THE PLACE OF BARTÓK’S THE MIRACULOUS MANDARIN IN THE CONTEXT OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC

Abstract

The Miraculous Mandarin takes a special place in Bartók’s oeuvre. It is clashing in it with an ancestral force the mythical pureness of the human ideal and our decayed world fell into a deep moral crisis. This contrast appears symbolically in the contrast of East and West, experienced by Bartók as a geographical and mainly as a cultural tension in his own life and artistic faith. This crossroad brought into life that musical representation, which contrasts the primary force of primitive music with the avant-garde trepidations. The Miraculous Mandarin well illustrates that creative ideal, which lines up the compositional techniques for its aesthetical value. Thus, the musical language of this pantomime could become extremely novel, exceeding in its progressive character many works of the contemporary avant-garde tendencies.

Our study is focused on three moments of The Miraculous Mandarin (“Introduction”, “The decoy games” and “The chase”) examining its main style elements such as the problem of sonority surfaces, the phenomenon of central sonorities, the dynamic of exposition-densification-saturation, the moving cluster, the use of contrasting musical plans, the rubato-technique etc. Throughout our analysis, we recall some contemporary and later composers (like Debussy, Webern, Varèse, Stravinsky, Lutosławski, Ligeti) and their masterworks, which musical language is related to the achievements of The Miraculous Mandarin.