1. 1881–1903.

At the time of Bartók’s birth, Nagyszentmiklós was part of the northern end of the

ethnically diverse southern Hungarian province of Torontál. There, his father, also

Béla Bartók (1855–88), was headmaster of an agricultural school; his mother,

Paula Voit (1857–1939), was a teacher. Both parents were keen amateur

musicians, and early encouraged the young Béla’s musical development with

dance pieces, and then with drumming. By the age of four he was able to play

some 40 songs on the piano, and at five he started piano lessons with his mother.

Impressions of a summer visit to Radegund, Austria, in 1887 led to one of his first

compositions, Radegundi visszhang (‘Echo of Radegund’, 1891). At the age of

seven Bartók was tested as having perfect pitch.

The earlier years of Bartók’s schooling were unsettled. Not only was he very shy,

the supposed result of confinement because of a persistent rash during his first five

years, but the premature death of his father in 1888 also caused the family to move

frequently in the following six years. Paula Bartók sought teaching positions in

provincial towns which were suitably equipped for the broader education of her

son and daughter, Elza (1885–1955). A move to Nagyszöllős (now Vinogradov,

Ukraine) in 1889 was followed by time in Nagyvárad (now Oradea, Romania)

during 1891–2, and in the larger city of Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) during

1892–3. Finally, after eight months in Beszterce (now Bistriţa, Romania), where

Bartók attended a German-language grammar school, the family was in April 1894

able to settle in Pozsony.

Despite these many moves and the periodic disruptions to Bartók’s general

education, his musical talents were rapidly developing. His first compositions,

from the early 1890s, were frequently dance pieces – waltzes, ländlers, mazurkas,

and, especially, polkas which he often named after friends or family members.

Also among his first band of 31 piano compositions (1890–94) were occasional

programmatic works, such as the ten-part A Duna folyása (‘The Course of the

Danube’, 1890–94) or A budapesti tornaverseny (‘Gymnastic Contest in

Budapest’, 1890), and some early attempts in sonatina and theme-and-variation

forms. Bartók’s pianistic dexterity rapidly increased during the early 1890s, and on

1 May 1892 he made his first public appearance, in Nagyszöllős, presenting a

programme of works by Grünfeld, Raff and Beethoven, and his own The Course of

the Danube.

At the Catholic Gymnasium in Pozsony, Bartók was soon appointed chapel

organist, as successor to Ernő Dohnányi, and gained more specialized musical

tuition from László Erkel and later Anton Hyrtl. During the school’s celebrations

of the Hungarian millennium in 1896 Bartók provided the piano accompaniment to

Kornél Ábrányi’s melodrama Rákóczi, and also played the piano in the school

orchestra’s rendition of the ‘Rákóczi’ March. In Pozsony he became increasingly

involved in the playing and composing of chamber music, with a first attempt, in

1895, at a sonata for violin and piano, in C minor (BB6); a string quartet (now lost)

in C minor in 1896; and a piano quintet in C (also lost) in 1897. During these

years, as he experienced the city’s concerts and occasional operas, his

compositional style and harmonic vocabulary broadened from Classical to early

Romantic models. By 1898, with two remarkably mature chamber works, the

Piano Quartet in C minor BB13 and String Quartet in F major BB17, the imprints of

Brahms and Schumann are strongly felt.

Bartók’s health was never robust; a long list of childhood diseases culminated in

February 1899 with the start of serious lung problems, which caused him to devote

many months to recuperation over the coming two years. During December 1898

and January 1899, nonetheless, he undertook auditions at the Vienna Conservatory

and the Budapest Academy of Music, both of which were keen to admit him.

Despite his fragile condition, Bartók also managed to matriculate in June 1899

with three excellent results (probably in mathematics, physics, scripture) and four

good ones (Hungarian, Latin, Greek, German).

Since the ‘Compromise’ of 1867, which had established the Austro-Hungarian

monarchy, Budapest had grown rapidly. By the turn of the century it had become a

vibrant centre of Hungarian culture, and, with a population of three-quarters of a

million, the sixth largest city in Europe. In 1875 an Academy of Music had been

established there, with Liszt as its first president. Notwithstanding Vienna’s

illustrious musical reputation, an offered scholarship and Pozsony’s proximity to

the Austrian capital, Bartók decided to study in Budapest with the same professors

who had taught Dohnányi: Thomán, a pupil of Liszt, for piano; Koessler, a pupil of

Rheinberger, for composition. On entering the Academy in September 1899, he

was granted advanced standing in both subjects.

In Budapest Bartók keenly attended the Opera and the Philharmonic, and started to

look beyond chamber music models in his compositions. Earlier in 1899, while

still living in Pozsony, he had composed a song for soprano and orchestra,

Tiefblaue Veilchen BB18. Now, along with his Academy studies in harmony and

counterpoint, he engaged in orchestration exercises and wrote short pieces for

orchestra. During 1900–1 these included a Valcer (BB19/3) and a Scherzo in B

(BB19/4). From 1899 until early 1902, however, Bartók’s compositional zeal

ebbed. He found Koessler a thorough and traditional if uninspiring teacher, who

only raised a compositional block in him. Bartók’s composition exercises of this

time were dutiful but unremarkable, with little suggestion of his later genius. His

growing knowledge of the works of Wagner and Liszt did not yet provide a strong

stimulus for his own writing.

‘From this stagnation I was roused as by a lightning stroke by the first

performance in Budapest of Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902’, Bartók wrote in his

autobiography of 1921. Richard Strauss’s music offered to Bartók some interim

compositional solutions. In 1902 he drafted in piano short score a four-movement

Symphony in E (BB25), which merged a Straussian thematic and motivic

technique with stylistic gestures of Liszt and popular nationalist rhythmic and

melodic turns. He was still dissatisfied with this new amalgam of elements, and

only fully orchestrated the third movement, a Scherzo. His only other substantial

work of 1902, the Four Songs BB24, set texts of folk-like poetry by Lajos Pósa in a

style drawn substantially from the clichés of popular art-song.

While Bartók’s compositional development had been sluggish, he had been

attracting attention as a pianist. At his first public Academy concert, on 21 October

1901, he performed Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor. A critic from the Budapesti

Napló reported that Bartók ‘thunders around on the piano like a little Jupiter. In

fact, no piano student at the Academy today has a greater chance of following in

Dohnányi’s tracks than he’. That was, indeed, Bartók’s aim. He remained close to

his elder townsman through his later years at the Academy, and during the summer

of 1903 took masterclasses with Dohnányi in Gmunden. Bartók gained further

pianistic notice in late 1902, with private performances of his own piano

transcription of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, followed by its successful performance

at a Tonkünstlerverein concert in Vienna during January 1903. This encouraged

Hanslick to comment: ‘So, he must be a genius of a musician at any rate, but it is a

pity that he goes in for Strauss’, a sentiment echoed by Koessler. Bartók’s

reputation as a pianist was further enhanced by a brilliant final Academy

examination performance of Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole on 25 May 1903.

2. 1903–8.

Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben provided Bartók with both the style and the structure

for his next composition, Kossuth BB31, a ten-section symphonic poem which

glorified Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the abortive Hungarian War of Independence

from Austria in 1848–9. Bartók wrote Kossuth between April and August 1903,

another period of nationalistic fervour concerned with the degree of independence

of the Hungarian army. An irony, not lost on Bartók himself, was that this

intensely patriotic work relied so heavily upon Strauss’s Germanic idiom.

Béla Bartók, aged 22

Budapest Bartók Achives

Kossuth and Bartók’s rendition of Ein Heldenleben were central to the launching

of his career as a pianist-composer. Hans Richter, an early promoter also of

Dohnányi, scheduled the work with his Hallé Orchestra in Manchester during

February 1904, and provided opportunities for Bartók as a pianist. Meanwhile,

during 1903 Bartók had been invited back to Vienna as soloist in Beethoven’s

‘Emperor’ Concerto, while the sizeable audience at Bartók’s Berlin début on 14

December 1903, including Busoni and, at rehearsal, Nikisch, owed much to

Godowsky’s reports of Bartók’s performing and compositional feats that year.

From 1903 until 1906 Bartók pursued an itinerant life, following performing or

compositional opportunities as they presented themselves. There were substantial

residencies in Vienna, Berlin and Pozsony, as well as Budapest, and he spent

August and September 1905 in Paris, where he participated unsuccessfully in the

Rubinstein competition both as composer (where no award was made) and pianist

(where Backhaus gained the prize). However, despite a two-month tour of Spain

and Portugal in 1906 with the Hungarian violinist Ferenc Vecsey, Bartók’s

international performing career had effectively stalled by this point, and it was

fortuitous that he was invited to replace Thomán on the piano staff of the Budapest

Academy late the same year. He became tenured in 1909 and remained at the

Academy (which in 1925 was renamed the Liszt Academy) until 1934. During

1907–9 Bartók all but gave up performing, although he played very occasionally in

Academy concerts. One exception was his only appearance as a conductor, with

the Berlin PO on 2 January 1909, when he directed a movement of his Second

Suite.

Meanwhile, Bartók had begun to develop an enduring interest in peasant music.

He realized that his compositional style still lacked originality and unity. His first

two opus-numbered works, the Rhapsody for piano and Scherzo for piano and

orchestra, for example, are ungainly stylistic and structural amalgams of Brahms,

Strauss and Liszt, together with Hungarian identifiers, drawn either from patriotic

compositions of Liszt, Mihály Mosonyi and Ferenc Erkel, or from stylized

verbunkos and csárdás dances, popular art-songs or gypsy embellishing figures.

Bartók was, however, yearning for a style which was autochthonously Hungarian –

to its core, not just in its accoutrements. During May to November 1904 (except

for some weeks at Bayreuth) he had stayed at the northern Hungarian resort of

Gerlice Puszta (now Ratkó, Slovakia), where he split his time between piano

practice and composition, finishing his Piano Quintet BB33, and writing the

Rhapsody and Scherzo (originally titled Burlesque), both intended as showpieces

for his forthcoming concerts. There he heard a Transylvanian-born maid, Lidi

Dósa, singing in an adjacent room, and he noted down her songs. He did not yet

appreciate the exact boundary between folksong and popular art-song, nor the

different classes of Hungarian peasant music, but Dósa’s songs had inspired a new

direction in Bartók’s thinking, as he wrote to his sister in December 1904: ‘Now I

have a new plan: to collect the finest Hungarian folksongs and to raise them,

adding the best possible piano accompaniments, to the level of art-song.’ The first,

tentative fruits of this intention were his publication in February 1905 of his setting

of a Székely (Transylvanian) song, Piros alma (‘Red Apple’) BB34, and a

collection of settings of four folksongs (BB37), the second of which Bartók

performed as a piano solo in the Rubinstein competition. In these earliest settings

Bartók’s piano accompaniments still retain many Romantic flourishes, but already

show a tendency towards writing in simple block chords and a use of rhythm

which shadows rather than complements the melody. Yet Bartók was still some

way from appreciating the full potential of folk music for creating a new home-

grown style in his compositions. His Suite no.1 op.3 for orchestra (1905), despite

his claim regarding its ‘Hungarianness’, self-consciously uses four-square

‘international’ thematic material within a five-movement cyclic structure, with

frequent resort to Strauss in its orchestration. The Second Suite op.4 for small

orchestra (originally Serenade), starts to show a way forward. While its first three

movements, written in 1905, cling to national Romantic tenets, with a strong

Lisztian influence in the second movement, its fourth and final movement,

composed in 1907, commences with a short, pentatonic tune, and unveils a stark,

spare texture, which he would develop in succeeding compositions.

On 18 March 1905 Bartók met Kodály, one year his junior, at the Budapest home

of Emma Gruber (later Kodály’s wife). Like Bartók, Kodály had studied

composition under Koessler; he was also taking a teaching diploma, and a year

later completed a doctoral dissertation on the stanzaic structure of Hungarian

folksong. So began an enduring artistic, scholarly and personal relationship, which

sometimes rivalled that of the Schoenberg–Webern–Berg school in intensity but

lacked its master-student characteristics. Kodály held the ethnological knowledge,

which Bartók for all his enthusiasm then lacked. Bartók had more practical

musical skills and phenomenal aural capacities. They soon found themselves

teaching colleagues at the Academy of Music, collaborators in many

ethnomusicological projects, and the frankest critics of each other’s compositions.

In March 1906 Bartók and Kodály issued a joint ‘appeal to the Hungarian people’

to support ‘a complete collection of folksongs, gathered with scholarly exactitude’,

so setting a goal which remained far from realized even at Kodály’s death in 1967.

Their appeal warned that the influx of ‘light music’ and many ‘imitation

folksongs’ would render Hungarian traditional music extinct within a few decades.

They called for subscribers to a collection of simple settings for voice and piano of

20 songs (BB42), collected by Béla Vikár and themselves, with the first ten

arranged by Bartók and the remainder by Kodály. This collection appeared in

December 1906, but drew a scant response from the Hungarian public. Bartók,

already feeling alienated from the ‘rootless’ Germans and Jews so prominent in

Budapest’s musical life, also now strongly resented the apeing of Western popular

culture by the ethnic Hungarian aristocracy and middle class, as well as the

undying urban popularity of the gypsy bands. The rural peasants, however, he

came to idealize as the conveyors of the pure musical instincts of the nation. Their

song was an unauthored ‘natural phenomenon’, with the potential of reforming the

nation’s musical life, and also of reforming his own musical approach. While

Kodály allowed his attention to encompass broader literary and historical aspects

of Hungarian musical folklore, Bartók’s interests tended to be more strictly

musical and class-related. Hence, he soon found himself becoming interested in

the characteristics of the peasant music of the many ethnic minorities living within

the Hungarian section of the Empire. As early as 1906 he started to collect Slovak

folk music, followed in 1908 by Romanian, and he later collected much smaller

numbers of Ruthenian, Serbian and Bulgarian tunes. His interest in the origins of

the Hungarians even led him to plan trips further east, to the Csángó people in

Moldavia and to the Chuvash and Tartar peoples living along the Volga River,

although World War I banished all hope of such trips. He became fascinated not

just with the transcription, analysis and classification of the many tunes he

collected, but also with the comparisons between these different peasant musics

and their dialects.

Ever since hearing Lidi Dósa’s singing in 1904 Bartók had wanted to travel to her

homeland, Transylvania, the heartland of the Székely people in the far east of the

Empire. His collecting trip to the Transylvanian province of Csík during July and

August 1907, with a local assistant and two phonographs, proved a revelation.

There, among the older people, he found many examples of anhemitonic (lacking

semitones) pentatonic tunes and came to realize the pentatonic basis of much of

the oldest stratum of Hungarian folk music. As Bartók collected and analyzed

more Hungarian tunes he started to distinguish old-style and new-style melodies:

the old most characterized by a parlando, poco rubato performance style, in

ecclesiastical (commonly Aeolian or Dorian) or pentatonic modes, and tending to

non-architectonic forms (ABCD, ABBC, for instance); the new performed tempo

giusto, favouring Aeolian or major modes, and generally with architectonic forms

(ABBA, AABA, for instance). Finally, he came to recognize a large class of

‘heterogeneous’ songs, showing some degree of foreign influence. In a dictionary

article on Hungarian music of 1935 (Révai nagy lexicona) Bartók determined the

percentages of these three classes of Hungarian peasant music as 9% old, 30% new

and 61% heterogeneous.

Bartók’s Transylvanian tour of 1907 provided him with final proof that the

renewal of his own style could be based on folk music. Folk music was not just a

fertile field for arrangements, but also introduced a wealth of melodic, rhythmic,

textural and formal models which might creatively be transformed, or transcended,

in original composition. While still travelling in Transylvania he worked on the

fourth movement of his Second Suite, with its pentatonic melody. Before the year

was out he completed settings of three Csík folksongs, Gyergyóból (‘From

Gyergyó’) BB45a for recorder and piano, and the first five of his Nyolc magyar

népdal (‘Eight Hungarian Folksongs’) BB47 for voice and piano. Of these latter,

three are parlando rubato with tales of sadness – the betrayed lover, the unhappily

married woman, farewell – while the two tempo giusto songs are humorous.

When in Transylvania Bartók had also been working upon his own work of love,

the Violin Concerto BB48a, written for and about his new infatuation, the violinist

Stefi Geyer. Between passionate outpourings to her in a series of intimate letters

about the meaning of life, religion and love, he was drafting a work of three

movements, with the first depicting the ‘idealized Stefi Geyer, celestial and

inward’, the second as ‘cheerful, witty, amusing’, and the third as ‘indifferent, cool

and silent’. One ascending line of 3rds, D–F –A–C , the so-called ‘Geyer’ (or

‘Stefi’) motif, dominates the first movement, while a jagged permutation of

descending direction characterizes the second. Bartók decided not to develop the

‘hateful’ third movement, leaving an unconventional two-movement fantasy-like

composition, completed on 5 February 1908, just one week before Geyer

terminated the relationship. When she chose not to play it, and other violinists

showed little interest, Bartók combined the first movement with an orchestrated

version of the last of his Fourteen Bagatelles, also based on the ‘Geyer’ motif, to

create the Két portré (‘Two Portraits’) op.5. The two movements were titled ‘one

ideal’ and ‘one grotesque’.

3. 1908–14.

The many piano pieces of 1908–11 show Bartók’s increasing confidence in using

folk materials, as well as a growing emphasis upon grotesquerie, often in

association with the ‘Geyer’ motif. Indeed, after this early Violin Concerto none of

his works escapes a strong folk influence. In his later lecture ‘The Relation

between Contemporary Hungarian Art Music and Folk Music’ (1941, in Béla

Bartók Essays, 348–53), Bartók exemplified three types of arrangement: where the

folk melody is mounted like a jewel (ex.1), where melody and accompaniment are

almost equal in importance, and where the folk melody is a kind of inspirational

‘motto’ to be creatively developed (ex.2). In original compositions folk elements

can be found either in the general spirit of the style, or in specific imitational

features; Bartók gave Este a székelyeknél (‘Evening in Transylvania’) from his Ten

Easy Pieces as an example which uses such imitation (ex.3).

Ex.1 Romanian Folk Dances (1915), movt 3, 1–8

Ex.2 Improvisations op.20 (1920), movt 7, 29–33

Ex.3 Ten Easy Pieces (1908), ‘Evening in Transylvania’, 30–1

The Fourteen Bagatelles op.6 (1908) drew from Busoni the comment ‘at last

something truly new’. In these short pieces, of varying programmatic and abstract

qualities, Bartók pioneered his new style of piano writing, devoid of the

unessential embellishments and rippling excesses of late-Romantic piano

figuration. The interval of the 7th, first found as a consonance in Bartók’s music at

the conclusion of the Second Suite’s third movement, now assumed a role more

equal to the 3rd and 5th, akin to its significance in pentatonic structures. Any sense

of functional harmony is persistently undermined by the use of ostinato figures

(nos.2, 3, 5, 10, 13), quasi-bitonal writing (nos.1, 13), streams of parallel 5ths and

7ths (no.4), of 4ths (no.11), of tritones (no.8), or of piled-up 3rds (nos.7, 9, 10). In

pieces where dominant–tonic relations are invoked, they are soon subverted by

dissonance (no.10) or mocked, as in the final Valse ‘Ma mie qui danse’ (no.14).

Two of the pieces directly quote folksongs, an old Hungarian tune (no.4) and a

Slovak song (no.5). ‘Elle est morte’ (no.13), written on the day Bartók received

Geyer’s letter ending their relationship, mercilessly distorts features of her motif,

until near the close it emerges in ‘pure’ form, at which point Bartók has written in

the score ‘meghalt’ (‘she is dead’). The influence of Debussy, about whose works

Bartók had recently learnt from Kodály, also lies behind several of the pieces,

notably in the use of parallel chords, and in no.3, with its unchanging semitonal

ostinato. Some other features, such as the use of 4th chords, could have been

spurred either by Bartók’s recent folk-music experiences or by his knowledge of

the latest trends of his Western contemporaries. As a whole the Fourteen

Bagatelles laid down a blueprint both for Bartók’s new musical language and his

new, leaner approach to keyboard writing.

Although Breitkopf & Härtel rejected Busoni’s recommendation of Bartók’s op.6

for publication, on the grounds that they were ‘too difficult and too modern for the

public’, the pieces were soon accepted by the Budapest firm Károly Rozsnyai,

which had already in March 1908 contracted Bartók to provide an educational

edition of J.S. Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier – the first of many historic

editions which Bartók produced – and agreed to publish his next composition, the

Ten Easy Pieces BB51 (1908). Rozsnyai also published Bartók’s first large

collection of folksong arrangements, Gyermekeknek (‘For Children’) BB53 (1908–

10), which comprised 42 Slovak and 43 Hungarian tunes. (Two of the Hungarian

settings were actually by Emma Gruber, and were omitted, along with four other

settings, in Bartók’s revision of 1943.) Bartók’s aim in the series was to acquaint

young pianists with ‘the simple and non-Romantic beauties of folk music’. In other

piano works of the 1908–11 period, such as the Két elégia (‘Two Elegies’) op.8b,

he did sometimes return to the elaboration and stylized emotion of his earlier

music. The Három burleszk (‘Three Burlesques’) op.8c unite both old and new

aspects of Bartók’s piano writing with that capricious programmaticism seen in

earlier compositions dedicated to his female friends. For the first Burlesque,

dedicated to his student and soon-to-be wife Márta Ziegler, he explained in one of

its drafts: ‘Please choose one of the titles: “Anger because of an interrupted visit”

or “Rondoletto à capriccio” or “Vengeance is sweet” or “Play it if you can” or

“November 27 [1908]”’. Another work dedicated to her, the first of the Vázlatok

(‘Seven Sketches’) op.9b, is entitled ‘Leányi arckép’ (‘Portrait of a Girl’) and calls

again on the ‘Geyer’ motif. In November 1909 Bartók married Márta Ziegler, and

a son, Béla, was born in August 1910. Over the following 15 years she proved his

worthy assistant as a copyist, translator and occasional folksong-collecting

companion.

The First String Quartet op.7 (1908–9) is an exceptional work of stylistic

transition. Although it betrays many disparate influences it is remarkably coherent.

The Lento first movement, conceived as a funeral dirge, takes as its main theme

the boisterous, jagged transformation of the ‘Geyer’ motif yet within a

contrapuntal, Tristanesque mood of yearning; other late-Romantic influences are

evident – those of Reger, about whose works Bartók and Geyer had been

enthusiastic, and of Strauss. Yet Bartók’s quartet unfolds, in Kodály’s words, a

‘return to life’, with increasingly fast second and finale movements, which are

more in keeping with his new, sparer style. The finale establishes the brusque,

folk-like style used in the concluding movements of many later chamber works. It

twice calls upon pentatonic phrases and in its introduction the cello parodies the

opening of a popular Hungarian song, Csak egy szép lány (‘Just a Fair Girl’) by

Elemér Szentirmai. The quartet was first performed on 19 March 1910, at one of

the earliest concerts of the youthful Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, which would also

provide the premières of his Second and Fourth Quartets

Bartók with Kodály (front right) and the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet (from left to

right): Jenő Kerpely, Imre Waldbauer, Antal Molnár, János Temesváry

Budapest Bartók Achives

In the first half of 1910 Bartók’s recognition as a composer appeared to be

growing, and with it requests for him to perform. At a ‘Hungarian festival’ concert

in Paris on 12 March 1910 he played several of his own works, as well as pieces

by Szendy and Kodály. A press comment about these ‘young barbarians’ from

Hungary probably prompted Bartók to write one of his most popular piano pieces,

the Allegro barbaro BB63, in the following year. In other works of 1910–12

French influences are at their most apparent, with Debussy’s mark perhaps being

too readily identified, notably in the orchestral Két kép (‘Two Pictures’) op.10 and

the Four Orchestral Pieces op.12. The intervening op.11, the one-act opera A

Kékszakállú herceg vára (‘Bluebeard’s Castle’) (1911) is, however, a masterful

Hungarian emulation of the realism of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Written to

an expressionistic libretto by Béla Balázs about the ‘mystery of the soul’, the

action of Bluebeard’s Castle is negligible, involving just two singing protagonists,

Bluebeard and his new wife Judith, who progress through the opening of the

eponymous castle’s seven doors, drawn by the woman’s curiosity. The opera’s

climactic turning-point comes at the fifth door, to Bluebeard’s kingdom, after

which Judith’s jealousy becomes obsessive, leading to her eventual entombment,

along with all Bluebeard’s previous wives, and eternal darkness. Bartók’s work

changed the course of Hungarian opera by successfully developing a fluid form of

Hungarian declamation of Balázs’s ballad-like text, based largely upon the

inflections of parlando rubato folksong. He also managed to characterize the

protagonists modally: Bluebeard through smooth, pentatonic lines; Judith through

more chromatic and angular writing. Bartók’s operatic conception owed much to

Wagner, particularly in his use of a recurring minor-2nd ‘blood’ motif, while the

orchestration is still indebted to Strauss, whose influence in other compositional

respects had waned. The adjudicators of two Budapest opera competitions of

1911–12 nonetheless found little merit in this ‘unperformable’ work, and it was

assigned to Bartók’s drawer.

The year 1912 signalled Bartók’s withdrawal from public musical life. He was

increasingly seen as a radical, out of sympathy with the ruling musical clique led

by such figures as the violinist Jenő Hubay. His efforts in 1911 to assist the

formation of a New Hungarian Musical Society had, he felt, been futile, and he

resigned from it in February 1912. He did not engage in serious composition in

1913, and saw no point in orchestrating his four op.12 pieces until there was some

chance of their performance, which only occurred after the war. As a teacher, he

was not generating a distinctive ‘school’, as did Hubay, Szendy or, later, Kodály,

for he was fundamentally disinterested in questions of piano technique or didactic

method. He did, however, in 1913 contribute nearly 50 easy pieces to the

Zongoraiskola (‘Piano Method’) BB66, co-authored with Sándor Reschofsky, from

which 18 were later selected for Kezdők zongoramuzsikája (‘The First Term at the

Piano’, 1929). In one field, folk music, Bartók’s enthusiasms remained

undiminished, and he was making reasonable professional progress. These

ethnomusicological studies became his life’s mainstay during the following six

years of isolation.

Since 1906 Bartók had engaged in many folk-music collecting tours, some in

collaboration with Kodály, but many undertaken independently. As well as

informing his composition – the first Slovak folksong settings (BB46) date from

1907, and the first Romanian-influenced work, Ket román tánc (‘Two Romanian

Dances’) BB56 from 1909–10 – these tours had led to Bartók’s first

ethnomusicological articles in 1908 and 1909. These were simple collections of

transcriptions of melodies and texts of Transylvanian (Székely) and Transdanubian

ballads. By the immediately pre-war years Bartók had developed more theoretical

and speculative interests. His first essay on ‘Comparative Musical Folklore’ dates

from 1912, and his first published book, about Romanian folksongs from the

Hungarian county of Bihor (Bihár) which he had collected in 1909–10, appeared

from the Romanian Academy in Bucharest in 1913. As a principle of grouping

Bartók early came to adopt the system of the Finnish musicologist Ilmari Krohn,

which had been endorsed in 1902–3 after a competition of the International Music

Society. In Krohn’s system all songs were transposed so that their final note was

G. Songs were then ordered according to the cadence patterns of each verse.

Further differentiation was possible according to cadence types and song ranges.

With a growing number of modifications, this strongly structural scheme remained

the model for Bartók’s many later folk-music editions.

The richness of Romanian folk traditions, which in Bartók’s opinion surpassed the

Hungarian because of the greater primitivism and isolation of the Romanian

population within the Empire, led him in 1913 to collect folk music of the

Romanians of the Hungarian province of Máramaros (Maramureş). Bartók’s

excitement about this Máramaros material rivalled that surrounding his pentatonic

discovery of 1907. It concerned his identification of an ancient cântec lung, or

horă lungă. This ‘long melody’, or ‘long dance’, which he later identified in

Arabic, Ukrainian and Persian musics, was strongly instrumental in character,

improvisational, highly ornamented, and of indeterminate structure. Until 1913

virtually all of Bartók’s collecting had taken place within Hungary. During June

1913, however, his comparative ethnomusicological interests drew him to north

Africa, where among the Berber people around the oasis town of Biskra (now in

Algeria) he experienced a folk music strikingly different from that of eastern

Europe, in the narrower range and changeability of its scales and the almost

constant drumming which accompanied most strict-time melodies. Both his

Máramaros and north-African collections were prepared by 1914, but were,

because of the war, delayed in publication.

4. 1914–26.

Holidaying in France during July 1914, Bartók was almost caught unawares by the

rush into World War I. For several months, as the Russians made incursions into

the eastern provinces of Hungary, there were fears that even Budapest would be

attacked; folk-music collecting became impossible. Bartók himself fearfully

undertook several medical examinations, which however confirmed that he was

unfit for service. Later, in lieu of military service, Kodály and Bartók were

entrusted with the collection of folksongs from soldiers, which in January 1918

resulted in a patriotic concert in Vienna attended by Empress Zita. From Easter

1915, with the military situation stabilized, Bartók again resumed song collecting,

mainly in Slovak regions fairly close to the capital, although in 1916 he ventured

out into Transylvania on his task with the military. Romania’s sudden attack on

Transylvania in August 1916 ensured, however, that his further collecting did not

venture too far from the Hungarian plain.

Although Bartók hardly performed at all during the war, its years were bounteous

in folk-music arrangements. While 1914 had seen the start of work on two

Hungarian piano sets – Tizenöt magyar parasztdal (‘15 Hungarian Peasant Songs’)

BB79 and Three Hungarian Folk Tunes BB80b – both of which were completed in

1918, 1915 was a ‘Romanian’ year: piano settings of Romanian Christmas Songs

(Colinde) BB67, the Sonatina BB69 (in 1931 transcribed for orchestra as Erdélyi

táncok, ‘Transylvanian Dances’); and one of Bartók’s most popular works, the

Román nepi táncok (‘Romanian Folk Dances’) BB68. The period 1916–17, by turn,

was fruitful with three sets of Slovak folksongs for a variety of vocal resources

(BB73, 77, 78).

Bartók’s rate of composing original works was not impaired by his wartime

conditions. Indeed, his isolation led to a more unified and concentrated

compositional approach. With his three-movement Second String Quartet op.17

(1914–17) he maintained something of the nervous introspection of the First

Quartet’s opening in the outer movements, but for the central Allegro molto

capriccioso movement (with which he experienced the most difficulty in

composition) he drew on inspiration from north Africa, in the limited range of its

harsh tune, in the drumming accompaniment and in the exaggerated

embellishments. The Piano Suite op.14 (1916) similarly shows in its third

movement a north-African influence, with its urgent ostinato and limited scalar

patterns. This suite, originally in five movements with the symmetrical pattern of

movement tonalities B –F –B –D–B , was later reduced to four movements with

the removal of the second-movement Andante, yet still retains a strong interest in

pitch symmetries, above all in its Scherzo. In a radio interview of 1944 Bartók

described his intention in this work of refining piano technique to achieve ‘a style

more of bone and muscle’.

Also in 1916 Bartók deviated from his established pattern of vocal settings of

folksongs to compose his only mature Lieder: two sets of Öt dal (‘Five Songs’),

opp.15 and 16. The quality of the poetry differs greatly between the works. Op.15

is a setting in parlando declamatory style of four love poems by a young woman,

Klára Gombossy, with whom Bartók was involved during his 1915–16 collecting

tours in Slovakia, with an extra poem by another adolescent friend. Bartók soon

realized the folly of his musical (and personal) ways, and ensured that these songs

were neither published nor performed during his lifetime. The op.16 songs are

settings of poems by Hungary’s leading progressive poet, Endre Ady. They exhibit

a characteristic melancholy, with autumnal themes of isolation, loss and despair.

Bartók’s style of setting is less folk-influenced in these songs, but rather reflects a

continuation of German Lieder traditions, especially in the complementary

rhythmic relationships between voice and piano. This work also pays stylistic

homage to the composer Béla Reinitz, well known for his Ady settings, to whom

Bartók dedicated the set in 1920.

Most significant professionally among Bartók’s wartime compositions was his

one-act ballet A fából faragott királyfi (‘The Wooden Prince’) op.13, written to a

scenario again by Balázs. The idea of this ballet had grown out of the visit of the

Ballets Russes to Budapest in 1912. By March 1913 the Budapest Opera had

requested a work from Bartók, but its composition and following orchestration had

taken him until early 1917. In the journal Magyar színpad at the time of the

ballet’s production Balázs described how the work reflects ‘that very common and

profound tragedy when the creation becomes the rival of the creator, and of the

pain and glory of the situation in which a woman prefers the poem to the poet, the

picture to the painter’. Bartók crafted the work as a symmetrical tripartite

symphonic poem, with the final part recalling materials from the first part in

reverse order. Its music, as its plot, portrays the constant tension between the ideal

prince and the grotesque puppet, who share the same thematic material.

Given Bartók’s fatalistic attitude towards his own compositions, he was surprised

by the ballet’s highly successful première on 12 May 1917 under Egisto Tango (to

whom he later dedicated the work). Not only did this success lead to many repeat

performances of the work, but it also encouraged the Opera in Budapest to arrange

for the première of Bluebeard’s Castle, which took place on 24 May 1918.

Importantly for the future, the enterprising Viennese publisher Universal Edition

now contracted to publish Bartók’s compositions, an event which he considered

his ‘greatest success as a composer, so far’ and a sure road to greater international

exposure. Universal worked hard to clear the backlog of the composer’s many

unpublished pieces, and, despite Bartók’s frequent criticisms, remained his main

publisher for the next two decades.

The last years of the 1910s witnessed widespread political and social dislocation in

Hungary. Bartók and his family, living at Rákoskeresztúr, some kilometres east of

Budapest, found transportation to the city increasingly difficult; food and fuel

supplies became scarce; they had no electricity or running water. Medical help had

to be brought from Budapest when in October 1918 Bartók succumbed to Spanish

influenza during the pandemic. Finally in 1920 he was obliged to move to

Budapest, where for two years his family took rooms in the apartment of the

banker József Lukács. Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed.

The new national boundaries, based on principles of majority ethnic self-

determination and ratified by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, saw Hungary stripped

of those very areas of Transylvania and the northern, Slovak territories which

Bartók had found ethnologically most interesting. For some years national tensions

in the region ensured the unviability of collecting expeditions. Apart from a brief

expedition to Turkey in November 1936 Bartók never again engaged in fieldwork,

even within post-Trianon Hungary (as Kodály, for instance, continued to do). The

remainder of his life was largely devoted to analyzing and categorizing his existing

collection, which by 1918 numbered about 10,000 melodies (including 3,404

Romanian, 3,223 Slovak and 2,771 Hungarian), or to comparative studies

involving knowledge of a large number of mainly eastern European collections.

With the succession of Hungarian governments during 1918–19 Bartók found

himself courted for many positions, including director of the Opera, and head of a

planned music department at the National Museum, although neither came to pass.

In late October 1918 he was appointed by the liberal Károlyi government to be a

member of the National Council, and under the short-lived communist government

of Béla Kun in 1919 served on its music directorate, along with Kodály, Dohnányi

and Reinitz. Bartók bore these rapidly changing events with apparent nonchalance,

as he did the establishment of the right-wing rule of Miklós Horthy in the autumn

of 1919. Yet he did think of settling abroad, with a first preference for

Transylvania (by then part of Romania), followed by Austria or Germany. Of

greater day-to-day significance to him was the continuation of sabbatical leave

from the Academy of Music and of his attachment to the ethnographic department

of the National Museum, both of which ceased in mid-1920. In 1920 he also had to

fend off the first of several challenges in the press from the Hungarian right wing

that, through his recent folk-music work, he was a supporter of the Romanian

national cause and a traitor to Hungary. (This did not stop him in later years being

accused by the Romanian authorities of being a Hungarian revisionist.)

Amid this turbulence Bartók succeeded in writing his iconoclastic pantomime A

csodálatos mandarin (‘The Miraculous Mandarin’) op.19. He drafted the work in

short score to a scenario by Menyhért (Melchior) Lengyel between October 1918

and May 1919, but only orchestrated it in 1924. Lengyel’s is a superficially sordid

plot about a prostitute, her ‘minders’ and clients, with a deeper message, conveyed

by her last client, the Mandarin, about the powers of human love. The unsavoury

aspect of the work caused it to be withdrawn immediately after its November 1926

première in Cologne, and contributed to the continual postponement of its

Budapest première until December 1945, after the composer’s death. Bartók

approached the narrative in a mosaic-like way, using brief intervallically-

determined ‘tone patches’ of variable tonal clarity and density of texture, which

parallel the fluctuating sense of tension. The Miraculous Mandarin is, however,

much more than graphic ‘mime music’. Through various revisions up until 1931

Bartók refined a truly symphonic concept based upon his musical symbols of

desire and love. It was a continual frustration to him, then, that this work, which he

considered one of his finest compositions, so languished, while The Wooden

Prince, a work he soon came to dislike, was staged more frequently.

With Mandarin and its immediate predecessor, the Three Studies op.18 for piano,

Bartók launched into his most radical, Expressionist phase (1918–22), during

which he believed he was approaching some kind of atonal goal. In his essay ‘Das

Problem der neuen Musik’ (Melos, i/5, 1920, pp.107–10) he referred four times to

Schoenberg, and recognized the need ‘for the equality of rights of the individual

12 tones’; he drew examples of the ‘previously undreamt-of wealth of transitory

nuances [now] at our disposal’ from his own opp.18 and 19. The following

Improvizációk magyar parasztdalokra (‘Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant

Songs’) op.20 (his last work to receive an opus number) also showed a bold

linking of innovative techniques of folksong arrangement and atonal direction. In

‘The Relation of Folk-Song to the Development of the Art Music of Our Time’

(The Sackbut, ii/1, 1921, pp.5–11) Bartók explained that ‘the opposition of the two

tendencies reveals all the more clearly the individual properties of each, while the

effect of the whole becomes all the more powerful’; he further wrote of the peasant

tunes saving such works as op.20 from a ‘wearying or surfeiting extreme’. Yet

towards the end of the 1920s Bartók claimed, in apparent contradiction to such

statements, that atonality was incompatible with a style based on (necessarily

tonal) folk music. In an interview in 1929 he even suggested that tonality in his

early postwar works was not lacking ‘but at times is more-or-less veiled either by

idiosyncrasies of the harmonic texture or by temporary deviations in the melodic

curves’; the Violin Sonatas nos.1 and 2 (BB84 and 85) for example, are, he

maintained, in C minor and C respectively. However, though these works of

1921–2 show further merging of folk-derived ideas and atonality, it is difficult to

consider them in a key. Moreover, despite their titles, they only pay lip-service to

traditional sonata principles. The first movement of the three-movement First

Sonata adopts such a strongly variational approach to thematic materials that the

point of recapitulation loses its traditional force. The two-movement Second

Sonata, with its slower-faster progression is indebted to a rhapsodic model, while

in long-term function the tritonal relationship F –C is of primary importance.

During the first half of the 1920s Bartók’s compositional output slackened, not

least because of his intense ethnomusicological work. Already in an essay of

January 1918 he had articulated his old–new stylistic distinction in Hungarian folk

music; by 1921 Kodály and Bartók had finalized a modest collection of Hungarian

folksongs from Transylvania, published two years later; in 1924 Bartók’s

transcription and analysis of over 320 Hungarian songs was unveiled in his A

magyar népdal. It appeared in German the following year, and in 1931 in English

with the title Hungarian Folk Music. Bartók was also engaged during 1921–3 in

compiling a two-volume study of some 1,800 Slovak peasant melodies, which he

sent for publication in Czechoslovakia. (A third Slovak volume was completed in

1928, although all three remained unpublished during Bartók’s lifetime.) He then

immediately moved to prepare a volume of Romanian Christmas songs, which

occupied much of his time from late 1923 until April 1926. (After many trials,

only the musical part of this study appeared in a self-funded edition in 1935.)

The other draw on Bartók’s time in the postwar years was his revitalized

performing career. Amid the revolutionary atmosphere of 1918–19 he had

unexpectedly re-emerged onto the concert platform, after seven years of virtual

absence, with a willingness to perform in chamber, orchestral soloist and recitalist

roles. One of his first Budapest concerts, on 21 April 1919, introduced his wartime

compositions opp.14, 16 and 18 along with one of the earliest performances of the

Second Quartet op.17. With the war over and Universal rapidly publishing his

scores, Bartók was keen to grasp every opportunity for promoting his works

through his own playing. Over the next 12 years he took part in over 300 concerts

in 15 different countries. He also quickly took advantage of the promotional, as

well as much-needed monetary, opportunities in writing for the international press,

for which during 1920–21 he contributed over 20 scholarly or journalistic essays.

Already by February 1920 he had re-established a performing connection with

Berlin, where the conductor Hermann Scherchen and the theatrical entrepreneur

Max Reinhardt sought to aid his cause. Further Hungarian performances and a

concert tour of Romania (Transylvania) in February 1922 preceded a series of

major performances during March to May of 1922 in Britain, France and

Germany, which culminated in the German premières of Bluebeard’s Castle and

The Wooden Prince on 13 May in Frankfurt. Bartók’s frequent partner in these

concerts and further western European concerts in 1923 was the Hungarian-born

violinist Jelly Arányi, to whom he dedicated both violin sonatas. Bartók was

impressed by how seriously these sonatas were received, although his avowedly

percussive approach to the keyboard was deemed unfortunate by many British

critics, brought up on Matthay’s views about relaxation and use of weight. The

critics also had difficulties comprehending the frequent thematic segregation

which exists between the instruments’ parts in these two sonatas. Bartók’s higher

profile soon led to his inclusion in an international chamber music festival in

Salzburg in August 1922, after which the International Society for Contemporary

Music (ISCM) was founded. He became a staunch supporter of the ISCM; during

the 1920s and 30s many of his pieces were performed, some for the first time, at

its annual festivals. He served on its first festival jury in 1924, and was nominated

to convene the aborted 1940 Budapest Festival.

Despite Bartók’s growing opportunities for performing internationally, which

extended during 1923–5 to include Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Switzerland

and Italy, he did not immediately start to compose new works for this audience.

His only composition of 1923, the orchestral Táncszvit (‘Dance Suite’) BB86a, was

commissioned as a companion to Kodály’s Psalmus hungaricus and Dohnányi’s

Ünnepi nyitány (‘Festival Overture’) for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of

the union of Budapest. The style of the suite marked a retreat from his recent

expressive radicality, not least through Bartók’s re-acceptance of an

accommodating rather than oppositional relationship between tune and

accompaniment. It employs idealized peasant musics in its six movements, which

are played without a break and connected by a ritornello theme in a serene

Hungarian style. Its first movement, for instance, recalls the chromatic ‘Arabic’

inflections, the second, a brash, minor-3rd-based Hungarian idiom, while the third

movement introduces an imitation of Hungarian bagpipe music followed by a

section suggesting Romanian folk violins. The later movements reflect a growing

stylistic internationalism, culminating in the colourful medley of the sixth

movement. Bartók had also drafted a Slovak-styled movement, but omitted this

from the final version of the piece. His next composition, Falun (Dedinské scény)

(‘Village Scenes’) BB87a was, however, a setting in five movements of old Slovak

ceremonial melodies. These mainly Lydian or Mixolydian tunes were given

inventive ‘motto’-like settings for female voice and piano; in 1926 the final three

movements were arranged for female voices and chamber orchestra (BB87b) to a

commission from the American League of Composers. The Village Scenes, with

their themes of love, marriage and babies, are dedicated to Ditta Pásztory, whom

Bartók had married in August 1923 following a sudden divorce from Márta

Ziegler. Pásztory bore Bartók a son, Péter, in July 1924.

Apart from Village Scenes Bartók did not compose between August 1923 and June

1926, and by February 1925, as earlier in 1913–14, he was writing himself off as

an ‘ex-composer’. Nevertheless, he did devote much time in 1924 to orchestrating

The Miraculous Mandarin, when there were early hopes of a first performance in

Germany. His Dance Suite, however, gained a highly publicized performance,

under Václav Talich, at the Prague ISCM orchestral festival in May 1925, which

catapulted Bartók’s work onto the international stage. Over the following two

years it received over 60 performances in major European and American centres.

5. 1926–34.

Between March 1925 and March 1926 Bartók visited Italy at least four times.

There his long-standing interest in Baroque music, previously centred upon Bach,

Domenico Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin, was roused by the keyboard music of

such Italian Baroque composers as Benedetto Marcello, Michelangelo Rossi, Della

Ciaia, Frescobaldi and Zipoli. From October 1926 he started to perform his own

piano transcriptions of their works and those of their contemporaries, 11 of which

he later refined for publication. This new Baroque passion, coupled with the

stimuli of rhythmic discoveries in Romanian Christmas songs, the additional

performance opportunities which radio now afforded, and the hearing of

Stravinsky’s latest piano works (notably the Concerto for piano and wind), pushed

Bartók into an almost frenzied phase of composition of piano works for his own

performance. With these works of 1926 he initiated, in his own analysis, a

fundamental creative shift from a Beethovenian ideal of artistic profundity to one

more orientated towards the ultimate musical craftsman, Bach. In compositional

process, however, he remained still a composer of essentially Romantic habit, a

believer in inspired genius, whose music was ‘determined by instinct and

sensibility’ rather than by theory, and who physically composed, as he explained

in a 1925 interview, ‘between the desk and the piano’.

While Bartók’s international status had grown, his only available work for piano

and orchestra remained the 1905 arrangement of the Rhapsody op.1 BB36b. By

1926, it was not only a stylistic anachronism, but also – as with the early Piano

Quintet and First Suite – an occasional embarrassment for Bartók, when audiences

took a liking to these early works over his more recent and dissonant

compositions. From June to November 1926 he set about equipping himself with a

new piano repertory: a three-movement Sonata (BB88), two collections of piano

pieces, Szabadban (‘Out of Doors’) BB89 and Kilenc kis zongoradarab (‘Nine

Little Piano Pieces’) BB90, and for his orchestral engagements the First Piano

Concerto BB91. Three further short piano pieces later found a home within the

Mikrokosmos collection. In these works of Bartók’s ‘piano year’, he provided a

preview of so many of the qualities which were to come to fullest maturity in the

works of his ‘golden age’, 1934–40. ‘Az éjszaka zenéje’ (‘The Night’s Music’)

from Out of Doors, in depicting the nocturnal sounds of the Hungarian plain,

introduced a genre of stylized representation of nature which would be repeatedly

invoked up to his Third Piano Concerto of 1945. The ‘Menuetto’ from BB90

presented a pioneering example of Bartók’s principle of expansion and contraction

of scalar intervals – in this case notably a major 2nd into a perfect 4th (see ex.4) –

which would come to its most magisterial expression ten years later in the Music

for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. The finale of the Sonata revealed Bartók’s

skilful imitation of traditional styles in the service of his concept of unity through

variation. The movement’s ritornello theme also provided the basis for the three

intervening episodes, the first in imitation of vigorous peasant chanting, the

second, of the peasant flute, and the third, of village fiddlers. Bartók drafted

another longer episode, in bagpipe style, which developed a separate life as

‘Musettes’ (in BB89).

Ex.4 Nine Little Piano Pieces, Menuetto, 3–4, 9–10

Straddling the borderline between Baroque and barbarism is the hammering

rhythmic impulse which underlies the First Piano Concerto. From this impulse

spring the main themes of all three movements. In the commencement of the slow,

middle movement that impulse also provides the mechanism for the integration of

piano and percussion, which Bartók explored further a decade later in the Sonata

for two pianos and percussion. The sharp-edged timbral world of Stravinsky’s

Concerto for piano and wind is often alluded to in Bartók’s, but it is especially

evident in the middle movement, from which the strings have been banished

entirely. Bartók’s concerto, played first under Furtwängler at the 1927 ISCM

Festival in Frankfurt, proved only moderately successful as a new carte-de-visite.

Its first edition was so studded with errors that it had to be replaced, and Bartók

also confessed in 1939 that ‘its writing is a bit difficult – one might even say very

difficult! – as much for orchestra as for audience’. Even he found its solo part

taxing, and with these experiences in mind he ensured that his Second Piano

Concerto was more tuneful and less bristling with difficulties.

Having updated his piano repertory Bartók turned his attention in 1927–8 to

chamber music, starting with the Third String Quartet (BB93), composed during

the summer of 1927. In this quartet he attained the ultimate compression of his

formal, pitch and rhythmic materials. Adorno (1929) wrote: ‘What is decisive is

the formative power of the work; the iron concentration, the wholly original

tectonics. The traditional four movements are here fused into a single movement of

about 17 minutes’ duration. A new colouristic approach to string sonority is

displayed, partly inspired by Berg’s Lyrische Suite, which Bartók had recently

heard. The score bristles with ‘special effects’ – glissando, pizzicato, col legno, sul

tasto, ponticello, martellato, muted passages, the use of exaggerating vibrato,

strumming, and their combinations – all of which give the piece its startling

piquancy. In October 1928 it was awarded joint first prize, with Casella’s

Serenata, in a competition of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, where it

was given its first performance on 30 December of the same year.

Meanwhile, during the summer of 1928, Bartók had composed his Fourth String

Quartet BB95. While taking over the expanded palette of string sonorities of no.3,

the Fourth is formally very different. Originally conceived in only four

movements, Bartók then added another (the published fourth movement) to

provide a symmetrical five-movement structure. The slow, third movement, in a

style reminiscent of ‘The Night’s Music’ from Out of Doors, is the work’s kernel.

The second movement’s tight thematic material is reflected, in more open guise, in

the fourth, entirely pizzicato movement. The first movement’s themes are also

loosely mirrored in the finale, which ends with a coda that borrows liberally from

the first movement’s conclusion. Such symmetrical thinking about form had been

evident in Bartók’s works since the 1910s, but had never been expressed by him as

clearly, either in the music or in his own analysis. The pitch relations of the quartet

operate at a high level of abstraction, with much interplay between contracted and

expanded expressions of short cells, yet in rhythm certain folk models are more

apparent. In the first movement, for instance, Bulgarian-type irregular rhythms are

used; the third movement involves rhythmic elements of both ‘old’ Hungarian and

Romanian horă lungă precedent.

Two further chamber works, the Violin Rhapsodies (BB94, 96), originate from

1928. They were intended for Bartók’s many performances with Hungarian

violinists, as milder alternatives or adjuncts to his violin sonatas; but he also

arranged them for violin and orchestra, as well as the first for cello and piano, on a

request from Casals. Both pieces follow the traditional lassú–friss (slow–fast)

rhapsodic pattern which Bartók knew so well from his scholarly work during the

1910s on Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies for that composer’s complete edition.

Bartók’s Rhapsodies are cunningly devised concatenations of predominantly

Romanian melodies, although Hungarian and Ruthenian tunes are represented. The

First Rhapsody was dedicated to Szigeti, who had recently made a violin and piano

arrangement of seven For Children pieces, and the Second to Székely, who had

similarly arranged Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances.

The concerts for which Bartók had intended his many compositions of 1926–8

found willing entrepreneurs. The late 1920s were Bartók’s heyday as a pianist,

with good offerings of concert opportunities, increasing radio work and, from

1928, contracts for producing gramophone records. By this time he often had the

chance to specialize in playing his own works. When Bartók was granted a

sabbatical from the Budapest Academy for 1927–8 he was finally able to realize a

plan he had nurtured ever since graduating, of a concert tour of the USA.

Notwithstanding the débâcle of the first two concerts on 22 and 23 December

1928, when the New York PO, under Mengelberg, proved unable to perform the

First Piano Concerto and the Rhapsody op.1 had to be substituted at the last

minute, Bartók’s two-month coast-to-coast tour, with its mixture of small lecture-

recitals and large concert events, was a successful musical and promotional

undertaking as well as a personally eye-opening experience. In America he

performed especially with Szigeti and his former student Reiner, under whose

baton the First Piano Concerto did eventually have its American première on 13

February 1928. By 1929 Bartók was starting to live the life of the itinerant

performer. During that year’s first four months he undertook a three-week tour of

the Soviet Union, followed by concerts in Switzerland, Denmark, Britain, Holland,

Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Hungary, where on 20 March he heard both

his recent string quartets in sympathetically received performances from the

Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet. Even the pessimistic Bartók had good reason to be

‘relaxed and happy’, as his son reported of him on his 48th birthday.

Vocal music absorbed Bartók’s compositional energies during 1929–30. Kodály’s

increasing list of Hungarian folksong arrangements jogged Bartók into

contributing one last substantial set of voice and piano arrangements: Húsz magyar

népdal (‘Twenty Hungarian Folksongs’) BB98. He grouped these songs

thematically – four sad, four dancing, seven diverse and five new-style – but with

no intention that they be performed in order. Bartók’s settings mostly fall within

his creative, ‘motto’ approach. In publication it was not the music but the German

song translations which caused the most acute problems, as had often been the

case with previous vocal works, notably his settings of Ady in the Five Songs

BB72. Unlike Kodály, Bartók was insistent upon an idiomatic German translation

which faithfully maintained the east European musical rhythms but also adhered as

far as possible to natural German word accentuation. With Twenty Hungarian

Folksongs a publishing compromise was finally reached, with both poetic and

literal translations being provided for some songs. During early 1930 Bartók also

arranged his four-movement Magyar népdalok (‘Hungarian Folksongs’) BB99 for

mixed chorus.

For the Cantata profana ‘A kilenc csodaszarvas’ (‘The Nine Enchanted Stags’)

BB100, written during the summer of 1930, Bartók set his own poetic working of

an ancient Romanian epic ballad for tenor and baritone soloists, chorus and

orchestra. However, before making the score’s final copy, he replaced the text with

a skilful Hungarian translation, of which he was particularly fond and later

independently recorded. A three-movement work running without a break and

anchored firmly in D, the cantata marked an important stage in Bartók’s long-term

reversion to more overtly tonal writing and longer thematic statements. His

strengthening interest in symmetries can be clearly illustrated by comparing the

mirrored nature of the modes with which the work begins (D–E–F–G–A –B –C–

D) and ends (D–E–F –G –A–B–C–D). This latter, Slovak-influenced ‘acoustic’

form (so-called because of its congruence with the lower degrees of the harmonic

series), through its association with the cantata’s closing words ‘From clear and

cooling mountain springs’, came to be recognized as Bartók’s symbol for the

purity of nature. Of all Bartók’s compositions, the Cantata profana has elicited

perhaps the greatest variety of interpretations of its overall musical form – implied

four-movement structure (Ujfalussy), ‘large sonata form’ (Somfai), five-act

classical dramatic form (Szabolcsi), to list but three – as well as of its textual

message, with its components of initiation–transformation–purification,

naturalistic freedom and pantheistic integration. Particularly in its aspects of

generational conflict, the cantata has been seen as emblematic of Bartók’s

response to the rising fascism of its time.

As Bartók approached his 50th birthday he attracted the accolades of international

fame, and became more overtly committed to internationalist goals. In late 1930 he

received news of awards, namely the French Légion d’Honneur and the Hungarian

Corvin wreath. He was honoured again in 1932 with a Romanian cultural award.

While his interests in national folk musics remained intense, he was tending to

write more generally and more comparatively about folk music, culminating in his

study Népzenénk és a szomszéd népek népzenéje (‘Our [Hungarian] Folk Music

and the Folk Music of Neighbouring Peoples’) which first appeared in 1934. As a

composer Bartók harboured, even into the early 1940s, the aim of adding two or

three further ‘national’ parts to his Cantata profana, as a musical tribute to the

increasingly tenuous brotherhood of Danube-basin peoples. As a performer, too,

he more sought international than national acclaim, having decided in 1930 no

longer to perform his own works in unresponsive Budapest. He maintained this

ban until late 1936, although he still sometimes played his own works in other

Hungarian towns and occasionally other composers’ music in the capital. None of

Bartók’s major works of the 1930s or 1940s received its première in Budapest.

On 13 January 1931 Bartók’s internationalism took more concrete form in his

acceptance of an invitation to join the Permanent Committee for Literature and the

Arts of the League of Nations’ Commission for Intellectual Co-operation, where

his colleagues included Thomas Mann, Gilbert Murray and Karel Čapek. Over the

next five years he occasionally introduced proposals about musical issues

requiring international collaboration – gramophone records, Urtext and facsimile

editions – but in 1934 also framed a proposal about artistic and scientific freedom.

His joining of the Permanent Committee coincided with his much-quoted

statement of compositional internationalism, in a letter of 10 January 1931 to the

Romanian diplomat and music historian, Octavian Beu. While recognizing the

three sources of his creative work as Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak, with the

strongest influence being Hungarian, Bartók expressed his belief in the

brotherhood of peoples, brotherhood in spite of all wars and conflicts. I try – to the

best of my ability – to serve this idea in my music; therefore I don’t reject any

influence, be it Slovak, Romanian, Arabic, or from any other source. The source

must only be clean, fresh and healthy!

Bartók’s consolidation of a more thematic and less rhythmically reiterative style

continued in his next major work, the Second Piano Concerto BB101, completed in

October 1931. Symmetries abound at many pitch and rhythmic levels, as also in its

overall five-part ‘bridge’ (ABCBA) structure, with the third movement being a

free variation of the first, and the second movement of an Adagio–Scherzo–

Adagio construction. Stravinsky is again a decided influence upon Bartók’s use of

instruments – the strings are not used until the second movement – and upon his

thematic material, which occasionally alludes to the early Parisian ballets, notably

The Firebird and Petrushka. Apart from this concerto Bartók composed no

substantial new works during 1931–4.

During these fallow years, coinciding with the worst years of the Depression,

Bartók was occupied with several arrangements of existing compositions and

series of miniature ‘educational’ pieces. His publishers, anxious to counter falling

sales by promoting his more popular piano or vocal compositions in new quarters,

encouraged him to engage in four orchestral arrangements: of his Sonatina (via

Gertler’s violin and piano transcription) as Erdélyi táncok (‘Transylvanian

Dances’) BB102b in 1931; of five of his piano pieces from 1908–11 in Magyar

képek (‘Hungarian Sketches’) BB103 in 1931; of nine of his Tizenöt magyar

parasztdal (‘Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs’) BB79 as Magyar parasztdalok

(‘Hungarian Peasant Songs’) BB107 in 1933; and, in 1933, of five of his Húsz

magyar népdal (‘Twenty Hungarian Folksongs’) (1929) as Magyar népdalok

(‘Hungarian Folksongs’) BB108 for voice and orchestra. Bartók did not manage to

complete other planned orchestrations of selected pieces from Out of Doors and

Nine Little Piano Pieces; nor did he embark upon a planned ‘string symphony’

based on the Fourth String Quartet.

Apart from this relatively mechanical work of arrangement, Bartók composed the

Forty-four Duos BB104 for violins during 1931. These pieces arose through a

request from the German violin pedagogue Erich Doflein for permission to set

some of Bartók’s For Children pieces in Doflein’s Geigenschulwerk. Bartók was

excited by Doflein’s project and offered to write new pieces which would

introduce simple folk music (or, in two numbers, imitations) from a much greater

range of cultures: Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Ukrainian and ‘Arabic’, as well

as Slovak and Hungarian. When in 1932 Bartók saw many of these pieces within

the context of Doflein’s five-volume progressive ‘violin school’, he formed a

broader plan of his own: a series of piano pieces, graded from very easy to recital

standard, which he later called Mikrokosmos (BB105). During the summer of 1932

he composed some 35 pieces, ranging in difficulty from ‘In Dorian Mode’ (no.32)

to ‘Chromatic Invention III’ (no.145). When his young son, Péter, began piano

lessons with his father in 1933, Bartók had an immediate incentive to compose

many simple pieces; the same year he composed a further 30 pieces, including

seven which eventually found their way into the first volume, comprising the

easiest pieces, and nearly half of the sixth volume, the most difficult. Another 20

pieces were added to the collection in 1934, after which Bartók produced only

occasional items until a second phase of intense activity in 1937–9.

6. 1934–40.

In the summer of 1934 Bartók achieved a professional goal he had desired for over

two decades: a full-time position as an ethnomusicologist. Within weeks of

Dohnányi being appointed director of the Budapest Academy of Music Bartók

received permission to transfer to the Academy of Sciences, where for the

following six years, in conjunction with Kodály, he led a small team of folk-music

researchers in an omnibus Hungarian folk-music project. Bartók was overjoyed at

the release from institutional teaching, although he still maintained a small number

of private piano pupils to supplement his income. The Academy of Sciences’

project was based upon a proposal which Bartók and Kodály had originally made

to the Kisfaludy Society in 1913 for a ‘complete, rigorously critical and exact

publication’ of Hungarian folk music. The number of items, estimated at nearly

6,000 in 1913, had grown to about 14,000 by the time Bartók closed the collection

in 1938. Of these about one fifth had been collected by Bartók himself. By 1940 he

had succeeded in refining a complex, closed classification system for the melodies,

which paid particular attention to rhythmic characteristics, and his team had

transcribed or revised existing transcriptions of the tunes, yet he had managed

neither to draft a justificatory introduction nor to address important editorial

questions. More seriously, his classification system had diverged considerably

from that which Kodály had understood would be used. (Over the years of their

acquaintance Bartók and Kodály had come to differ on many fundamental

questions on music, for instance on the relative melodic versus rhythmic

importance in categorization, and even on how differentiated or normalized the

ideal transcription should be.) Although both Bartók and Kodály are recognized as

the general editors of the Academy’s A magyar népzene tára series, the first

volume of which appeared in 1951, it was neither Bartók’s nor Kodály’s ‘system’

of classification which would ultimately prevail, but rather a principally genre-

based one to which Pál Járdányi was a principal contributor. The first volume of

the re-assembled Bartók system only appeared in 1991.

Bartók’s transfer to the Academy of Sciences gave him greater flexibility in

engaging his interests in other folk musics. He made final revisions to his Slovak

study in 1935–6 and continued to work on his Romanian collections, leading to an

expensive, failed attempt at self-publication in 1940. The draft of another study,

posthumously published as Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor (Princeton, NJ,

1976), resulted from Bartók’s fieldwork in Anatolia during 1936, as part of his

assignment to advise the Turkish authorities on the collecting of national folksong

and other educational questions. He also further indulged his passion for east

European folk music, in which he paid particular attention to south Slavic and

Bulgarian musics. The irregular Bulgarian rhythms and metres, awareness of

which had caused him considerably to revise his notations of Romanian folk music

in the early 1930s, came to exert an important force upon his own compositions,

and he developed but did not follow through plans to visit Bulgaria in 1935 to

pursue these interests.

As a pianist Bartók started to claw back engagements from the depressed levels of

1932–4, and during 1934–40 he performed approximately equally at home and

abroad. Engagements abroad were often hard to secure, due to the widespread

popularity of ‘home preference’ schemes to assist local artists, to increasing

tensions with Romania, and also to lack of opportunities for Bartók in Nazi

Germany. Since 1933 German radio stations had not offered him engagements;

after two years of negotiations to arrange an orchestral performance in Berlin, he

finally in mid-1937 decided no longer to seek engagements in Germany.

Accordingly, in the final years of the 1930s he performed more in Hungary,

although he also developed some new touring circuits in Switzerland, the Low

Countries and Italy, where he gave his last European performances abroad in

December 1939. As a soloist during these years Bartók highlighted his Piano

Concerto no.2, which was gaining a considerably better press than no.1. As a

chamber player he forged an important new partnership, with his wife, Ditta. Their

concert début took place on 16 January 1938, as the two pianists in the première of

Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. Over the following five years she

was his frequent stage companion.

The years 1934–40 constituted, notwithstanding the slide towards war, the

pinnacle of Bartók the composer; he produced masterpieces in each of his major

genres: chamber, orchestral, vocal and piano music. The few works of his final

American years are, despite their concert popularity, probably best seen as

compositional addenda to these powerfully integrated creative statements. Apart

from an arrangement for piano of several of the Forty-four Duos, entitled Petite

suite (BB113), all pieces of this period are original compositions, nearly all written

to commission. They exhibit a greater distance from any models of Bartók’s

contemporaries than do the works of preceding or following periods, and are also

less immediately reflective of his recent folk-music findings than hitherto. Their

homogeneity of style is unparalleled in Bartók’s output, and reflects the full

flowering of that Bachian aesthetic to which he had been gravitating since 1926.

Technically, this achievement was partly the result of the advanced state of

evolution of Bartók’s contrapuntal and chromatic writing, and also of his handling

of variation. In his later Harvard lectures (1943) Bartók identified polymodal

chromaticism as a main ingredient of his idiom. By this he meant a kind of

chromaticism which draws its elements from strands of different modes based

upon a single fundamental note; ex.5 shows a typical, Lydian-Phrygian polymodal

construction. From this Bartók further developed a structural (that is, non-

embellishing) type of ‘melodic new chromaticism’ in which earlier modal

obligations are dispensed with, even though allegiance to one focal note is

retained. The opening ‘Arabic’ melody in the Dance Suite was identified by

Bartók as his first ‘new chromatic’ melody, while he also referred, in his lectures,

to examples in a majority of the works of 1934–40, of which the twisting A-based

fugal theme in the first movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

is perhaps the most famous. The 12-note ‘row’ theme found in the outer

movements of the Violin Concerto (BB117) of 1937–8 (Bartók’s second concerto

for the instrument, though never numbered by the composer) is another instance of

such chromaticism, with which, as reported by Yehudi Menuhin, Bartók ‘wanted

to show Schoenberg that one can use all 12 tones and still remain tonal’.

Ex.5 Lydian-Phrygian polymodal chromaticism

Bartók’s fascination with documenting the ever-changing variants of folk music

had by the mid-to-late 1930s also become an ingrained aspect of his compositional

strategy. In 1937 he declared to the Belgian scholar Denijs Dille that ‘I do not like

to repeat a musical thought unchanged, and I never repeat a detail unchanged ….

The extreme variety that characterizes our folk music is, at the same time, a

manifestation of my own nature’. That variational orientation is seen in Bartók’s

very occasional theme-and-variation movements, such as the second movement of

the Violin Concerto ‘no.2’; but much more in his frequent writing of finales as

variants of opening movements, his incessant variation (often involving inversion)

of exposition material in recapitulations, and his bar-by-bar evolving variation of

thematic and motivic materials. It is not by chance that in over 30 statements of

Bartók’s 12-note theme in the opening movement of the Violin Concerto no two

statements are identical.

Most representative of the 1934–40 period, although each is of a very different

construction, are four chamber works. Bartók’s last two string quartets, the Fifth

(BB110) of 1934 and the Sixth (BB119) of 1939, frame the period’s output. Written

to a commission from Elizabeth Sprague-Coolidge, the Fifth, like its predecessor,

has five movements arranged symmetrically around the central, third movement,

in this case a Scherzo and Trio in Bulgarian metres. Bartók’s variational play is

seen nowhere better than in a banal ‘barrel-organ’ interlude near the end of the

finale, which turns out to be an inverted, diatonic relative of that movement’s

opening chromatic theme. By contrast, the Sixth String Quartet is in four

movements, and stylistically retrospective, even nostalgic. Its mesto, solo viola

ritornello theme recalls the opening dirge of the First Quartet, while the slow finale

looks back to the grim ending of the Quartet no.2. Bartók originally intended to

have a fast, dance-like finale, but the brooding ritornello came so to grow through

the work – in duration, complexity and instrumental involvement – that it

eventually consumed the entire role of finale.

Between these two quartets Bartók composed two chamber works for very

different ensembles; in 1937 the Sonata for two pianos and percussion BB115, his

only chamber work to involve percussion, and in 1938 Contrasts BB116, the only

one to involve a wind instrument. The three orchestral works which Bartók had

written since 1926 which used piano and percussion had convinced him that one

piano could not provide sufficient balance to the sharp sounds of the percussion

section – hence the Sonata’s instrumentation. Bartók demanded intricate

coordination from the two percussionists (although six were used in one early

Italian performance), not just in the virtuoso playing of their seven instruments but

also in achieving subtle distinctions of sound quality through using different

wooden or metal beaters, and even the blade of a pocket-knife. The three-

movement structure, as with the immediately preceding Music for Strings,

Percussion and Celesta, moves from a ‘closed’, twisting opening chromaticism to

the open, ‘acoustic’ scale forms of the finale. Moreover, the larger and smaller

sections of these two works were early identified to have an uncanny sense of

proportion, which the Hungarian analyst Ernő Lendvai from the late 1940s

onwards claimed as manifestations of golden section principles (See FIBONACCI

SERIES, and GOLDEN NUMBER). Although Bartók appears not to have

known about such proportions, and many of Lendvai’s calculations have since

been discredited, it is undeniable that a fine sense of proportion and of chromatic–

diatonic balance was articulated in these two works. Altogether different in form

and intention was Bartók’s Contrasts, commissioned by Benny Goodman as a

light two-movement piece of about six minutes’ duration, with each movement to

fit on one record side. Bartók, however, exceeded both duration and movement

expectations by producing a three-movement work which lasts some 15 minutes.

Within the original slow–fast rhapsodic frame, he inserted a ‘Relaxation’

movement in which the slowly moving clarinet and violin simultaneously mirror

each other’s lines. In Contrasts Bartók formally acknowledged with the first

movement’s title ‘Verbunkos’ the resurrection of that kind of stylized national

dance which had characterized some of his earliest works, had then been rejected

under the sway of peasant music, but had slowly been re-emerging since the violin

rhapsodies of the late 1920s.

The most significant of his chamber-orchestral works of the period is Music for

Strings, Percussion and Celesta BB114, written for Paul Sacher and the Basle

Chamber Orchestra during the summer of 1936. The piece shows great originality

at all levels of its construction and seamlessly integrates the broadest range of

Bartók’s folk-music and art-music sources. Formal and pitch symmetries are

plentiful, as in the A–C–F –A tonal pattern of the four movements, the forward

and reverse cycles of 5ths of the opening fugue, and the ABCBA ‘bridge’ form of

the third-movement Adagio. Bartók’s variation of materials is constant, with a

particularly poignant example in the finale, where, following the model of his Fifth

Quartet, a calmo, rhythmically uniform version of the movement’s snappy opening

theme momentarily halts the concluding rush. A sense of monothematicism is

achieved through the reintroduction of the opening movement’s chromatic fugue

theme in each succeeding movement: as a contour model for the second’s main

subject, as the cement between each block of the third’s bridge form, and, using

scalar expansion (ex.6), as a grand ‘acoustic’ transformation at the culmination of

the finale. Less technically demanding and profound, but even more in keeping

with Bartók’s Baroque aesthetic is the Divertimento BB118 of 1939, also

composed for Sacher, which Bartók described as a cross between a concerto

grosso and a concertino.

Ex.6 Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta: chromatic and ‘acoustic’ scalar bases,

movt 1, 1–4 and movt 4, 203–8

The only work for full orchestra during the latter 1930s is the three-movement

Violin Concerto ‘no.2’, written to a commission from Zoltán Székely. Not having

written a violin concerto in three decades and never having heard a full

performance of the earlier one, Bartók was nervous about the balance between

soloist and orchestra. However, when he finally heard the work performed, in

1943, he was delighted that ‘nothing had to be changed’. The concerto is probably

Bartók’s most diverse study in variation, not just in the theme and variations of the

second movement, which is a virtual catalogue of his techniques, or in the ever-

changing forms of his 12-note theme in the outer movements, but also in the way

in which the third movement is derived entirely from first-movement material. To

Székely, who had requested a traditional concerto, he confided: ‘so I managed to

outwit you. I wrote variations after all’. Even within the first movement, thematic

interrelationships and textural transformations are most ingenious: the placid solo

violin melody in the development section, for instance, reveals itself to be a literal

quotation of the movement’s opening pizzicato bass line. A verbunkos character is

again present in the concerto’s opening, with its suggestion of Transylvanian

fiddlers. As in several of Bartók’s later compositions, the ending was reworked to

give a more expansive peroration in which the solo violin continues playing to the

end.

During 1935–6 Bartók composed his last choral pieces, the Twenty-Seven Two-

and Three-part Choruses BB111 for children’s and women’s choruses, and Elmúlt

időkből (‘From Olden Times’) BB112, three songs for male chorus. Both works

present Bartók’s own fashionings of folk texts, the short choruses dealing with the

domestic world of childhood and adolescence, the longer male chorus songs with

the joys and sorrows of peasant life. Kodály, for whose growing choral movement

the Twenty-Seven Choruses were written, later wrote that Bartók’s recent studies

of Palestrina might have been a source of inspiration for the heightened

polyphonic plasticity and imitational resourcefulness found in these pieces.

Despite the quality of Bartók’s writing these two works have not gained the level

of international attention accorded to Bartók’s late instrumental works, partly

because of their educational associations and partly because of the intractably

Hungarian nature of their prosody.

At the same time as Bartók was writing this string of masterworks, his collection

of Mikrokosmos piano pieces continued to grow. Already on 9 February 1937 he

had given the public première of 27 of them at an ISCM concert in London, and he

continued to unveil such selections in following years. During 1937 he composed

ten, mainly more advanced pieces, including five of the ‘Six Dances in Bulgarian

Rhythm’; these brought what became the sixth volume almost to completion. He

added some 50 further pieces in the following two years, including much of the

first volume, and also the 33 exercises. In the preface which Bartók sent with the

completed collection of 153 pieces to his new publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, in

November 1939, he drew attention to the versatility of the series. He had included

a second piano part in four pieces, to encourage early ensemble playing, and

another four pieces were songs (‘All instrumental study or training should really

commence with the student singing’). Ten other pieces were recommended for

playing on the harpsichord. Bartók stressed that his collection did not present a

complete ‘progressive method’, but rather a base to which works by other

composers, such as Bach and Czerny, should be added. In a letter to Boosey &

Hawkes of 13 February 1940, he explained that he saw Mikrokosmos as a bridge

leading from his own 20th-century shore to an older one, either through ‘centuries-

old folk music’ or through such typical devices of older art music as canon and

imitation. With the completion of both Mikrokosmos and the Sixth String Quartet

in November 1939 Bartók entered his longest compositionally unproductive

period, which lasted until 1943.

From his vantage point as a committee member of the League of Nations, Bartók

was a direct witness to the deterioration in human rights and growing nationalistic

intolerance which swept so many parts of Europe during the 1930s. His

ethnomusicological work was still occasionally attacked by nationalists in both

Hungary and Romania, and the publication of his Slovak collection was finally

ruled out in early 1939, the victim of other nationalist tensions. Bartók was acutely

distressed at Germany’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938–9, but it was

Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938 which had the most immediate

effect upon him. Bartók’s then publisher, Universal, was rapidly Nazified, and his

main royalty agencies, AKM and Austromechana, were merged with the

corresponding German organizations. Bartók quickly sought to secure publication

through Boosey & Hawkes, and to join the British PRS. His worries about when

Hungary, too, might succumb to Nazi domination caused him in late 1937 to start

thinking about a safe haven for his more valuable manuscripts, and in April 1938

to start their despatch, first to Switzerland, and then, via London, to the United

States, where they later became the basis of the New York Bartók Archives. In

1988 they entered the private collection of Péter Bartók in Homosassa, Florida.

During the first half of 1939 Bartók seriously investigated the possibility of

emigrating to Turkey, before deciding that the USA was the most desirable

personal refuge. However, on 13 April 1938 Bartók had written ‘I have my mother

here: shall I abandon her altogether in her last years? – No, I cannot do that!’; and

only on her death in December 1939 did he feel morally free to leave. Despite the

precarious times – with the period of ‘phoney war’ drawing to a close – Bartók

undertook a successful concert tour of the USA during April–May 1940.

Noteworthy were a sonata recital with Szigeti at the Library of Congress in

Washington and a Columbia recording session of Contrasts in New York with

Szigeti and Goodman. His confidence in a move of indefinite duration was

immeasurably strengthened when he came to know of a large collection of Serbo-

Croat field recordings undertaken by a Harvard professor, Milman Parry, and his

associate, Albert B. Lord, in 1933–5.

Back in Budapest by late May of 1940, Bartók started to plan for his permanent

return to the USA with his wife in October 1940. Bureaucratic complications

associated with indefinitely leaving Hungary before the pensionable age of 60,

when he would also become exempt from military service, as well as visa, travel

and currency difficulties, were compounded by persistent pains in Bartók’s right

shoulder, which required daily hydrotherapy. These pains were later interpreted as

the first signs of his eventually fatal blood disorders. A final orchestral concert for

both husband and wife was held at the Budapest Academy of Music on 8 October

1940, before they travelled to New York, via Lisbon.

7. 1940–45.

Ex.4 Nine Little Piano Pieces, Menuetto, 3–4, 9–

10Bartók lived in the USA for the remainder of his life. After the trials of the first

few months, with the couple’s early two-piano concerts gaining less than

enthusiastic receptions and insecurities over accommodation, finances, passports

and their temporarily mislaid Hungarian luggage, Bartók settled into the familiar

routine of regular ethnomusicological work and occasional concert tours. During

his American years he declined several offers of composition-teaching positions,

although he did privately teach a few students piano or composition. In November

1940 Columbia University awarded him an honorary doctorate, and during 1941–2

he held a research appointment there, working on Parry’s Serbo-Croatian

collection, which was on loan from Harvard. That work eventually resulted in the

volume Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951), of which Bartók completed

the musical parts and Lord the textual. Probably Bartók’s greatest discovery

among this Serbo-Croat material lay with Dalmatian chromatic folk tunes. There

he came upon a form of melodic chromaticism very similar to the ‘new

chromaticism’ found in his own compositions since the Dance Suite. Moreover, he

found that his compositional technique of melodic transformation through

expansion or contraction of scalar intervals (exx.4 and 6) occurred naturally

among the Dalmatians. Their chromatic melodies were none other than

compressed diatonic melodies of surrounding areas. Another Dalmatian effect,

which Bartók later compositionally imitated, involved the playing or singing of

chromatic tunes in two parallel parts, separated by intervals such as major 2nds or

minor 7ths. Mainly in his private time, Bartók also worked on the final forms of

his volumes of Romanian instrumental and vocal melodies, which were essentially

complete by December 1942, and of Romanian folk texts, which took until late

1944. He also revised and polished his Turkish volume, which was finished in late

1943. Without prospect of publication for either, Bartók deposited them in the

music library at Columbia, to be available ‘to those few persons (very few indeed)

who may be interested in them’. These Romanian volumes were published in

1967, the Turkish in 1976. A further ethnomusicological appointment, for work on

Amerindian music, was periodically offered by the University of Washington,

Seattle, but never taken up.

The ‘magnificent possibilities’ to which Bartók’s New York agent had made

reference in 1940 soon turned out to be illusory. Twice during 1941 he ventured on

tours across the continent, presenting numerous solo or two-piano recitals in

universities or colleges. More prestigious engagements were few. His last solo

concerto performances took place in Chicago on 20 and 21 November 1941, and

his last public appearances were with his wife on 21 and 22 January 1943, when

Reiner conducted the American première of his Concerto for two pianos,

percussion and orchestra BB121, an arrangement of the Sonata for two pianos and

percussion. After January 1943 Bartók did still seek performing engagements, and

though in January 1945 he played for a New Jersey radio broadcast, for a variety

of health and logistical reasons no further public performances followed. As a

composer, too, his American output was initially meagre. The orchestral version of

the Sonata was made in 1940 and the arrangement of his Second Suite, as the Suite

for Two Pianos op.4b BB122, in 1941. But he did not engage in any original

composition until the spring of 1942, when some ideas emerged perhaps for a

suggested concerto for ‘combinations of solo instruments and string orchestra’.

From April 1942, however, chronic illness intervened and Bartók put this work

aside.

Although suffering more acutely, Bartók decided to go ahead with a visiting

appointment at Harvard for the spring semester of 1943. There his duties were to

present one recital and two lecture series on recent Hungarian music, principally

his own and that of Kodály, and on folksong and ethnomusicological procedure.

While Bartók only managed to present three of the first series’ lectures and to draft

a fourth, these Harvard lectures provide Bartók’s most candid and detailed

explanation of his compositional techniques. He was then hospitalized, with a

tentative diagnosis of blood (polycythemia) and lung (tuberculosis) disorders. The

American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), of which

Bartók was not a member, decided to underwrite the costs of his medical treatment

and recuperation. For the following three summers recovery took him to Saranac

Lake in New York State, and for the 1943–4 winter to a sanatorium in Asheville,

North Carolina. It was while on these rest cures away from New York that

Bartók’s final compositions were written.

The Concerto for Orchestra BB123 was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music

Foundation in May 1943. Probably drawing on some of his fleeting ideas from

1942, Bartók started in August 1943 to draft the work in five movements, less

overtly symmetrical, however, than Bartók’s other recent five-movement

compositions. The various folk-music and art-music components of its style are

also less integrated than in his music of the 1930s. In a programme note Bartók

depicted the work’s mood as gradually progressing from the ‘sternness of the first

movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the

last one’. The exception to this progression, as Bartók noted, was the jesting ‘game

of pairs’ second movement, in which he imitated the two-part parallel Dalmatian

style found in Parry’s collection. The fourth movement, ‘Intermezzo interrotto’, is

uncharacteristically cheeky in mood, with its parody of a tune from Shostakovich’s

then-popular Seventh Symphony, and nostalgic quotation of a popular song, Szep

vagy, gyönyörű vagy Magyarország (‘You are lovely, you are beautiful, Hungary’)

by Zsigmond Vincze. Another strong, nostalgic influence upon the first and third

movements is Bartók’s own style from the 1908–11 period, in particular that of

Bluebeard’s Castle. The life-asserting finale is, however, a boisterous roll-call of

some of Bartók’s favourite folk styles. It attempts, if with limited success, to

combine aspects of sonata form with the loose ‘chain’ forms which Bartók had

invoked in the second and third movements. First performed in Boston on 1

December 1944, the Concerto for Orchestra proved immediately attractive to the

American public, although Bartók was soon persuaded to write a second, less

abrupt ending to the finale. Whether, or how much, Bartók’s new accessibility

betrayed his longer-term creative directions became a frequent point of debate

after his death.

During October 1943 Bartók heard excellent multiple performances of his Violin

Concerto (‘no.2’) in the hands of Tossy Spivakovsky, and in November inspired

performances of his First Violin Sonata from Menuhin. On Menuhin’s suggestion

of a commission, Bartók had by 14 March 1944 written the four-movement Sonata

for solo violin BB124, a work of overt homage to Bach, in particular Bach’s solo

Sonata in C, which Bartók had heard Menuhin perform. Of his four major

American works this astringent sonata could, however, least be accused of stylistic

compromise. Its use of Baroque imitative techniques is sustained in the first

movement, marked Tempo di ciaccona, and also in the second movement, an

ambitious four-voiced fugue whose chromatic subject is characterized by

competing major and minor 3rds. The Presto finale is significant in introducing

long passages of quarter-tone writing, and some reference to third-tones. However,

only Bartók’s semitonal alternatives were included in Menuhin’s posthumous

edition of the work.

While writing the sonata Bartók’s health again declined. The first definite signs of

leukaemia were detected in the spring of 1944, although through the use of blood

transfusions and drugs, including penicillin, Bartók’s condition was able to be held

reasonably stable until the late summer of 1945. During the summer of 1944

ethnomusicological demands largely took over from composition, but Bartók also

regained his enthusiasm for performance, even to the extent of wanting to make

new recordings of his own works. His financial circumstances, which had been

particularly exacerbated since 1941 because of double taxation on his British-

derived royalty income, were now somewhat more secure. The successful

premières of his first two American works within a week in late 1944 further

reinforced his confidence, and led to several offers of commissions during the first

half of 1945.

Bartók’s final two substantial compositions were both concertos. While in Saranac

during July–August 1945 he worked intensively on the Third Piano Concerto

BB127, intended for his wife to perform, in tandem with the Viola Concerto BB128,

commissioned by William Primrose. The idea of a new piano concerto grew from

Bartók’s realization that his wife could not master some of the more challenging

sections of his previous one. In the Third, consequently, he wanted something

texturally lighter and is reported to have examined Grieg’s concerto as one

possible model for this new lucidity. Bartók’s folk-, art- and nature-derived

inspirations in the work are relatively undisguised. The second movement, for

instance, begins with an extended imitation of Beethoven’s ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’

(from the String Quartet in A minor op.132), while its middle, ‘Night Music’

section makes explicit reference to the call of the rufous-sided towhee bird, which

Bartók had noted down while in North Carolina.

Bartók died in New York on 26 September 1945, after a month-long relapse in

health. During his final weeks he managed to complete the Third Piano Concerto,

except for the scoring of the final 17 bars, which his colleague Tibor Serly quickly

accomplished. His Viola Concerto, however, only remained in sketch, the solo part

suggesting a work of comparable lucidity and harmonic restraint to the piano

concerto, but with incomplete and less conclusive detail about instrumentation,

texture and even the final form. In early August 1945 Bartók had written to

Primrose about his concept of a four-movement work with joining ritornello

passages, but the evidence of the manuscript suggests only three movements with

interconnecting, non-ritornello passages. Since 1945 several attempts have been

made to complete the concerto, either for viola or cello. Two of the viola versions

have ‘authorized’ status: that undertaken by Tibor Serly with additional input by

Primrose, which was published in 1950 shortly after the première, and a ‘revised

version’ of 1995 prepared by Péter Bartók and Nelson Dellamaggiore.

8. Legacy.

Dying within weeks of the end of World War II, Bartók narrowly missed the wave

of popularity which greeted his music in the first postwar decade. A Hungarian

diaspora of conductors (Reiner, Doráti), violinists (Székely, Szigeti) and pianists

(Kentner, Sándor) energetically spread his music around the world, as did recent

commissioners of his works (Sacher, Koussevitzky, Menuhin and Primrose).

His later works, particularly the orchestral and chamber music, gained increasing

access to mainstream concerts, sometimes to the chagrin of the postwar avant

garde. Within Hungary itself, Bartók’s compositions were during the late 1940s

and early 1950s subjected to investigation for their socialist-realist qualities, with

approval being accorded to his folksong settings, lighter piano works, and such

orchestral works as the Dance Suite, and disapproval to what one Hungarian critic

called ‘formalist, modernist works written in an abstract language’, such as The

Miraculous Mandarin, the first two piano concertos, the Fourth String Quartet and

the Cantata profana. The excesses of this phase passed with the early 1950s,

however, and by the mid-1950s Bartók’s works were in official favour with the

communist authorities, just as his life was now interpreted as a socialist symbol of

resistance both to European fascists and to American capitalists. In the 1950s,

however, a complex dispute arose concerning the estates which Bartók had left, by

different wills, in Hungary and America. Lasting into the 1980s, this dispute

perpetuated a ‘cold war’ attitude of musical and scholarly non-cooperation

between the two countries of his residence, and resulted in retarded dissemination

of many important primary-source materials as well as distinctly different research

traditions and repertory focusses.

Bartók’s influence upon other composers certainly lacked the intensity and

dogmatic hold of Schoenberg, or the widespread impact of the neo-classical

Stravinsky. Always averse to teaching composition, Bartók did not leave behind

any loyal ‘school’. The composer most directly influenced by Bartók, and Bartók

in turn by him, was undoubtedly Kodály. So closely did the two collaborate,

especially in their earlier years, that the extent of their interdependence cannot be

fully known. Leading composers of following generations on whose works Bartók

exerted some measure of direct influence include Messiaen, Lutosławski, Britten,

Ginastera, Copland and Crumb. Among Hungarians, György Kroó (in Ránki,

B1987) has noted that Bartók provided a powerful model particularly for

composers emerging between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, not so much in terms

of specific techniques (although there had since 1945 been much superficial

imitation of his distinctive string and percussion sounds, and of a narrow band of

formal and folksong models) as in the human and professional ideals which he

offered, as Hungarian music sought to throw off its postwar isolation and to re-

establish a pan-European significance.

For a naturally reluctant teacher Bartók left a surprisingly powerful pedagogic

legacy. That legacy lies, to a minor extent, in the students of his Academy and

private piano lessons, who included the conductor Fritz Reiner, the pianists Lajos

Heimlich (Hernádi), Ernő Balogh, Ditta Pásztory and Andor Földes, the

ethnomusicologist Jenő Deutsch, and, briefly, the conductor Georg Solti. More

significant, however, for broader musical education were Bartók’s publications:

the many, early instructive editions of piano ‘classics’ and studies which he

produced between 1907 and the mid-1920s, as well as the Bartók-Reschofsky

Piano Method, but, above all, his compositions for young pianists (For Children,

Mikrokosmos), violinists (Forty-four Duos) and singers (Twenty-seven Choruses

and many simpler folksong arrangements). That Bartók produced the most

significant of these works in the 1930s, at the height of his maturity, attests to the

importance which he placed on educating a new generation in contemporary

styles.

As a performer, Bartók’s personal legacy was not great. With his dour personality

and diffident platform manners he did not manage to thrill the great public; within

the Hungarian context he was overshadowed by his better-known contemporary

Ernő Dohnányi. An outstanding corner of his pianistic legacy is, nonetheless, the

collection of gramophone, piano-roll and live recordings, dating from his last

quarter-century. These performances, with their wealth of tonal shadings, tempo

fluctuations and occasional deviations from the published scores, remind present-

day interpreters of the essentially Romantic underpinning to Bartók’s performing

art.

The ethnomusicological legacy of Bartók has been varied. Within the international

history of that discipline, his stature is more that of a precursor than of a seminal

figure. His significance outside Hungary is now largely historic, as an early

proponent of transcriptional exactitude rather than as a founder of enduring

disciplinary principles. Had he lived to complete his envisaged comparative study

of eastern European folk musics his international significance might well have

been more profound. Within Hungary his ethnomusicological legacy is

perpetuated in the Academy of Sciences’ long-term projects for a complete edition

of Hungarian folk music and a complete collection of Bartók’s own

systematization of Hungarian folksong, both of which remain substantially

unpublished. The greatest legacy of Bartók’s folk-music studies, however,

undoubtedly lies in his own compositions. It was exactly those ethnomusicological

fascinations with musical detail and subtle observations of variant forms (which

have led to periodic accusations from latter-day ethnomusicologists that he was not

‘seeing the wood for the trees’) which fed his greatest creative strengths. What

contemporaries such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky could not well appreciate was

that Bartók’s folk-music studies provided him with a limitless arsenal for creative

transformation. His approach to art-music sources was similarly transformational,

as his Romanian colleague Constantin Brăiloiu once observed: ‘Impressionism,

polytonality, atonality, motorism: Bartók has passionately lived through all these

revolutions and reshaped, as it were, for his own use, with his own rich resources,

all systems’ (in Moreux, E1949).