PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Béla Bartók Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (now part of Romania). Died September 26, 1945, New York City.

The Wooden Prince, Op. 13

Bartók began his ballet The Wooden Prince, based on a scenario by Béla Balázs, in 1914 and finished orches trating the score in 1917. The premiere was given on May 12, 1917, in Budapest. The score calls for four flutes and two piccolos, four oboes and two english horns, four clarinets, E -flat clarinet and bass clarinet, four bassoons and two contrabassoons, three saxophones, four horns, four trumpets and two cornets, three trombones and tuba, two harps, celesta, glockenspiel, xylophone, triangle, castanets, cymbals, side drum, bass drum, tam -tam, and strings. Performance time is approximately fifty -five minutes.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of Bartók’s The Wooden Prince were given at Orchestra Hall on October 22, 23, and 25, 1987, with Pierre Boulez conducting. Our most recent subscription concert performances were giv en on December 10, 11, 12, and 13, 1998, with Pierre Boulez conducting.

At thirty-two, Béla Bartók thought his career was over. His opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, had failed to win a national competition, and there was little chance it would ever be staged. F or two years he had been unable to write anything except for some easy piano pieces. In 1914 Béla Balázs, who wrote the text for Bluebeard’s Castle, found him “in a gloomy and hopeless state of mind. He was thinking about emigration, or—of suicide.”

Béla Bartók is arguably the twentieth -century’s unhappiest example of a composer who learned to live with neglect throughout his life only to receive, after his death, public recognition as one of the great masters of the era. The period around 1914 was perhaps the lowest point (at least from Bartók’s perspective), but for most of his career, stretching ahead another thirty years, discouragement, the struggle to find an audience, failing health, and chronic poverty predominated. The Wooden Prince is the first wo rk with which Bartók’s fortunes seemed, at least temporarily, to change.

The project was designed to lift the composer’s spirits. After their work together on Bluebeard’s Castle, Balázs suggested that he and Bartók collaborate on a musical pantomime based on his play The Wooden Prince . Composition began in 1914; it was the first serious work Bartók had tried in many months. Progress was fitful and stubborn, but Bartók pushed on, inspired, no doubt, by the promise of a staged production. He can’t have guess ed that this musical fairy tale would mark the turning point in his career. It may well have been that the pantomime’s subtext, filled with pertinent points about the fate of the creative artist, also spurred him on.

The main characters are a Prince and a Princess, who, in classic storybook fashion, lives in the castle next door. Their fates are governed by a Fairy. The central character, however, is the toy puppet the Prince makes of wood, which subsequently captivates the Princess, leaving the Prince al one and abandoned. Balázs later said that the wooden puppet symbolizes

the creative work of the artist, who puts all of himself into his work until he has made something complete, shining, and perfect. The artist himself, however, is left ro bbed and poor. I was thinking of that common and profound tragedy when the creation becomes the rival of the creator, and of the pain and glory of the situation in which a woman prefers the poem to the poet, the picture to the painter. At the premiere on May 12, 1917, The Wooden Prince was an enormous popular success, and Bartók received one of the few ovations of his life. At first he didn’t feel that the glory was more for the picture than the painter—in fact, if we are to judge from Balázs’s snippy comments, Bartók was practically lionized. (“The next day the papers gave Bartók full recognition,” he wrote, “but me mostly abuse.”) The popularity of The Wooden Prince paved the way for the delayed premiere of Bluebeard’s Castle the following year, restored Bartók’s will to compose, established his name with the Hungarian public, and perhaps even encouraged him to believe that audiences would follow the progress of his art in the years ahead. Initially this optimism wasn’t misguided. Bartók began to write with a new urgency and a fiercely concentrated energy; years of neglect turned to a time of success. His music was published by the prestigious Universal Editions, and he began to tour Europe and later America.

But the turn of fortune was temporary. The Wooden Prince disappeared from the repertory when Balázs became a political exile and the government forbade performances of his works. Revivals of both The Wooden Prince and Bluebeard’s Castle were planned to honor Bartók’s fiftieth birthday in 1931, but Bartók refused to have Balázs’s name taken off the programs and the performances were canceled. The Wooden Prince was presented again in Budapest in 1935, though this time success was less spectacular. By then Bartók was deeply caught up in the politics of the time, and already sensed that he might have to leave his homeland. He did, finally, in 1940, emmigrating to the United States. The story of his sad last years in this country has nothing to do with The Wooden Prince, except that it finds Bartók himself left robbed and poor, to use Balázs’s words, despite the lasting significance of his creative life.

Although The Wooden Prince has never held the stage as a ballet, it contains much inventive music and brilliant writing for orchestra. The work reveals a number of powerful influences on Bartók’s maturing style—the impact of Strauss’s incandescent orchestral works (Bartók was stunned when he first heard Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902); the careful study of Debussy’s scores, at Kodály’s suggestion; and the discovery of folk music, which had given him a second career as a pioneer ethnomusicologist. (He also may have been inspired, or perhaps merely provoked, by the Budapest premieres, in 1913, of Stravinsky’s two new ballets, The Firebird and Petrushka. )

The Wooden Prince also reveals the crystallization of Bartók’s working methods. The overall shape, taking its cue from that of the story itself, is an arch form, with the second half mirroring the first. The palindrome—a shape that reverses itself at its midpoint—became the most characteristic structure for Bartók, governing not only entire works, but movements and sections, and even individual themes. Bartók carefully uses music to distinguish characters, so that even in a concert performance there’s a sense of the action. The Prince and the Princess are given folklike themes; she appears at first accompanied by a gentle clarinet melody, he by a march in the lower strings. Nature is painted in lush, colorful, highly impressionistic tones. The wooden puppet dances to harsh, artificial, even grotesque sounds.

The music is continuous, although Bartók indicated in his score a division into seven sections framed by a prelude and a postlude. At the center, as the keystone of the arch, is the decisive dance between the Princess and the Wooden Prince. The score begins in the depths of C major, and the whole prelude is essentially one long-breathed crescendo on a C major triad—colored by a persistent F-sharp—much as Wagner’s Das Rheingold begins with a great, sustained E-flat chord.

Three dances build toward the central dance with the puppet. The first is the dance of the Princess in the forest (the clarinet melody leads the way). Next comes the dance of the trees, marked by rustling scales and tremolos, an eerie whistling in the strings, and the sounds of birds in the winds. The following dance of the waves, when the Fairy brings the stream to life, is painted in a burst of activity from the winds, harps, and celesta four-hands, and the saxophones sing a long melody. The dance with the Wooden Prince is the longest portion of the score, and the music grows in scope and abandon. After the climax, the music gradually retreats as the drama unwinds. The downward slope of the ballet is a sequence of episodes, including the seductive dance of the Princess trying in vain to win back the Prince, and the rising of the forest to bar her way. The postlude restores C major and the peaceful harmony of nature.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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