The Enchanted Night: Selected Tales
by Miklós Bánffy
Translated by Len Rix
Count Miklós Bánffy de Losoncz (1873 —1950), to give him his full name, was born to a long-established Transylvanian noble family and eventually held a number of political positions in Hungary, including that of Foreign Minister at tumultuous times in the history of the region. A veritable Renaissance man, he was an artist and stage designer, as well as the author of five plays, a novel, and several short stories. These certainly deserve a wider readership in the English-speaking world, and I am sure that this selection of stories which is being published by Pushkin Press in a translation by Len Rix (well known for his translations of Antal Szerb for the same publishing house) will go a long way towards addressing this.
I feel silly saying this, but when I started this collection whose title includes the word “Night”, written by a Transylvanian count to boot, I somehow expected this to be a collection about vampiric derring-do. Of course I was wrong, and the choice of stories reveals Bánffy’s versatility both as to choice of themes and settings. Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t space for fantasy and magic, sometimes tapping into the traditions and landscape of Transylvania. Such is the case, for instance, with the opening story Wolves, which draws an analogy between the cruelty of wolves and human greed, or Tale from a Mountain Village, a story about marital abuse with elements of folklore and superstition. One could also mention Little Borbalka and the Terrifying Safranics, about a girl who warns an outcast about a plan to murder him.
Bánffy’s choice of settings however goes well beyond the confines of the country he loved or the era he was living in. One story has as its protagonist Helen of Troy. Another – The Miraculous Tale of Gaspar Loki - speaks of a pleasure-seeking Hungarian knight at the time of the Venetian Republic. In The Emperor’s Secret, an official of the Chinese Emperor is held prisoner by the forces of Attila the Hun. There's even a futuristic sci-fi piece - The Contaminated Planet - which remains particularly relevant in our ecologically-minded times.
But most
representative of Bánffy’s style is the title story. Mimi, a young and ingenuous aristocrat, arrives
in an unnamed Mediterranean coastal town, accompanied by her grandmother. A stroll into the surrounding countryside is
rudely interrupted by the flaring up of hostilities between rebels and rulers,
and Mimi ends up being escorted by a down-and-out musician to a dubious
establishment hidden in the hills. Under
the light of the moon these seedy surroundings assume a mystical aura, infused
with “the perfume of olive blossom, of lilac and jasmine”. Mimi falls in love and witnesses an esoteric
female-only ritual, before the sun rises and reality reappears within its glare. The heady, dreamlike, Southern atmosphere of
this story reminded me of the novel Journey by Moonlight, by another Hungarian,
and near contemporary of Bánffy, Antal Szerb.
This was a fitting conclusion to a haunting collection.
Kindle Edition
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Although not himself a composer, Bánffy also earns a place in the history of music thanks to his championing of Béla Bartók (1881-1945). As director of the Hungarian State Theatres between 1913 and 1918, Bánffy was instrumental in the production of Bartók’s ballet The Wooden Prince, to which Bánffy provided the stage designs. At the time, Bartók was a young firebrand and Bánffy’s project faced considerable opposition by the more conservative members of the establishment. Indeed, Bánffy’s description of the musician in Enchanted Night could well apply to Bartók at his most avant-garde:
Everything I brought before the public was brand new – new harmonies, new ways of writing, a style that was quite different from anything that had gone before, young and fresh and probably rather raw – but new! It was a music that served the needs of that particular time. And they didn’t like it. They threw it back at me.
The Wooden Prince is based on a fairy-tale
like libretto by Béla Bálasz about a fairy who tries to thwart the love between
a prince and a princess. It calls for a
huge orchestra and, in its score influenced by Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss
and Richard Wagner, reveals an ambitious composer seeking (and finding) his own
voice. Here is the orchestral suite which the
composer himself arranged from the full ballet score:
Another major Bártokian work produced during Bánffy’s tenure was Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. The dark subject of the opera, based on the well-known fairytale, is very much in line with Bánffy’s literary interests – fairy tales and Gothic elements tend to recur in the stories featured in Enchanted Night. This extract from a recent production at the Lyon Opera House is strong on dark hues and echoes of Rebecca-like Gothic romance.
The Wooden Prince and Duke Bluebeard’s Castle are large-scale works. Albeit on a smaller scale, his six string quartets are amongst his greatest and most personal compositions. One of the characteristics of Bártok’s mature style is its use of so-called “night music”, which has been described by David Schneider as characterised by “eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies”. A case in point is the third movement from the Fourth String Quartet (1928), here in a recording by the Tátrai Quartet:
Much like the musician in Enchanted Night, Bártok was considered innovative in his youth but was eventually drawn into the mainstream. This was, in part, a result of a mellowing of the composer’s voice. However, as Bánffy’s musician puts it: “every age had its own style, a style that takes its shape from its time. Since then things have moved on”. In 1945, the final year of his life, as a poor and terminally-ill emigré in America, Bártok found himself a citizen of a rapidly changing world, one ravaged by two world wars. The classical music scene would soon be embracing the innovations of the sixties, innovations which, in hindsight, might have led to an unhealthy widening between “art music” and “popular music”. On the contrary, Bártok’s music remained true to the lyricism of the folksongs he collected in his youth. The slow movement of his third (and last) piano concerto – “Adagio Religioso” – reveals a mystical serenity quite at odds with the challenging times the composer was going through. It is one of the best examples of Bártok’s nocturnal music, but rather than ominous, it comes across as an accompaniment to an “enchanted night”.
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