miraculously alive in this murderous story is not just the childish invulnerability of a magician in a fairy-tale; it’s something deeper: the strength not of one man, but of whole nations, a savage hunger for freedom and a better way of life. This was to be a force that would sweep across the world and drive humanity to change and revolution. The young German poet, Bertolt Brecht: “This isn’t the wind of the Naples, my boy, no song to the lonely moon. This is the wild roar of our daily toil. We curse it and count it a boon. For this is the voice of our cities, it is our favorite song. It’s in a language we all understand that will soon be the world’s mother tongue.”
Terrified at seeing their victim struggle back to life, the 3 thugs drag the Mandarin across the floor; but he breaks free from them and leaps back on his feet again. (music) – The 3 thugs grab the Mandarin again and hold him tight. He is oblivious. He goes on staring at the girl. His eyes bulge and gleam with inner fire. One of the thugs seizes a blood-stained, rusty knife.
– The ballad of Mack the Knife, Bertolt Brecht’s hymn to proletarian anger: “See the shark with teeth like razors, each one gleaming pearly white, he’s got a jackknife in his pocket, and he keeps it out of sight. When he bites with his shark teeth though, a scarlet blood begins to spread, He is wearing fancy gloves though, so there’s not a spot of red.”
(music) – Two thugs hold the Mandarin down while the third stabs him in the back three times. With the knife still sticking in him, again the Mandarin staggers to his feet and moves towards the girl.
– Bartok believed that all art should face the unspeakable and horrific without fear. He once rebuked a friend, “Why do you want to be protected like a child from what is hard and harsh? The doors of your heart would then be closed to human feeling? Do you not want to struggle to be shocked, to experience life-threatening situations? How else will you understand Beethoven, Goethe, Nietzsche? Whoever wishes to feel ideas that are born from suffering must suffer too.”
(music)
– “They stood perplexed in top hats, as if around the carcass of a vulture, bewildered crows, and though they, sweating tears, tried hard, they could not bury this juggler.” (Bertolt Brecht, in his private notebooks, describing mourners at the funeral of his friend and hero Frank Wedekind, in Munich, 1918)
As the Mandarin advances, Mimi screams and tries to get away. The thugs, in panic, grab him one more time. (music) – One of the thugs looks up and sees the emblem of modern metropolitan existence, a naked electric lightbulb dangling in the middle of the ceiling. Hang him, from there.
– Once again, Freud, speaking of the worst and most malevolent instincts of the human race: “The aggressive cruelty of human beings usually waits for provocation or hides itself beneath another purpose. But, when circumstances are favorable, when the mental counterforces which normally inhibited our outer action, it manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations, or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Genghis Khan and Timur, or the capture of Jerusalem by the pious crusaders, or even indeed the horrors of the recent world war – anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before this truth.”
(music) – They kicked the chair away. The Mandarin falls. The light goes out. The lightbulb smashes to the floor. The room grows dark, and they see the Mandarin is glowing. And he is still alive, still staring at the girl, still longing for her. (music)
– “All love is hopeless. When a man loves, his everyday existence is destroyed and becomes merely a symbol, the door to connections stretching into endless space.” (the words of Bartok’s close friend, the philosopher György Lukács)
Now, only the girl Mimi sees what must be done. For the first time in this story, she takes command, ordering the thugs to cut the still living body down. Then she takes the Mandarin in her arms and they make love to one another.
– “What does it mean when one yearns? Perhaps this, that he longs for something other than himself, separate and apart, yet still his. Perhaps somewhere there is something I will melt into, a mirror to reflect my rays, a deed in which I will discover myself. I do not know what it could be. I only know that I am journeying towards it, and everything is merely a station along the way.”
(music) – Resolution. Fulfillment. Shared humanity. The Mandarin has given to the girl the gift of love, and she has given to him the power to die. – “Perhaps it is in death, who can tell, that the soul will become whole. Perhaps in death the yearning stops.” (music) – The End
Frank Wedekind wrote an immoral play, Spring’s Awakening. He was one of the Ueberbrettl group and sang in cabarets. He was a naturalist, and extreme – crude and cynical. He had a preoccupation w/ sex, seeing life as a cesspool of floating horrors. But there was always a glimmer of pity – like Shaw’s, the pity aroused by the sense of the terrific waste in modern society. See: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9406E2D9103BEE3ABC4153DFB0668383609EDE
In The Miraculous Mandarin, everything happens in threes. There are three thugs, three lurings, three times a stranger comes into the room, and three murders
Schoenberg’s opera Erwartung is often paired with Béla Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, as the two works are generally thought to be similar in character and psychological themes.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwartung
There was also some comparable English stuff: John Gay, Hogarth, Browning, Beardsley, Wilde, the decadents.
Here is the poem:
Wild Nights–Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile–the Winds–
To a Heart in port–
Done with the Compass–
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor–Tonight–
In Thee!
After viewing Beyond the Score: Bartok and the Miraculous Mandarin, my friend the music aficionado, wrote:
[i]Music from all over the region has middle eastern and Asian influences, not only that of Hungary, but the Hungarian language isn’t Indo-European, so the Magyar may have even more diverse influences. And one can’t forget the influence of Gypsy culture and music with I would presume Indian roots. Bartok collected music from villages all over the region, bringing the music into the conservatory. Interestingly, when Iva Bittová and her sister Ida Kelerová performed Bartok’s 44 Duets for Two Violins, they added extemporaneous vocal counterpoint to their violins, in effect dragging the music back to its village origins.
Wedekind was a proto-expressionist.
I shall have to check if that’s a bowdlerized Mackie Messer quotation. MacHeath is a sociopath. The original murder ballad is much more violent than Blitzstein’s adaptation, used by Bobby Darin, as it recounts MacHeath’s crimes, multiple murders, arson and rape. Maybe it’s just the particular passage they pulled out, but to call it a hymn to proletarian anger is a complete misnomer… John Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera, the source of the Brecht / Weill Threepenny. Brecht combined Gay’s theme with songs his girlfriend adapted from Kipling and Villon. The Moritat, oddly enough was one of the few original contributions Brecht made to the work which bears his name.
Allegro Barbaro is the tune ELP ripped off note for note, calling it The Barbarian and crediting themselves, so it’s likely the first Bartok I ever heard. Unfortunately they also lifted an entire movement from a Janacek Symphony and his widow turned out to still be alive and threatened to sue. They therefore credited their sources on subsequent pressings.
Bartok’s successor Gyorgy Ligeti wrote one opera, a theater of the absurd / cruelty, Guignolesque work called Le Grand Macabre.
I think I’ll pass this on to a few people, thanks again. I wonder if this is a series devoted to explicating certain classic pieces of music.[/i]
I agree that it takes more than one viewing to get all the visuals.
And Beyond the Score is a series of presentations by the Chicago Symphony. Here are some links:
http://www.americanorchestras.org/audience_development/beyond_the_score.html
More streaming videos here: http://beyondthescore.org/
I generally like to see if youtube has these videos. I found it easier to watch the Bartok on youtube because of the way I could move back and forth and manage my viewing better.
Jeux (Games)-Debussy
The scenario was described to the audience at the premiere as follows:
"The scene is a garden at dusk; a tennis ball has been lost; a boy and two girls are searching for it. The artificial light of the large electric lamps shedding fantastic rays about them suggests the idea of childish games: they play hide and seek, they try to catch one another, they quarrel, they sulk without cause. The night is warm, the sky is bathed in pale light; they embrace. But the spell is broken by another tennis ball thrown in mischievously by an unknown hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of the garden."
Lady McBeth of the Mtsensk District
Is there a version with the dance?
Nijinsky’s Jeux:
youtube.com/watch?v=FkZhDcB-OfA
youtube.com/watch?v=774MfmVqMmw
youtube.com/watch?v=C1SU5ZTkiVA
About his dances:
lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1705130.html
Nijinsky’s Faun
youtube.com/watch?v=ZRbjgbske08&NR=1
youtube.com/watch?v=sC3TPBrt … re=related
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon_ … _(Nijinsky
(Beautiful choreography…very “art nouveau” )
Thank you for posting the dances choreographed by Nijinsky. Debussy’s Jeux was magnificent, and would have been quite the scandalous menage a trois if it had been performed as he intended, with three males instead of one male and two females. The Afternoon of a Faun was just hauntingly lovely, truly great.
On Friday, I saw the movie Coco et Igor in which Nijinsky’s choreography of The Rite of Spring was shown, and I could see how it would have shocked the audience. I was very surprised myself.
Now that I’ve seen three Nijinsky productions, I would say that he revolutionized balletics. As the guy in Coco et Igor said, “It’s not Swan Lake.”