Bartok himself admitted that his one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle was a problem to stage since the whole plot is the spiritual conflict of two persons and nothing else happens on stage. Therefore he was pleased to receive the libretto of the pantomime The Wooden Prince, which as a one-act ballet would make a perfect pairing making up for the lack of action in the opera, and the two could be performed on the same evening. His friend Bela Balazs wrote the libretto for both works.
In the ballet’s scenario, folk motives combine with the mystical and intimations of things psychological – which were the rage around the turn of the century (Bartok began work on the score in 1914). A princess is preoccupied with her own beauty. A neighboring prince sees her and is immediately in love. As he tries to approach her a fairy who rules the forces of nature puts obstacles in his way. The prince creates a wooden version of himself to tempt the princess, and the princess dances off with the wooden prince, ignoring the real prince. There are conflicts of nature, the prince and the princess but in the end all ends happily as the pair finally belong together and are accepted by nature.
Bartok urged listeners to not overemphasize the folkloristic aspects of the work. As with much of his oeuvre, his creation of themes in the folk style sound so genuine that one would think they are quotations of folk songs and dances. He called the work a symphonic poem to be danced to, in three clearly designated parts. Its opening pages have been compared to Wagner’s leitmotif quotations at the beginning of Das Rheingold.
The ballet music is the same on both of these discs, but on the Hungarton you also get the Lisztian/R. Strauss symphonic poem Kossuth, a somewhat more idiomatic performance by the Hungarian orchestra, and to top it off a 5.0 channel hi-res surround recording. Of course the Naxos – a very good performace too – comes in at their bargain low price for the shorter program.
Around the turn of the century the area of Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but patriotic fervor was growing toward the eventual establishment of Hungary as an independent country. Lajos Kossuth was the leading figure in the 1848 war of independence, and Bartok made him the central figure in his first major-scale orchestral work – stimulated by an immersion in the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss and especially his Hero’s Life. The 18-minute work of 1903 has been divided into ten continuous tracks by Hungaroton. There are marches and national anthems of the opposing forces, funeral music and even some humorous themes. It reminded me of some “battle music” such as Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory.
This was only the second new multichannel recording from Hungaroton, made in 2006 and following on one presenting Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. The recording was made in the Palace of Arts in Budapest. Hopefully these two will be the start of a continuing series.
– John Sunier
