Bartok's "The Wooden Prince"

[bart]

Today's NY Times has a review of a concert given by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted by Pierre Boulez. On the program was a work I am unfamiliar with: Bela Bartok's ballet score, "The Wooden Prince."

“The Wooden Prince” is an episodic ballet score of 55 minutes that depicts an exotic and ominous fairy tale. A young prince, having fallen in love from afar with a princess in a nearby kingdom, sets off to court her but is thwarted by a fairy who causes forest trees to come alive and a river to overflow. At one point the determined prince builds a wooden puppet of himself and places it above the trees to entice the princess. But the fairy brings the puppet to life, and the princess is smitten with the decoy.

The work’s introduction is lushly tonal, harmonically static, almost motionless; it could be Bartok’s homage to the opening of Wagner’s “Rheingold.” Mr. Boulez conveyed the music’s primordial Wagnerian aura. Yet in the frenzied courtship dance of the princess and the puppet, he brought out the exotic pentatonic harmonies and molten energy of the music, which shows Bartok’s debt to Ravel and Stravinsky.

What Mr. Boulez de-emphasized was rhythmic drive. Even when he conducts something like “The Rite of Spring,” Mr. Boulez is not one to pummel listeners. The music-making here was urgent and inexorable, but the tension came from the way Mr. Boulez handled long spans of shifting elements, not from slashing attacks.

Has any one seen a ballet performed to this score? Or know about its history?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/arts/mus....html?ref=music

[rg]

here's the NYPL dance coll. cat. entry (or one of them) on this subject.

the ballet seems to have been choreographed mostly, tho' not exclusively, by Hungarian choreographers.

a quick look over the catalogue's items didn't come up with any especially familiar or prominent choreographers.

in any case here's the cat. entry on the music in its holdings.

Bartók, Béla, 1881-1945.

[Fából faragott királyfi; arr.]

Der holzgeschnitzte Prinz; Tanzspiel in einem Akt von Béla Balázs. A fából faragott királyfi... The wooden prince... Musik von Béla Bartók. Op. 13.

Wien, Universal-Edition A. G., 1921.

70 p. folio.

=Publ. pl. no. U. E. 6635.

Arranged for piano, 2 hands. Explanatory text in German, Hungarian, and English.

Original production in Budapest, May 12, 1917, with choreography by Balázs and Brada.

[California]

. . . Has any one seen a ballet performed to this score? Or know about its history?. . .

I saw this ballet, performed by the Slovak National Ballet, in September 2007. I'm looking at my program from that evening and it attributes the choreography they use to Tamas Juronics, who created this in 2003. In the essay he wrote for the program notes, he says that he tried to update the fairy tale to contemporary terms. He used 40 dancers for this production. Juronics is a Hungarian who now co-directs the Szeged Contemporary Dance group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53760111378

Although Bartok was Hungarian, he lived for a time in Bratislava, which was known then as Pozsony (sometimes also called Pressburg). For much of his life what we now know as the Slovak Republic was part of the greater Austro-Hungarian empire. He used folk themes from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and elsewhere in his music, and the Slovaks seem to have a special affection for him. A good biography with some of his geographical ties: http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/bartok.html

The Slovak program also included "Duke Bluebird's Castle" by the Slovak Opera. I'm not a big Bartok fan, so my memories of the evening are dim. I do remember sitting next to a couple from Vienna who were big Bartok lovers and had come over on the train specifically to see this performance. I also remember being impressed by the depth of talent in both productions.

[Alymer]

When the Hungarian State Opera and Ballet came to London some years ago they brought a version of the Wooden Prince by Lazlo Seregi, along with his version of the Miraculous Mandarin as part of a (very long) Bartok evening. Geoffrey Cauley also made a version for London Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet). For some reason this version had a chinoiserie setting. The Seregi version had some really excellent dancing but the scenario is not exactly easily put across in dance.

[bart]

Thanks for the information so far. It sounds as though Mitteleuropean choreographers, who probably have more regular exposure to Bartok than those of us to th west, are drawn to the possibilities of the score.

You have increased my curiosity. I will have to obtain and listen to the score. It's always fun to listen to unfamiliar music composed for dancing. Even if the story is hard to get across in dance, the Danubian stew of musical forms might make for fascinating dancing.

[papeetepatrick]

The work’s introduction is lushly tonal, harmonically static, almost motionless; it could be Bartok’s homage to the opening of Wagner’s “Rheingold.” Mr. Boulez conveyed the music’s primordial Wagnerian aura. Yet in the frenzied courtship dance of the princess and the puppet, he brought out the exotic pentatonic harmonies and molten energy of the music, which shows Bartok’s debt to Ravel and Stravinsky.

This makes me want to hear the piece ASAP. I know some Bartok works well, others none at all, but also am not enough on my Bartok history to have thought he might have done something that sounds (at least to some ears) like a homage to Rheingold. Hadn't really thought about Ravel, either, Stravinsky yes. And this, at 55 minutes, is bound to have some of the irregular meter (probably a great deal of it) that we were discussing in Cristian's thread. I may check out the score and take a look: This might be a real example of dancers working with a lot of different meters, but with them rather precisely, not floating along in more-or-less the same cloud.

What Mr. Boulez de-emphasized was rhythmic drive. Even when he conducts something like “The Rite of Spring,” Mr. Boulez is not one to pummel listeners. The music-making here was urgent and inexorable, but the tension came from the way Mr. Boulez handled long spans of shifting elements, not from slashing attacks.

That's interesting, I had thought Boulez did tend to emphasize rhythmic drive, not wanting to linger and luxuriate too long, but I'm judging on how I heard his old recording of 'La Mer', which does seem to revel in the Debussy sound-world, and how it seemed to have diminished in size (and rapturous sound) in perfs. in the 90s.

Edited: Placed a hold on a Boulez recording with Chicago Symphony from 1992, as well as the score for his piano reduction of the piece. Never heard either. There are a number of recordings of the piece, Naame Jarvi w/London Philharmonia, others.