Eros in the Metropolis: Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin

Abstract

Bartók's essay ‘The Relation of Folk Song to the Development of the Art Music of our Time’, published in 1921, was written as he was working on the score of The Miraculous Mandarin. Three main issues in the essay, the question of origin, the position of the creative subject with relation to ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, and the character of the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, are given fresh contexts by the musical work's emphasis on the character and function of differing types of eroticism. The possibility of cultural renewal based on the recovery of erotic self-expression in the face of the oppressive, objective conditions of the modern metropolis emerges as a central concern. This links Bartók's work to that of the Sunday Circle group of intellectuals, including Karl Mannheim, György Lukács and Béla Balázs, who sought an affirmative alternative to Georg Simmel's pessimistic view of the ‘tragedy of modern culture’.

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