Béla Bartók
(1881–1945)
Who Was
Béla Bartók?
A Brief Introduction
Béla Bartók was one of the foremost composers of the 20th century, a major figure in Hungarian music. The distinctive tang and spring of his music comes from the scales and rhythms he found in folk music—not just Hungarian (for he abhorred nationalism), but also that of many Central European populations. Working with these sources, unexplored previously, brought him close to other musical innovators of the time, such as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Yet Bartók remained deeply attached to how older music flowed with a sure sense of purpose, and, thus, his music is nearer traditional norms than that of his fellow modernists. Much of it has been readily absorbed into the standard repertory, including his six string quartets and his Concerto for Orchestra.
Early Years: Education and a Moment of Discovery
Bartók was just a small child when his father died. He was brought up by his mother, who encouraged his musical aspirations. He wrote his first compositions at the age of nine, and by his mid-teens had graduated to sonatas and string quartets. Professional training in composition and piano followed at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, from which he graduated in 1903.
On vacation the following year, he heard a servant girl singing a song of a kind he had never heard. He asked her about it and discovered she had learned it from her grandmother in Transylvania. Brahms and Liszt had based their Hungarian styles on the Roma bands of Viennese cafés, but Bartók had heard an indigenous and probably older music, and in 1908—with his friend and fellow composer Zoltán Kodály—he went to Transylvania to find it. Its effect on his music was immediate and profound, beginning with his First String Quartet (1908–09).
Brahms and Liszt had based their Hungarian styles on the Roma bands of Viennese cafés, but Bartók had heard an indigenous and probably older music, and in 1908... he went to Transylvania to find it. Its effect on his music was immediate and profound.
Middle Period: The International Composer
One of the outstanding pianists of his time, and an esteemed professor of piano at the Liszt Academy, Bartók produced a good deal of piano music in the years following his First Quartet, including his Allegro barbaro (1911). But the strong influence of folk music went also into his opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) and a variety of orchestral pieces. He was signed by Universal Edition, a publishing firm specializing in modernist music whose support brought him wider recognition.
Bartók’s home was in Budapest with his wife and son (in 1923, he divorced, remarried, and soon had a second son), and his creative life was solidly based there: his next three quartets, for instance, were all composed for the Hungarian ensemble that had introduced the first. Nevertheless, he traveled regularly for performances. He performed a lot with the new generation of Hungarian violinists, playing his two violin sonatas (1921–22) around Europe with other repertory. His first two piano concertos took him to Frankfurt for their premieres, in 1927 and 1933—the latter seven days before Hitler came to power, after which Bartók refused to appear in Germany or have his music presented there. Patrons in Switzerland took up the slack—notably Paul Sacher, who commissioned Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936).
Bartók: Quartet No. 4 for Strings, BB 95
An avowed atheist, Bartók was a humanist who recognized that humanity shared much more than what separated them and that their differences, manifest in their folk traditions, were cause for joy and celebration. That was the implicit message of his Dance Suite (1923), a linked sequence of dances from regions of Central Europe and North Africa.
Most of his larger mature works are, however, abstract in nature: sonatas, quartets, and concertos. These were classic forms, but Bartók remade them using alternative, folk-derived scales and his own taste for symmetry. Often there are five movements or sections in an A–B–C–B–A palindromic structure, with an energetic finale.
Late Period: New York City
Discouraged by the slide toward fascism in Hungary and the outbreak of World War II, Bartók left in October 1940 for New York City. His health was in decline, and although he had a job at Columbia University working on its collection of Yugoslav folk music, he was anxious about how his second wife, Ditta, would survive. He therefore wrote for her a third piano concerto (1945) which is less demanding for the soloist than the first two. He also composed a tough Sonata for Solo Violin (1944) for Yehudi Menuhin. Hungarian friends clandestinely engineered a commission from Serge Koussevitzky which resulted in the Concerto for Orchestra (1942–43). The first performance of that work, which took place in Boston in December 1944, was the last occasion Bartók was seen in public. He died the following year.
Legacy
Bartók would have had no idea that, after the war, his Concerto for Orchestra would rapidly become as much a repertory piece as any of Beethoven’s symphonies, that other orchestral works of his would appear frequently in concert halls and on soundtracks, or that his string quartets would be regarded as the most important from the first half of the 20th century. While parts of Stravinsky’s output are neglected and Schoenberg’s mature works are rarely performed today, the majority of Bartók’s oeuvre remains alive.
Meanwhile, his music’s mysteries have engaged generations of scholars and subsequent composers—especially in Hungary, where it was a key example for György Ligeti and György Kurtág.
Bartók would have had no idea that... his string quartets would be regarded as the most important from the first half of the 20th century.
Watching and Listening
Bartók’s quartets have naturally returned often to programs given by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, whose online archive offers performances of all but the first. A good starting point would be the Fifth Quartet, in a performance that illuminates the Bach-like interconnectedness of Bartók’s music without missing its urgency. This is one of those five-part works, with slow second and fourth movements. It’s a small step from there to the more dissonant Fourth Quartet—also in five movements, but with fast second and fourth movements. There are excellent performances by the Emerson Quartet (tight and true) and the Jerusalem Quartet (looser and sweeter). Bruce Adolphe gives expert and engaging lecture-demonstrations on the Fourth Quartet and the melancholy Sixth, zipping from podium to piano and cuing extracts from the players on stage. The Third Quartet is the most compact and challenging of the set, but here, given tenderness and intensity, it sounds exquisite.
Bruce Adolphe also takes us into Contrasts, which Bartók wrote for Benny Goodman on clarinet, Joseph Szigeti on violin, and Bartók himself on piano. Mixing European folk flavors with a touch of jazz, this piece is available in performances with clarinetists Sebastian Manz and Romie de Guise-Langlois. Bartók’s wild ballet The Miraculous Mandarin is given an electric outing in its piano, four hands version, and his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is as exciting visually as it is aurally.
