The Wooden Prince

Bartók’s mastery as an orchestral composer reached an early pinnacle in his ballet score The Wooden Prince, premiered at the Budapest Opera House in 1917. The work’s folk-tale scenario was by Béla Balázs, who had also written the libretto for Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (completed six years earlier, but not performed until 1918). Composing the ballet’s sumptuous late-Romantic score took Bartók two years, plus a third to complete the orchestration. For this, he deployed the largest lineup of instruments he was ever to use, with two saxophones (rarities in the classical orchestra) besides very substantial woodwind and brass sections. Neighbouring castles in a forest provide the setting for a young Prince’s attempts, manipulated by a capricious Woodland Fairy, to win the love of a reluctant Princess. The Prince creates a dancing wooden dummy of himself; the Princess is much taken by this until it loses its life force and collapses, and she then has to placate the Prince’s feelings of rejection before love can finally triumph. A magnificent slow introduction establishes the music’s epic scale, and Bartók then conjures a spectacular range of orchestral moods and colours to match the storyline. One superb episode is the orchestra’s depiction of a flooding river (created by the Fairy to thwart the Prince’s initial approach), with shimmering flutes, harp and celesta. Another is the dance of the Wooden Prince, a grotesquely stamping distortion of the warmly Romantic music for the Prince himself.