Images of the friendship with Bartók: From Béla Balázs’s recollections

Béla Balázs, the librettist of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Wooden Prince, wrote many remarks about Bartók in his recollections throughout his life, and their manuscripts are preserved in Budapest, in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and National Széchényi Library. Some parts of these texts, however, still remain unpublished. Even though his reminiscence tends to exaggerate their friendship, which in fact ended in their earliest period in Budapest, examination of the sources provides us with a new understanding of the relationship between the librettist and the composer. Therefore, this paper introduces the documents written by Balázs, gives a selective overview of their friendship, and examines how the image of Bartók changed in Balázs’s mind over time

Béla Bartók’s controversy with Géza Molnár in 1911: As a member of the “Transitional generation”

Béla Bartók’s “On Hungarian Music,” one of his controversial articles published in 1911, is known for criticizing Géza Molnár’s book, Theory of Hungarian Music (1904). However, it has not been mentioned that Molnár himself replied to Bartók’s article in the next volume of Aurora [Dawn] magazine, using exactly the same title as Bartók’s. While Bartók asserted that true Hungarian music had never existed before, Molnár, a musicologist in Budapest, bitterly criticized Bartók’s assertions from an academic perspective. This controversy over Hungarian music published in Aurora seemed quite crucial for understanding and relativizing Bartók’s position at that time. The historian Mary Gluck explained that several intellectuals, including György Lukács and Béla Balázs, had to depend on the older generation, both financially and philosophically, during that period. Using Gluck’s framework, this paper examines the genesis of Bartók’s article and the connection between him and the intellectuals in 1911, as well as to interpret this controversy. In conclusion, the controversy with Molnár, and plausible “defeat” in the field of musicology could be added to his list of challenges and setbacks before 1912, the year that saw Bartók’s temporal exit from public musical life

Physical Relation of Source I to IRc2 in the Orion KL Region

We present mid-infrared narrow-band images of the Orion BN/KL region, and N-band low-resolution spectra of IRc2 and the nearby radio source "I." The distributions of the silicate absorption strength and the color temperature have been revealed with a sub-arcsecond resolution. The detailed structure of the 7.8 micron/12.4 micron color temperature distribution was resolved in the vicinity of IRc2. A mid-infrared counterpart to source I has been detected as a large color temperature peak. The color temperature distribution shows an increasing gradient from IRc2 toward source I, and no dominant temperature peak is seen at IRc2. The spectral energy distribution of IRc2 could be fitted by a two-temperature component model, and the "warmer component" of the infrared emission from IRc2 could be reproduced by scattering of radiation from source I. IRc2 itself is not self-luminous, but is illuminated and heated by an embedded luminous young stellar object located at source I.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures. Minor corrections had been done in the ver.2. Accepted for publication in PAS

The Discovery of “Asia”: Okakura Kakuzō in Colonial India

Okakura Kakuzō (1863-1913) is a Japanese art critic famous for his phrase "Asia is One." This paper argues that Okakura "discovered Asia" when he visited India for the first time in 1901-02. At the turn of the twentieth century, non-Western intellectuals began to cross borders in order to pursue national goals, including anti-colonial struggles and cultural "revival" movements. The benefits of a Western education allowed some to engage in writing and speaking activities in Western languages, mostly English. Following the lead of Indian scholars, Okakura and other Japanese thinkers entered the international intellectual arena. He and others like him sought to portray the "East" as a civilization with universal values, placing it on equal terms with the West. In India, Okakura associated with Bengali elites such as Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) and members of the Tagore family. Vivekananda was a man of strong national consciousness and universal views who asserted that being "Hindu" or being "Indian" also meant being "universal." The confidence and national consciousness of the Bengali elite had a strong influence on Okakura\u27s creation of the idea of "Asia." During his stay in India, Okakura completed his first book in English, The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903) which began with the symbolic manifesto "Asia is one." In this book, he presented his idea of "Asia" not as a mere geographical concept but as a civilization with China and India as the two major sources of culture and with vast areas nonetheless united in "the Ultimate" of beauty and religion. One motivation to reveal the heights of "Asian" civilization was Okakura\u27s belief that non-Western peoples needed a reliable standard for self-recognition independent from the Western standard. He wrote this book not only for a Western audience, but for Indians who were conversant with English. Okakura felt political sympathy for colonial India under the historical situation of Bengal where the mental and social preparation for the Swadeshi Movement from 1905 was gradually beginning. However, Okakura could not help realizing that he and Bengalis could communicate with each other only in English, the suzerain language. And he became sensitive to how the Western point of view influenced non-Western people and their interactions with each other. In this historical context, Okakura\u27s idea of "Asia" was meant to be effective as a suggestion of reforming the cultural identity of non-West. But The Ideals of the East had another purpose with regard to Okakura\u27s special field of Japanese art. He put Japan in the position of "a museum of Asiatic civilisation" which preserved the essence of the artistic legacies of "Asia." And thus Japanese art acquired an aesthetic value that matched its Western counterpart. On the contrary, Okakura had to prove that Japanese art was not a mere epigone of China and India but had its own unique significance and originality. This book shows while Okakura located Japanese art within the stream of beauty of "Asia," his nationalism made him seek for a Japanese "spirit" that had continued throughout history from ancient times to modify "continental" styles and produce a "national" element in art. In Bengal, Okakura set himself this complicated task to create a monolithic cultural identity known as "Asia" and to universalize Japanese art while, at the same time, he sought to particularize it as a unique national culture

Book Reviews

Emi Hamana, Shakespeare Performances in Japan: Intercultural-Multi-cultural-Translingual. Yokohama: Shumpusha, 2019. Pp. 188.Li Jun, Popular Shakespeare in China: 1993-2008. Beijing: University of International Business and Economics Press, 2016. Pp. 199.Soji Iwasaki’s Japanese Translation of Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Revised edition. Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 2019. Pp. 242.

神秘劇をオペラ座へ : バルトークとバラージュの共同作品としての『青ひげ公の城』

学位の種別:課程博士University of Tokyo(東京大学