In Bluebeard's Castle (1911), The Wooden Prince (1916/17), The Miraculous Mandarin (1919/24, rev. 1931) and Cantata Profana (1930), Bartók engaged scenarios featuring either overtly grotesque bodies or closely related transformations and violations of the body. In a number of instrumental works he also overtly engaged grotesque satirical strategies, sometimes - as in Two Portraits : 'Ideal' and 'Grotesque' - indicating this in the title. Julie Brown argues that Bartók's concerns with stylistic hybridity (high-low, East-West, tonalatonal-modal), the body, and the grotesque are interconnected. While Bartók developed each interest in highly individual ways, and did so separately to a considerable extent, the three concerns remained conceptually interlinked. All three were throughly implicated in cultural constructions of the Modern during the period in which Bartók was composing

Bartók and the nineteenth-century grotesque -- Bartók and the body -- The mandarins miraculous body : expressly for our vexation? -- The third string quartet as grotesque -- Conclusion and coda : on Adorno and the grotesque