1 See John C. Crawford and Dorothy L. Crawford, Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music (Bloomington, 1994), 176–91, for discussion of these works, which the authors view as products of Bartók's ‘recurrent episodes of psychological and sexual turmoil’ (p. 176). On the importance of Endre Ady's erotic work for Bartók see Frigyesi, Judit, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley, 1998), esp. pp. 168–95.Google Scholar

2 Botstein, Leon, ‘Out of Hungary: Bartók, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music’, Bartók and his World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton, 1995), 3–63 (p. 62, n. 126). Lee Congdon, however, says that there is ‘no reliable evidence to suggest that … Bartók presented this'; The Young Lukács (Chapel Hill, 1983), 126.Google Scholar

3 Bartók, Béla, ‘The Relation of Folk Song to the Development of the Art Music of our Time’, Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (Lincoln, NE, 1976), 320–30 (p. 321).Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 321–2.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 325–6.Google Scholar

6 For a chronology of the composition of the work see Bónis, Ferenc, ’ The Miraculous Mandarin: The Birth and Vicissitudes of a Masterpiece’, The Stage Works of Béla Bartók, ed. Nicholas John (London, 1991), 81–5; and John Vinton, ‘The Case of The Miraculous Mandarin, Musical Quarterly, 20 (1964), 1–17.Google Scholar

7 From Mannheim's lecture ‘Soul and Culture’, trans. Congdon, The Young Lukács, 123.Google Scholar

8 This introductory material draws upon Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and his Generation 1900–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1985), and Congdon, The Young Lukács. Bartók's relationship with Balázs and Lukács is explored in Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the Century Budapest. Further context is given in Mary Gluck, ‘The Intellectual and Cultural Background of Bartók's Work’, Bartók and Kodaly Revisited, ed. György Ránki (Budapest, 1987), 9–23.Google Scholar

9 Lukács, György, ‘Bartók Béla’, Nagyvilág, 15 (September 1970), 1290; trans. Ivan Sanders, ‘Three Literary Bartók Portraits’, Bartók and Kodaly Revisited, ed. Ránki, 45–54 (p. 47).Google Scholar

10 trans. Bónis, ’ The Miraculous Mandarin, 83.Google Scholar

11 See Bónis, Ferenc, ‘Bartók and Wagner’, Bartók Studies, ed. David Crow (Detroit, 1976), 84–93 (p. 89), who calls the opening of The Wooden Prince a ‘twentieth-century reformulation’ of the Rheingold Prelude. György Kroó notes that the dawn awakening was not in Balázs's original scenario; ‘Ballet: The Wooden Prince’, The Bartók Companion, ed. Malcolm Gillies (London, 1993), 360–71 (p. 362).Google Scholar

12 Schneider, David E., ‘Bartók and Stravinsky: Respect, Competition, Influence, and the Hungarian Reaction to Modernism in the 1920s’, Bartók and his World, ed. Laki, 172–99 (p. 187). Schneider reveals the enduring importance of this topos for Bartók in an analysis of the opening of the first movement of the First Piano Concerto. Frigyesi similarly analyses the same passage as ‘creation music’ in Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest, 123–34.Google Scholar

13 Bartók, Béla, ‘The Problem of the New Music’ (1920), Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Suchoff, 455–9 (p. 456).Google Scholar

14 Quoted in Music in European Thought 1850–1912, ed. Bojan Bujic (Cambridge, 1988), 318, 320.Google Scholar

15 Simmel, Georg, ‘Psychological and Ethnological Studies on Music’ (1882), The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. and introduced by K. Peter Etzkorn (New York, 1968), 90–140 (pp. 111, 113).Google Scholar

16 Frigyesi, , Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest, 96.Google Scholar

17 Bartók, Béla, ‘Hungarian Peasant Music’ (1920), Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Suchoff, 304–15 (p. 304).Google Scholar

18 According to Edmund Gurney, another who took Darwin as his starting-point, ‘melody aims at individual beauty, and every successful melody is a new free form which must be created, not manufactured'; The Power of Sound (1880; repr. New York, 1966), 248. On Gurney and his relation to Darwin's work see Budd, Malcolm, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London, 1985), ch. 4: ‘Sexual Emotion in Ideal Motion’, 52–75.Google Scholar

19 Cited in Kroó, ‘Ballet: The Wooden Prince’, 367.Google Scholar

20 Bartók, Béla, ‘Mechanical Music’ (1937), Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Suchoff, 289–98 (p. 297).Google Scholar

21 Crawford and Crawford are onto this when they state that the melody's ‘exotic turns and trills describe her desire for [the youth]’, but seem on less secure ground when they assert that ‘her forced seductions become more expansive as her technique improves with growing confidence'; Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music, 198.Google Scholar

22 Raymond Williams, ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’, The Politics of Modernism (London, 1996), 37–48 (pp. 40–1).Google Scholar

23 Lesák, Barbara, ‘Photography, Cinematography and the Theatre: A History of a Relationship’, Fin de siècle and its Legacy, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1990), 132–46 (pp. 141–2).Google Scholar

24 Simmel, Georg, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York, 1964), 409–24 (pp. 409–10). Wolff's translation of the title of Simmel's essay seems less satisfactory than one which emphasizes the conflict between city and ‘spiritual’ life, particularly when discussing Simmel in relation to the concerns of the Sunday Circle, for whom the ‘spirit’ was so important. Wolff's title will be retained for the purposes of locating passages taken from his translation.Google Scholar

25 Simmel, Georg, Philosophische Kultur (1923), trans. from David P. Frisby, ‘Simmel and the Study of Modernity’, Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology, ed. Michael Kaern, Bernard S. Phillips and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht, 1990), 57–74 (p. 59). As Edward Timms has observed, whereas the realist novel of the nineteenth century portrayed ‘social milieux which were fixed, stable’, in modernism the city was ‘transposed to an existential plane. The metropolis ultimately becomes a metaphor – a dynamic configuration of the conflicting hopes and fears of the twentieth century'; ‘Unreal City – Theme and Variations’, Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, ed. Edward Timms and David Kelley (Manchester, 1985), 1–12 (p. 4). See also Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916 (Oxford, 1994), ch. 4, ‘The City’, 133–208.Google Scholar

26 Donald, James, ‘The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces’, Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London, 1995), 77–95 (p. 84).Google Scholar

27 See Jenks, Chris, ‘The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction’, Visual Culture, ed. Jenks, 1–25.Google Scholar

28 Connor, Steven, ‘The Modern Auditory I’, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London, 1997), 203–23 (p. 209).Google Scholar

29 See Weber, Fritz, ‘Heroes, Meadows and Machinery: Fin-de-siècleMusic’, Fin de siècle, ed. Teich and Porter, 216–34 (p. 224).Google Scholar

30 See Timms, Edward, ‘Musil's Vienna and Kafka's Prague: The Quest for a Spiritual City’, Unreal City, 247–63 (p. 255). On Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) see also Malcolm Bowie, ‘A Message from Kakania: Freud, Music, Criticism’, Modernism and the European Unconscious, ed. Peter Collier and Judy Davies (Cambridge, 1990), 3–17.Google Scholar

31 Simmel, , ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, 410–11.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 413, 420–2.Google Scholar

33 See Brantlinger, Patrick, ‘Mass Media and Culture in Fin-de-siècle Europe’, Fin de siècle, ed. Teich and Porter, 98–109, who sees this – the concern for the fashionable – as one connection between avant-garde and mass culture.Google Scholar

34 Deathridge, John, ‘Wagner and the Post-Modern’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 143–61 (p. 154).Google Scholar

35 For Adorno, of course, ‘history’ is similarly a construct. This summary of Adorno's views is culled and condensed from Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993), 30–7.Google Scholar

36 Simmel, Georg, ‘On the Concept of the Tragedy of Culture’ (1911), The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, 27–46 (p. 30).Google Scholar

37 See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry in Society’ (1957), Notes to Literature, i, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1991), 37–54 (p. 41). See also Dai Griffiths, ‘So Who are You?: Webern's Op. 3 No. 1’, Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist (Cambridge, 1996), 301–14.Google Scholar

38 Simmel, Georg, ‘The Conflict in Modern Culture’ (1918), The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, 11–26 (p. 11).Google Scholar

39 Paddison, , Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, 38. On Adorno and Simmel see Rose, Gillian, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London, 1978), 32–5. See also Robert W. Fitkin, Adorno on Music (London, 1998), 20–4.Google Scholar

40 Paddison, Max, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music (London, 1996), 64.Google Scholar

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43 Quoted in Renato Pogglioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 141.Google Scholar

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48 This is an example of what Scruton calls the ‘prostitution of command’, a ‘depersonalizing strategy’ practised by an ‘enslaver'; Sexual Desire, 158.Google Scholar

49 The robbers are thus like hidden conductors of what Paul Bekker called a ‘mechanistic orchestra’, in which he discerned the ‘replacement of the expressive power of music by its motor power … the change from inner feeling as the leading constructive force to external gesture'; Paul Bekker, The Orchestra (1936; repr. New York, 1963), 306. For Elias Canetti ‘there is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor': the ‘rhythmic or throbbing crowd’ must all dance to the same rhythm, for the ‘regulation of time [is] essential to political structure'; and for the citizens ‘the rhythm of their lives is beaten out within the pack’ (Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, London, 1962, 31, 394, 397, 399).Google Scholar

50 See Lissa, Zofia, ‘The Temporal Nature of a Music Work’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 26 (1968), 527–38.Google Scholar

51 See Cave, Terence, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford, 1988), 1–2.Google Scholar

52 Bergson, Henri, ‘Le rire’ (1900), trans. Wylie Sypher, Comedy (New York, 1956), 92.Google Scholar

53 Cave writes: ‘Anagnorisis is always the recovery of a buried past which is problematic, threatening, often equivocal in character as fact or fiction. … Furthermore, it represents the repetition or recovery of something once known and familiar as implausible, unexpected or astonishing. Recognition has many of the characteristics of the unheimlich, and stories of the uncanny frequently stage recognition scenes.’ Recognitions, 240–1.Google Scholar

54 Julie Brown, ‘Bartók, the Gypsies, and Hybridity in Music’, Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (forthcoming), discusses Bartók's distinction between two ‘internal ethnic Others’ – the gypsy and the peasant. She notes how, in the essay ‘On Hungarian Music’ (1911), Bartók characterized the gypsy as a threatening, contaminating Oriental at home, and later, in ‘Hungarian Folk Music’ (1921), as the epitome of greed and commercial vulgarity. (Bartók's distaste for this, she argues, may be the result of his association with the short-lived Communist government of Béla Kun (March-July 1919) and with Lukács.) The peasant, by contrast, takes on the powers and character of the ‘noble savage'. I am grateful to Dr Brown for supplying me with a copy of her article.Google Scholar

55 Bónis, ’ The Miraculous Mandarin, 93.Google Scholar

56 Kroó, ‘Ballet: The Wooden Prince, 368.Google Scholar

57 Kroó, ‘Pantomime: The Miraculous Mandarin, The Bartók Companion, ed. Gillies, 372–84 (p. 373).Google Scholar

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71 Brown, Julie, ‘Schoenberg's Musical Prose as Allegory’, Music Analysis, 14 (1995), 161–92. The expressionist Gottfried Benn called the modern city the ‘bearer of the myth that began in Babylon’, and the Tower of Babel is a potent symbol, for example, in Lang's Metropolis: see Timms, Edward, ‘Expressionists and Georgians: Demonic City and Enchanted Village’, Unreal City, ed. Timms, 111–27 (p. 118); and Minden, ‘The City in Early Cinema’, 194. On Simmel and Stefan George see Pascal, Roy, From Naturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society 1880–1918 (London, 1973), 154–9.Google Scholar