Bartók spent years listening to and transcribing nearly a thousand recordings and live performances of traditional Hungarian folk melodies for use in his own compositions.
Lebrecht Collection
The Hungarian Béla Bartók became one of the 20th century’s greatest and most original composers by going back to his nation’s folk music. His patient and sustained research in the field enabled him not only to stimulate international interest in traditional peasant music, but to use its idiom and its energy as the building blocks for his own highly individual style. In doing so, he not only created a national Hungarian style but also laid down a cornerstone of 20th-century music.
Bartók was born on March 25, 1881, in the small Hungarian town of Nagyszentmiklós (now in neighbouring Romania). The early death of his father, a talented amateur pianist and cellist, obliged his mother, another fine pianist, to support the family through teaching. Throughout the 1890s, she repeatedly uprooted the family in pursuit of ever better piano teachers for her precociously talented son. Despite long bouts of poor health and suffering from a skin rash possibly due to the adverse effects of smallpox vaccination, the young Bartók was able to practise the piano and begin writing his own compositions, including a programme piece Echo of Radegund (1891). He gave his first concert, as both pianist and composer, in his native town in 1892, performing the highly conventional but well-received The Course of the Danube.
Bartók spent years listening to and transcribing nearly a thousand recordings and live performances of traditional Hungarian folk melodies for use in his own compositions.
Lebrecht Collection
In 1899, Bartók won a place at the Budapest Academy of Music to study piano and composition. There he found a mentor and father figure in his piano teacher, István Thomán, himself a former pupil of Franz Liszt, who helped him out financially and introduced him to the celebrated musicians, composers, and society figures of the Hungarian capital. During these years, Bartók encountered two great influences: first, there was the work of his slightly older German contemporary Richard STRAUSS, whose symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra received its first performance in Budapest in 1902; second, there was Hungarian nationalism. Apart from the short-lived republic of 1849, Hungary had been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire since the early 18th century. At the turn of the 20th century, sentiment for independence, particularly among the urban intelligentsia, was at its most intense, and the promotion of a reclaimed Hungarian national culture, music included, was an important part of this movement. During this period, Bartók himself adopted national costume and opposed the everyday use of German spoken by his family. Both of these influences, as well as that of Liszt, are evident in the compositions of the period, notably in the symphonic poem Kossuth (1903), which was named for the leader of the Hungarian republic of 1849, and which aspires to Strauss’s vivid orchestral style.
Hungarian composers of the 19th century had frequently turned to folklike songs for inspiration. These songs, however, tended to be popular salon tunes played by gypsy orchestras. It was Bartók, together with Zoltán KODÁLY, who made if not the first then the most influential attempts to unearth and 1 catalogue the wealth of songs and dances that was 8 still part of the peasant tradition in the more remote reaches of the Hungarian countryside.
In 1904, Bartók spent several months in the spring and summer staying with his sister in her rural home in order to ready himself for concerts and to work on new compositions. It was here that he first heard, and wrote down, an authentic piece of Hungarian peasant music, sung by a local girl. The following year, he and his friend Kodaly, who had recently published his first book on folk music, made the first of what were to be annual journeys through Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, meeting peasant families and listening to them sing the old tunes that had come down through the generations. Sometimes he jotted these tunes down; sometimes he actually recorded them on an early type of phonograph. “As I went from village to village,” he later recalled, “I heard the true music of my race.” He even learned to play folk instruments, such as the hurdy-gurdy–a stringed instrument that instead of being bowed is sounded by means of a resined wooden wheel turned by a crank.
Both Bartók and Kodály were interested in how the folk songs–with their strong, complex rhythms and their use of the pentatonic (five-note) scale–could inform and enrich their own compositions. From 1906, Bartók began publishing his arrangements of folk songs, among them Hungarian Folksongs (1906) and For Children (1908–09). In 1907, Bartók was appointed Thoman’s successor at the Budapest Academy, holding a piano professorship. This secure position enabled him to study Hungarian folk music more freely. Over the years, however, Bartók’s primary motive in cataloguing folk songs became one of preservation instead of musical inspiration. As Hungary industrialised, and the countryside became depopulated, the survival of the indigenous music was increasingly threatened. By 1918, Bartók had collected over 3,500 Romanian, 3,000 Slovak, and 2,721 Hungarian folk pieces.
Bartók’s ambition was to create a distinctively Hungarian art music rooted in indigenous folk songs. But his view was at the same time much wider: “My real idea,” he wrote, “is the brotherhood of nations. I try to serve this idea in my music … and that is why I do not shut myself away from any influence, be the source Slovak, Romanian, Arab, or any other.” He was also strongly drawn to the developments in concert music throughout Europe: to the emotionally intense symphonies of Gustav MAHLER; to the modal harmonies of Claude DEBUSSY, in which he found parallels with folk music; to the lurid scenarios of such operas as Richard Strauss’s Salome] and to the dazzling virtuosity of Igor STRAVINSKY’S early ballet scores. For Bartók, folk music and other primitive forms provided a kind of justification for the experiments then taking place in music–for the movement away from diatonic (major-minor) harmonies and fixed rhythms toward more primitive scales and freer rhythms and time changes.
His first successful fusions of Hungarian folk and art musical influences were the String Quartet No. 1 (1908), the 14 Bagatelles (1908), Two Pictures (1910), and, most famously, the piano piece Allegro barbaro (1911), whose very name suggests its clashing harmonies and fierce rhythms. Bartók used folk and art styles to quite different effect in the one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), based on a bloody fairytale in which a young bride discovers the grim fate that has overtaken each of her husband’s previous wives. The libretto was taken in part from Paul DUKAS’S opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907), which was written by Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. In Bartók’s version, the pentatonic folklike themes associated with the murderous Duke Bluebeard are contrasted with the chromatic, Romantic music given to the heroine, Judith. The opera, which Bartók dedicated to his young wife and pupil, Marta Ziegler (whom he had married in 1909 and who had given birth to their son, Bela, in 1910), failed to win a national opera competition. He found the opera’s lack of initial success difficult to accept. It seemed to the patriotic composer as if his country were rejecting him, and, disheartened, he withdrew from the public eye, concentrating instead, almost exclusively, on his musicological studies.
Toward the end of World War I, Bartók returned to composition with renewed vigour. In 1917, he produced both the String Quartet No. 2, with its strong North African flavour, and the fairy-tale ballet The Wooden Prince, whose lush orchestration (including parts for the saxophone and xylophone) and light mood could not have been more different from Bluebeard’s Castle. The ballet’s success, coupled with the end of the war, helped Bartók to establish himself as an international figure. He visited Berlin, Paris, and London to promote his works, meeting numerous composers including Stravinsky and Erik SATIE, Maurice RAVEL, and Francis POULENC. In 1927 and 1928, Bartók went on a recital tour throughout America, completing the tour with the successful premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 1.
Renewed contact with his contemporaries was not without influence on his work. The masterpiece of the 1920s, the ballet suite The Miraculous Mandarin (piano score, 1919) is often labelled “expressionist” and its complex rhythms and textures come close to the 12-note experiments of Arnold SCHOENBERG and his “school.” Its premiere in Cologne, Germany, in 1926 caused an uproar among critics and audiences, and further performances there were banned. Village Scenes (1924) was composed directly under the influ-ence of Stravinsky. Between 1926 and 1939, he published the six-volume Mikrokosmos, which included 153 keyboard pieces ranging from easy to very difficult, and which were inspired by his son Peter’s earliest attempts to learn the piano. International fame also brought a wealth of commissions: the 1938 Contrasts, for example, was written for the American clarinettist Benny GOODMAN, and they later recorded the piece together in 1941.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, despite continued hostility to his music, Bartók’s fame and reputation grew steadily around the world. Nevertheless, in 1940, at age 59, he went into voluntary exile. A man of strong and uncompromising political as well as musical convictions, he had long disliked the right-wing dictatorship of Admiral Horthy and Hungary’s strengthening ties with Nazi Germany. Finally, in 1940, together with his second wife, Ditta Pasztory (herself a concert pianist whom he had married in 1923), he emigrated to the U.S.
It was a bold move. Bartók arrived in New York with very little money, speaking hardly any English, and with the symptoms of a disease that, although undiagnosed at the time, was probably a form of leukemia. Friends and admirers, however, rallied around, and he acquired a position as a visiting assistant working on the Parry Collection of Yugoslav folk music at Harvard University.
There was a final, concentrated burst of creative activity. In 1943, Sergey KOUSSEVITZKY, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned from him a Concerto for Orchestra: in this work, Bartók showed all his old flair for vivid orchestration, and it has since become one of the most popular works in the concert repertory. Early the following year, he wrote a Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin for the violinist Yehudi MENUHIN. He was working feverishly on his Piano Concerto No. 3 and on another commission for a Viola Concerto when he became terminally ill. He died in a New York hospital on September 26, 1945.
While Bartók was a fervent nationalist who was deeply attached to his country’s folk traditions, his aims and achievements went much further. “My true conviction” he wrote, “is the brotherhood of nations.” He lived and breathed the sometimes hauntingly beautiful, sometimes wild and barbaric, tunes, harmonies, and rhythms of Hungarian folk song, until they became part of his own international language. Ironically, it was the antiquity of so much of this music that made Bartók’s own compositions sound so alien to its early listeners. A composer of genius, he is also one who has had no real imitators.
Alan Blackwood
SEE ALSO:
BALLET AND MODERN DANCE MUSIC; CHAMBER MUSIC; EXPRESSIONISM IN MUSIC; FOLK MUSIC; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
FURTHER READING
Antokioletz, Elliott. The Music of Béla Bartók (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984);
Wilson, Paul. The Music of Béla Bartók (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992);
Yeomans, David. Bartók for Piano (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Ballets: The Miraculous Mandarin; The Wooden Prince.
Chamber music: Contrasts, for violin, piano, and clarinet; Six String Quartets; Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; Two Sonatas for Violin and Piano.
Opera: Bluebeard’s Castle.
Orchestral music: Concerto for Orchestra; Dance Suite; Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta; Three Piano Concertos; Two Pictures; Two Portraits; Two Violin Concertos.
Piano music: Allegro barbaro;
Mikrokosmos, Vols. 1–6.