Composed in 1924 as incidental music to Hungarian dramatist Lengyel's (1880-1974) drama “The Miraculous Mandarin - pantomime grotesque -”, it was not performed in its original form for many years after its premiere in Cologne and a second performance in Prague (both of which were canceled without having met their scheduled runs), partly because of the overly graphic script. Bartók was particularly concerned about the fact that the work was not performed on stage in his native Budapest, and proposed to his publishers to produce a concert version, which resulted in the 'suite'. Unlike the customary suite, which is made up of independent pieces taken from ballet music, etc., the suite is in the style of an 'excerpt', with two-thirds of the entire work performed as is (with a few shortcuts) and a new coda added. The second half of the piece is omitted entirely, so the story does not reach its conclusion, but it could be interpreted as the composer's wish to move away from the controversial script.
This concert band arrangement began in 1997 as a selected piece for Ina Gakuen High School Wind Orchestra at the All Japan Band Competition. Initially, "Introduction", "Dance of the Girl" and "Finale" were extracted and arranged. Later, in 2007, the Osaka Municipal Symphonic Band (now Osaka Shion Wind Orchestra) asked if I would arrange the rest of the piece, so I added 'First seduction game', 'Second seduction game' and ‘Third seduction game’. I had originally intended to write "all the rest" of the unarranged music, but I was faced with a part that I considered impossible to arrange, so I omitted the middle 29 bars of "Dance of the Girl”. Ten years later, when the idea of including it in the CD "New Arrangements Collection 14" came up, I filled in the missing 29 bars and made some minor corrections to the existing parts, thus completing the arrangement of the entire suite.
The main reason I held the arrangement for a long time was that I wanted to eventually publish it completely as composed by Bartók himself. In addition, the presence of the original score was so great that whenever I looked at the arranged parts, I repeatedly asked myself whether such a way of writing was really appropriate, which also contributed to the delay in writing. As Bartók was also a piano virtuoso, the piano plays a very important role in this piece, which requires exceptional skill for a "piano in orchestra". For a while, I even wondered how much significance there was in arranging such a special work for concert band, but after listening to a performance of the entire piece and confirming that the innovative and stimulating music was reproduced without any trouble, I was finally able to put my mind at rest.
When I started the arrangement, I used the 1955 study score by Universal Publishing House, but later a revised score supervised by the composer's second son Pater (1924-) was published in 2000. In 2010, Japanese researcher Yasuhiro Murakami revised the suite version of the score with the help of Pater, and the score was published by Zen-On Music Publishing Co. This most recent edition is probably the most reliable study score in the world, having corrected all possible printing errors after careful examination of the autographs and other documents. I have honored the revisions in the original score as I added new arrangements, but I would like to add that in the final version I retained everything in the ZEN-On edition and have followed the notation, etc.
(Kazuhiro Morita)
