Ja, det er jo litt av en historie som beskrives. Her er en analyse av verket:
The Miraculous Mandarin (A csodálatos mandarin in Hungarian; Der wunderbare Mandarin in German) is a pantomime/ballet composed for full orchestra by Béla Bartók from 1918 to 1924. It premiered in 1…
mawrgorshin.com
What also would have caused distaste for the audience, whom I’d presume to have been mostly conservative in their musical tastes, was the extreme dissonance of the music. Indeed, Bartók’s toughest, most dissonant music was written in the 1920s, with such pieces as his
third and
fourth string quartets, his
first piano concerto,
Out of Doors for
solo piano, and his
second sonata for violin and piano. At times, this music would get so dissonant as to border on
atonality.
Though he insisted that his
music, while using all twelve semitones, was tonal (a reaction to
Schoenberg‘s atonal use of
all twelve semitones), Bartók essentially abandoned the major/minor system in favour of one based on
axes of symmetry. These axes are at the intervals of the
diminished seventh chord; this isn’t to say that he made constant use of that particular chord, but that he would do modulations and chord changes–and use such scales at the
octatonic (and its
alpha chord)–based on the
minor third, the
tritone, and the
major sixth, pivot points, if you will, which are
comparable to shifts from the major key to its relative minor, and vice versa.
These–at the time, unusual-sounding–melodic and harmonic experiments, as well as the extensive influence of the
folk music of his native Hungary and neighbouring countries (around which he traveled much in his younger adulthood, recording and studying the music), give Bartók’s music its unique sound.