In the midst of the Second World War, a series of military defeats laid bare old rivalries within the Axis alliance, such that the patronage of prestigious cultural events became a crucial site of competition between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In autumn 1942, the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture sponsored a festival of contemporary operas and ballets scheduled in both Milan and Rome. According to Carlo Gatti, the artistic director of La Scala, this event demonstrated the ‘stupendous power of Italian musical Art’ in establishing a ‘new cultural order’ in Europe.
The festival took place from 3 October to 10 November 1942, and, although the majority of the composers performed were Italian, included four foreign works: Berg’s Wozzeck, Honegger’s Amphion, Orff’s Carmina Burana and Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. The choreographer of Hungarian origin, Aurél M. Milloss, who had emigrated from Germany to Italy in the mid-1930s, was one of the main protagonists of the festival. Having successfully directed the Italian premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1941, he decided to stage Wozzeck in Rome and The Miraculous Mandarin in Milan.
Musicologists have long pointed out the exceptional significance of the Italian premiere of Wozzeck – at that time Berg’s music was virtually forbidden in Nazi Germany, following the scandal provoked by the 1934 Berlin premiere of the Lulu Suite. The premiere of Bartók’s ballet, however, could be considered just as much an act of cultural dissent from Nazi hegemony as the performance of Berg’s opera. In my doctoral thesis, completed in 2017 at the EHESS (Paris), I investigated Bartók’s political reception in Italy. The performances of Bartók’s stage works during the fascist period (i.e. the opera Bluebeard’s Castle in 1938 and the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin in 1942) constitute excellent examples of intermedial practices and noteworthy points of reference in Italian cultural history.
After its world premiere in Cologne in 1926, The Miraculous Mandarin had been banned by the mayor of the city, the later famous Konrad Adenauer, for the ‘amorality’ of its story, which revolves around physical violence, murder and sex. Subsequent attempts to perform the ‘pantomime’ (as the work is described on its title page) were unsuccessful, and during the 1930s the Mandarin was known only through its orchestral suite. In 1936, after hearing the suite in Vienna, Milloss had the idea to transform the work into a full-scale ballet and even met the composer in Budapest to advocate a new staging. This opportunity came true only on 12 October 1942 in Milan by virtue of the support of the fascist authorities.
It is worth noting that, despite his hostility to fascist violence, Bartók had made many concert tours to Mussolini’s Italy: the last one in December 1939. In the early 1940s, however, after his move to New York, the composer adopted an openly anti-Nazi stance and momentarily became the president of an organisation lobbying for an anti-Nazi Hungarian government-in-exile. The author of the ballet’s libretto, Melchior Lengyel, had also emigrated to the United States in 1937. What is more, in 1942, Ernst Lubitsch adapted one of Lengyel’s stories for his anti-Nazi satirical film To Be or Not to Be.
Fig. 1 Aurél M. Milloss as The Mandarin, Teatro alla Scala, 1942 – Still photography
Courtesy of Archivio Aurél M. Milloss, Istituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice
The Milanese premiere of The Miraculous Mandarin proved to be a success and, according to the conductor János Ferencsik, received ten curtain calls. The press unanimously exalted the soloists’ performance: Attilia Radice as the Girl and Milloss in the title role (Fig. 1). In the art magazine Emporium, the sets and costumes by the futurist painter Enrico Prampolini were courageously likened to Robert Wiene’s expressionist chef-d’oeuvre The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Fig. 2). Furthermore, in the musical guide printed on the occasion of the premiere by the publisher La Lampada, the musicologist Luigi Rognoni glorified the ‘coherence of Bartók’s moral world’: Bartók belonged to those artists who have tried ‘to affirm and defend the most noble and civil human aspirations.’
Fig. 2 Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, Teatro alla Scala, 1942 – Still photography
Courtesy of Aurél M. Milloss, Istituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice
Can the Italian premiere of Bartók’s Mandarin in 1942 be understood as a political gesture or even (as suggested above) an act of cultural dissent? One could emphasise the fact that Bartók’s Mandarin shared a triple bill with Orff’s Carmina Burana and Honegger’s Amphion: the presence of a contemporary work by a German composer on the programme may well have helped to deflect attention away from the political impact of Bartók’s work. Nevertheless, the decision to perform a scandalous expressionist masterpiece by an anti-Nazi composer – even one who had emigrated to an enemy country – in a world-famous theatre, and in the midst of a human catastrophe, can hardly be considered as an insignificant act. It is worth remembering that on 24 October 1942, two weeks after Mandarin’s premiere, Milan was bombed twice by British Royal Air Force. In the same year the anti-fascist movement had started to re-organise and in October there was a spontaneous strike in the Milanese factory of Magnaghi. From this perspective, the Milanese Mandarin suggests not only the exuberance of the Italian cultural landscape in a catastrophic moment of its history, but could be interpreted as a significant event for the cultural legitimisation of the Italian resistance movement.
*I would like to thank Ben Earle for his help in revising the text
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