73 (BB 82), is a one act pantomime ballet composed by Béla Bartók between 1918 and 1924, and based on the 1916 story by Melchior Lengyel.

[1] Premiered on 27 November 1926 conducted by Eugen Szenkar at the Cologne Opera, Germany, it caused a scandal and was subsequently banned on moral grounds.

[2][3][4] Although more successful at its Prague premiere, it was generally performed during the rest of Bartók's life in the form of a concert suite, which preserves about two-thirds of the original pantomime's music.

After an orchestral introduction depicting the chaos of the big city, the action begins in a room belonging to three tramps.

The lamp falls, plunging the room into darkness, and the Mandarin's body begins to glow with an eerie blue-green light.

The violins have rapidly rising and falling, wave-like scales over the very unusual interval of an augmented octave.

The music for the shy young man is a slow dance in 54, also interrupted by the 68 minor second as the tramps throw him out.

When the Mandarin enters the room, the trombones and tuba play downward glissandos, again spanning a minor third.

As the tramps hang the Mandarin from the lamp, the texture is blurred with glissandi on trombones, timpani, piano and cellos.

The glowing body of the Mandarin is represented by the entry of a chorus singing wordlessly, once again in the interval of a minor third.

The climax, after the girl embraces the Mandarin, is a theme given out fortissimo by the low brass against minor-second tremolos in the woodwinds.

As the Mandarin begins to bleed, the downward minor-third glissando heard at his entry is echoed in the trombone, contrabassoon and low strings.

Other special effects include fluttertonguing in the flutes; muting the brasses and strings, a cymbal roll a deux (a cymbal crash followed by scraping the plates together); playing the bass drum with the wooden part of a timpani mallet; a roll on the gong; rolled timpani glissandi; string harmonics; col legno and sul ponticello playing in the strings; scordatura in the cellos; and, at one point, quarter-tones in the violins.