A Modern Love Story
By “modern love story”, I don’t mean “Romeo & Juliet retold with contemporary characters” – I mean “a prostitute lures a lecher to be robbed and murdered, but the lecher is magical and won’t die until his lust is fulfilled.”
When Béla Bartók‘s ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” was premiered in 1926, it was quickly banned for its questionable morals. But it was cool to be intense, politically charged, and controversial back then – after all, this was the era which included the rise of facism and communism, American prohibition and speakeasies, and all kinds of varied fringe arts ranging from elegant, traditional-sounding neoclassicism to clunky, forward-looking futurism. Time has eroded this ballet’s edgy effect – after books like Lolita or movies like Pulp Fiction, the story of the Miraculous Mandarin feels pretty tame:
A woman dances to lures victims into a room where they are robbed by three bandits. Eventually, a Chinese man comes, and he jumps on the woman in lust. The three bandits attack him and stab him, but he won’t bleed. He begins to glow with an eerie light. The woman realizes what is happening, and orders the bandits off the victim. He jumps up and embraces the woman – his lust fulfilled, his wounds begin to bleed and he dies. Ah, love.
Without the slightest idea of the plot (or that there even was a plot!), I listened to this before reading the commentary, which is my approach to FAoL. Not that I don’t find the commentary not infrequently just as engaging as the music. I just like to experience the effect of the music in and of itself, on its own terms. And so I did in fact read outside meaning into the work, but it was material derived within my own head. Namely ponderings on the human situation. And so I wept, because it seemed to sum up the human situation, in which we have at the same time the sublime writings of Hildegard of Bingen (whose feast day is today) on the one hand; the appalling candidacy of Donald Trumph (John Wentz’s pronunciation) on the other.
And then I read the commentary. Whoa, what a premise! Ah love, indeed!
Oops. “However” should be in place of the first “And so.”