Cover: Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók’s greatness may have been overshadowed by his modesty and by his more gregarious and outgoing contemporaries but, argues Jessica Duchen, the Hungarian’s staggering talent rose above them all
The Hungarian composer’s extraordinary musical gifts and fertile imagination were unchallenged during the 20th century, argues Jessica Duchen
Outside South Kensington tube station stands a bronze statue of a slender, diminutive man in overcoat and hat. How Bartók became one of few composers honoured with a London statue deserves a story to itself, but here he is, the self-effacing figure whose impact on the musical world proved him a giant.
As we approach the 75th anniversary of his death, this most genuine, direct and original of composers remains somewhat in the shadow of Igor Stravinsky (who was one year his junior). That could be partly because so few western musicologists can deal with Bartók’s native Hungarian; and Stravinsky’s larger-thanlife personality and sizeable assemblage of supporters also contributed to his dominant presence.
Yet is it perhaps Bartók who was the lifelong original, his tales of the musically unexpected evolving, maturing and growing more profound the better we know them? This is the perfect time to reassess his position in the annals of 20th-century music. The greatest composer of his day? You decide. I already have.
The pianist
Bartók is not often considered amid the golden-age composer-pianists. Perhaps he should be. His performing career accounted for much of his early fame, taking him on high-profile international concert tours and sparking much music that he wrote to perform himself.
He entered the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest in 1899, preferring to go to the Hungarian capital rather than Vienna. Heading there from Pressburg – where he and his mother had lived since his father’s early death – he studied with István Thomán, a pupil of Liszt. On Thomán’s retirement in 1907, Bartók took over his post. Later, his younger son Peter (from his second marriage) recalled him referring to the Academy as ‘the Awful Place’. He hated teaching, but as his students included
Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti, György Sándor and Lili Kraus, he must have been doing something right.
Any pianist facing, for instance, his Piano Concerto No. 1 or the piano part of his Violin Sonata No. 1 could have no doubt of his technical abilities. But listen to his recordings and a surprise might lie in store. It is often noted that Bartók treated the piano as a percussion instrument – sadly, this leads students to bash his music, and their pianos, into the ground. Yet the striking thing (no pun intended) is how unpercussive Bartók’s own sound is. His tone is open, clear and singing – the closest I’ve heard to it today is his compatriot András Schiff – and the complex textures emerge with clarity, airiness and infinite shades of sensitivity. A review in The Daily Dispatch of his performance in Manchester in 1904 praised ‘a very admirable technique, a beautiful, smooth touch and, best of all, great expressive powers’.
The Piano Concerto No. 1 was part of a rush of music that Bartók composed after several despondent years following some negative reviews, the impact of World War I and the Treaty of Trianon, all of which affected him deeply. The latter had shaved away so much of Hungary’s territory that the places where he had been born and raised were no longer part of his homeland: the first, Nagyszentmiklós, was ceded to Romania, while Pressburg became Bratislava in Slovakia.
THE MUSIC:
Piano Concerto No. 1
The Concerto was written in 1926 and premiered the following year in Frankfurt. Bartók was the soloist; Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted. The planned American premiere at Carnegie Hall had to be cancelled due to lack of rehearsal time – and the Concerto needs as much rehearsal as possible, given its impetuous rhythmic drive and Grand Prix changes of gear. The first movement is propulsive and angular, percussive enough for any taste. The second exemplifies his ‘night music’ style – mysterious, dusky and minutely detailed, as if evoking the sounds of nature after dark; the piano duets with the percussion and timpani as if in the ghosts of a shattered military march and a grotesque waltz. The finale embraces a stamping, freewheeling earthiness that requires from its soloist as much delicacy and exactitude as it does muscle power. Recommended recording: Jean-efflam Bavouzet (piano); BBC Philharmonic/ Gianandrea Noseda (Chandos CHAN10610)
Bluebeard is a work of profound psychological and musical power
The alternative Bartók
Bartók was often aligned with cultural and philosophical trends that knew no geographic boundaries. He took on board theories of Nietszche regarding spiritual indifference over worldly matters, was greatly in favour of equality for women and developed a healthy scepticism about religion. His interest in Symbolism shines through his stage works, notably The Wooden Prince, The Miraculous Mandarin and, above all, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, his only opera.
Its librettist, Béla Balázs, was an influential Symbolist poet and playwright who left Hungary after Béla Kun’s shortlived regime fell in 1919; later, entering the film world, he worked in 1932 with Leni Riefenstahl on The Blue Light.
He also provided Bartók with the complex, fantastical scenario for the ballet The Wooden Prince.
We can thank him, too, for an unforgettable image of Bartók pursuing another unlikely-sounding trend: naturism. The two families, together with the Kodálys, stayed in 1911 in a somewhat spartan nudist colony at Waidberg in the north of Switzerland: Balázs observed the composer working on the score of Bluebeard’s Castle in the solarium, clad only in sunglasses.
‘A most moving and wonderful man,’ the poet commented. ‘He possesses an incredible magical dignity… His figure, face, movements are like a rococo prince’s, and yet there is a certain titanic dignity about him. A rococo titan!’
THE MUSIC:
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
The opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle – written in 1911, but premiered only in 1918 – is a work of profound musical, mythical and psychological power. An hour long, it is scored for two singers and large orchestra. Judith, Bluebeard’s bride, insists that he opens seven locked doors in his castle, where the walls seem to weep. Each takes her deeper into his world, oozing with blood and tears, splendour and horror. Behind the final door she expects to find the slaughtered bodies of his former wives; but they are still alive. Each is assigned a different time of day. Judith becomes the Bride of Night. Recommended recording:
Elena Zhidkova (Judith), Willard White (Bluebeard); London Symphony Orchestra/valery Gergiev (LSO Live LSO0685)
The collector
Bartók considered himself as much an ethnomusicological researcher as a composer and performer. From 1908 he made regular field trips to rural areas of Hungary, together with his colleague and friend Zoltán Kodály, seeking peasant
Capturing culture
How Bartók collected folk songs
Over 12 years Bartók collected 10,000 folk melodies. He was a patriotic Hungarian, but although most of those melodies were gathered in what was known until the post-ww1 carve-up as ‘Hungary’, it’s more accurate to describe them as Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Transylvanian – they were the nationalities into which the onceproud Hungarian state was humiliatingly divided. The first song Bartók collected came from a Transylvanian housemaid he overheard, and when he teamed up with a fellow student named Zoltán Kodály he established a collecting strategy from which he never deviated.
He would stay with friends or family and draw on their local connections; he was only interested in music from villages and his typical informants were swineherds, shepherds and servants, often lubricated with alcohol. He was suspicious of itinerant pedlars, soldiers and the educated – his criterion was local authenticity, and he mistrusted songs collected from schools or radio.
He dropped his initial interest in
Gypsy ‘national’ music because he believed that was the fruit of aristocratic patronage; genuinely Gypsy music he loved, but the ‘Hungarian Gypsy’ melodies purveyed by Liszt and Brahms he dismissed as ‘pseudo-folk’. His goal was to find the ancient peasant music of Hungary: this he described as tonal, possessing ‘exquisite reserve’, ‘impressive melancholy’ and ‘a perfect purity of style’. This music, he believed, hailed from Central Asia – an arresting hypothesis yet to be disproved. communities where someone might be willing to sing them the local songs. These they recorded on an Edison phonograph and then transcribed. The collection finally ran to more than 10,000 songs. Bartók in 1913 extended similar research to Algeria and much later, in 1936, to Turkey. When in 1934 he was offered a post on the folk-music subcomittee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, it proved a fine way to escape his loathed duties as piano professor.
His interest in folksong gave him common ground with composers of other nations, not least England. A warm friendship sprang up when he met Delius in Zurich in 1910 – Bartók told him, ‘I have never before met anyone to whom from the very first I could feel so close.’ About ten years later he developed a friendship via Delius with Philip Heseltine, aka
Peter Warlock, who, hearing of Bartók’s straitened circumstances, was keen to help organise a concert tour for him in Britain. Thus in 1922 Bartók stayed with his Hungarian friends in Chelsea, the violinist Jelly d’arányi and her sister Emilia Hawtrey. On one occasion he took a ride in the sidecar of Warlock’s motorbike, which broke down, leaving the unlikely duo stranded.
Bartók not only collected folksong. Evincing a lifelong passion for nature, he amassed specimens of insects just as meticulously. Once Peter, travelling in Panama, captured, preserved and posted to his father a gigantic local beetle; Bartók wrote to thank him, dubbing the creature the ‘bogarone’ (mixing the Hungarian word for beetle, bogár, with the Italian enlarging suffix). The insect world is never far away from Bartók’s atmospheric ‘night music’. His passion for collecting seems to blend two apparently disparate strands of his work: the folk songs and the night music. THE MUSIC:
Romanian Folk Dances
Besides absorbing folk music into the fabric of his musical language, Bartók created numerous concert versions of folksongs, some for solo singer with piano, others for choir, still more as suites of instrumental pieces. The most celebrated are the Romanian Folk Dances (1915), which exist in a plethora of arrangements, notably the transcriptions for violin and piano by Zoltán Szelély. This popular collection seems to represent an ideal synthesis of folk and art music. Recommended recording: Zoltán Kocsis (piano)
(Decca 478 2364)
Bartók in love
In an intriguing repetitive pattern, Bartók fell intensely in love with starry violinists, only to marry very young piano students soon afterwards.
It was the violinist Stefi Geyer who sparked his Violin Concerto No. 1 into existence. Bartók became infatuated with her in 1907, when she was not quite 18; she does not appear to have returned his feelings, and a lengthy letter he wrote explaining his loss of faith to this devoutly Christian girl may not have helped (‘If I ever crossed myself it would signify “In the name of Nature, Art and Science…”’, he wrote). In November 1909 he married Márta Ziegler, who was 16 at the time. His
friendship with Geyer nevertheless proved lasting: Peter describes a family holiday in 1938 in Silvaplana, Switzerland, shared with Geyer and her daughter.
Márta ‘nearly jumped out of her skin’ when after several years of composing little beyond folk song arrangements, Bartók started in autumn 1921 to write a sonata for Jelly d’arányi. A bedazzlement with this remarkable artist followed when the pair toured the resulting work to Paris. D’arányi emphatically did not reciprocate; she and her eldest sister Adila Fachiri (for whom Bartók had nursed another passion many years earlier) were not fond of either his music or what they regarded as his lack of humour. Ultimately this episode must have signalled that all was not well at home. In summer 1923 Bartók and Márta divorced. Two months later he married Ditta Pásztory, who was 19 to his 42.
Recent researchers have suggested that Bartók may have had Asperger syndrome, which might account not only for the apparent emotional inexpressiveness of which the d’arányi sisters complained, but also could have contributed to his hypersensitivity to noise and aromas. A pair of ivory earplugs proved his constant companion.
THE MUSIC:
Violin Concerto No. 1
The First Violin Concerto was written for Stefi Geyer – who rejected it, along with its composer. Composed between 1907 and ’08, it lay unpublished until 1956; she had kept the manuscript, but never played the work. She bequeathed it to the conductor Paul Sacher, long a champion of Bartók’s, who saw about its resuscitation more than a decade after the composer’s demise. The Concerto is in two movements, the traditional form of a Hungarian rhapsody, with lassù (slow) and friss (fast) sections. The first movement Bartók reused as the first of his Two Portraits for violin and piano – essentially it was a soulful musical portrait of Geyer. ‘The first movement is my confession to you,’ he wrote to her.
Recommended recording:
Barnabás Kelemen (violin); Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra/
Zoltán Kocsis (Hungaroton HSACD32509)
Influences and experiments
Bartók possessed one of the most recognisable musical voices of his time, yet in terms of style he never stood still. Just as his passion for collecting showed continual investigation, his musical curiosity never confined him to one approach. His earliest success, the tone poem Kossuth, sounds a step away from Liszt, Brahms and Strauss. Debussy, however, was virtually a kindred soul: Bartók was intrigued to find in the French composer’s works pentatonic scales like his own, if derived from very different sources. Lovers of Delius will glean some joy from the perfectly verifiable idea that Bartók was influenced by him as well.
Few composers of that time, meanwhile, could be unaffected by serialism. With typical scepticism, Bartók explored elements of its potential in, for instance, the Suite for Piano, Op. 14 and later in the Violin Concerto No. 2, in which he ‘wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all 12 tones and still remain tonal’. Still, he never fully adopted it as a modus operandi.
As for Stravinsky, he is an undeniable influence, evident in the driving