The Traditional and the Innovative in the Dramaturgy and Composition of Béla Bartók’s Ballets

Abstract

This article investigates the development of the 20th century ballet genre on the example of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881—1945). The study aims to reveal the features of B. Bartók’s ballets in the context of trends in Western European art of the 20th century and to show the composer’s innovative techniques. The article identifies specific musical formative means that reflect the genre definition of “pantomime”, and emphasizes his innovation. The early 20th century ballet art is an extremely bright phenomenon associated with the active search for new ways of developing the genre, which took place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Classical ballet, which had reached its peak in the works of the Russian ballet school and the works of M. Petipa, was suddenly recognized as outdated and unviable. The new generation of choreographers sought to refute, to a certain extent, the genre’s old laws. The idea of searching for new means of expression became the leading one, and the canon of classical choreography was replaced by pantomime and a new unusual dance technique, which later became known as modern dance. B. Bartók’s ballets “The Wooden Prince” (1917) and “The Miraculous Mandarin” (1919) are examples of the new type of ballet performance of the early 20th century. The article shows that the composer focused on creating a symphonic score corresponding to the ideas of pantomime. His appeal to this had been primarily dictated by the librettos themselves, in which B. Balázs and M. Lengyel had defined the work character in this way. Naturally, the rejection of classical ballet’s traditional forms influenced the works’ compositional features. The article demonstrates that the scores of “The Wooden Prince” and “The Miraculous Mandarin” are distinguished by a new approach to the musical structure, in which the principles of instrumental forms play a significant role. At the same time, each of the ballets expresses the dialectical pair of “canon and heuristic” in its own way: “The Wooden Prince” retains to a certain extent the flair of classical ballet; in “The Miraculous Mandarin”, this genre pattern is violated almost ostentatiously. In this work, B. Bartók’s appeal to such an anti-classical subject reflects the era’s new trends associated with the artistic movement of expressionism. In the Hungarian composer’s ballets, the dualism of the traditional and the innovative gives rise to a different type of ballet score itself.