Cantata profana

Cantata Profana (Secular Cantata), composed in 1930, has a subtitle, “The Nine Enchanted Stags”. Bartók had come across its mysterious story while collecting Romanian folk music in 1914; and he set the words in his native Hungarian for tenor and bass soloists, double chorus and orchestra. The first performance was given in London in 1934 by the Wireless Chorus (now the BBC Singers) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The cantata tells how a hunter’s nine sons, themselves out hunting, cross a bridge in the forest and are transformed into stags. Searching for them, the father (the bass soloist) is about to shoot one of the stags (the tenor soloist) when it begs him not to, saying that he, the eldest son, and his brothers cannot return to the human world. Bartók descibed the work as his “most profound credo”, and his music throughout has a dark and probing power, ranging from the wild momentum of the sons’ hunting expedition to the fiercely expressive, folksong-like incantation of the tenor and bass solos.