The Miraculous Mandarin

Composed between 1918 and 1924, the ballet pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin is one of Bartók’s major masterpieces, and among the most uncompromising and disturbing of all musical works. Menyhért Lengyel’s scenario is set in a room in a city slum, where three thugs rob male passersby in the street outside by coercing a girl to lure them in with her seductive dancing. The first two men to be enticed have no money and are thrown out. The third is a strange, inscrutable mandarin, mesmerised by his desire for the girl. When he pursues her around the room, the thugs seize, rob, suffocate and stab him, and then hang him from a lamp hook; but all the while he refuses to die, still fixating on the girl. Unnerved, the thugs release him; the girl takes him in her arms, and he dies. Bartók’s score is an eruptive tour de force of rhythmic firepower and masterly orchestration, ranging from the cacophonous opening depiction of the city street to the menacing clarinet solos for the girl’s dancing; the scene of the mandarin’s slow death introduces the eerie sound of a wordless chorus. The Miraculous Mandarin was first staged in Cologne in 1926, where it was banned by the mayor after a single performance. That year Bartók arranged a concert suite from the ballet, ending the music at the climax of the mandarin’s pursuit of the girl; in this format the work soon became better known, and is widely performed today.