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Why is Bartók’s music is still played and enjoyed? Perhaps because its complexity thrills, while its folksiness continues to reflect real life. Bartók brings us a heady mix of sexual charge, raw confrontation and outlandish fantasy.
Bartók's style in his art music compositions was a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism. His melodic and harmonic sense was influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and other nations. He was especially fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music. Most of his early compositions ...
Dec 27, 2020 · As it turned out Bartók decided to leave the work in two movements and not develop his ideas for the third. A week after the concerto was finished, Geyer ended their relationship and chose not to play the piece.
Sep 28, 2020 · Bartók rewrote the coda, allowing the solo violin to play to the final bar. The original version can be heard on Viktoria Mullova’s 1997 recording with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. There is something magical and inevitable about the way Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto begins.
- Overview
- Career in Hungary
- U.S. career
- Legacy
Béla Bartók (born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary, Austria-Hungary [now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania]—died September 26, 1945, New York, NewYork, U.S.) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist, and teacher, noted for the Hungarian flavour of his major musical works, which include orchestral works, string quartets, piano solos, seve...
Bartók spent his childhood and youth in various provincial towns, studying the piano with his mother and later with a succession of teachers. He began to compose small dance pieces at age nine, and two years later he played in public for the first time, including a composition of his own in his program.
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Composers & Their Music
Following the lead of another eminent Hungarian composer, Ernö Dohnányi, Bartók undertook his professional studies in Budapest, at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music, rather than in Vienna. He developed rapidly as a pianist but less so as a composer. His discovery in 1902 of the music of Richard Strauss stimulated his enthusiasm for composition. At the same time, a spirit of optimistic nationalism was sweeping Hungary, inspired by Ferenc Kossuth and his Party of Independence. As other members of Bartók’s generation demonstrated in the streets, the 22-year-old composer wrote a symphonic poem, Kossuth (1903), portraying in a style reminiscent of Strauss, though with a Hungarian flavour, the life of the great patriot Lajos Kossuth, Ferenc’s father, who had led the revolution of 1848–49. Despite a scandal at the first performance, occasioned by a distortion of the Austrian national anthem, the work was received enthusiastically.
Shortly after Bartók completed his studies in 1903, he and the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, who collaborated with Bartók, discovered that what they had considered Hungarian folk music and drawn upon for their compositions was instead the music of city-dwelling Roma. A vast reservoir of authentic Hungarian peasant music was subsequently made known by the research of the two composers. The initial collection, which led them into the remotest corners of Hungary, was begun with the intention of revitalizing Hungarian music. Both composers not only transcribed many folk tunes for the piano and other media but also incorporated into their original music the melodic, rhythmic, and textural elements of peasant music. Ultimately, their own work became suffused with the folk spirit.
Bartók was appointed to the faculty of the Academy of Music in 1907 and retained that position until 1934, when he resigned to become a working member of the Academy of Sciences. His holidays were spent collecting folk material, which he then analyzed and classified, and he soon began the publication of articles and monographs.
As Nazi Germany extended its sphere of influence in the late 1930s and Hungary appeared in imminent danger of capitulation, Bartók found it impossible to remain there. After a second concert tour of the United States in 1940, he immigrated there the same year. An appointment as research assistant in music at Columbia University, New York City, enabled him to continue working with folk music, transcribing and editing for publication a collection of Serbo-Croatian women’s songs, a part of a much larger recorded collection of Balkan folk music. With his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory, he was able to give a few concerts. His health, however, was never very strong and had begun to deteriorate even before his arrival in the United States.
Bartók’s last years were marked by the ravages of leukemia, which often prevented him from teaching, lecturing, or performing. Nonetheless, he was able to compose the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), the Sonata for violin solo (1944), and all but the last measures of the Piano Concerto No. 3 (1945). When he died, his last composition, a viola concerto, was left an uncompleted mass of sketches (completed by Tibor Serly, 1945).
The significance of Béla Bartók lies in four major areas of music—composition, performance, pedagogy, and ethnomusicology. As a composer of a stature equaled by few in the first half of the 20th century, he fused the essence of Hungarian and related folk music with traditional music to achieve a style that was at once nationalistic and deeply personal. As a pianist he gave concerts in Europe and the United States, disseminating the newer Hungarian music. As a teacher he helped train generations of pianists, both Hungarian and foreign. And as an ethnomusicologist he was one of the first to examine folk music with attention to its historical and sociological implications. He helped to lay the foundations for the study of comparative musical folklore in Hungary and published several important book-length studies of Hungarian and Romanian folk music. The composer’s son Peter, a recording engineer (from 1949) who worked with Folkways Records, was a crucial figure in the dissemination of American folk and avant-garde music on LP records.
Though Béla Bartók’s music was infrequently performed outside Hungary during his lifetime, many of his compositions, including the string quartets and the Concerto for Orchestra, later entered the standard concert repertory. Within a quarter century after his death, many of Bartók’s works had been recognized as belonging among the classics of Western music.
- Halsey Stevens
Béla Bartók’s music takes listeners on a journey through folklore and fantasy. Rob Cowan offers a guide to exploring his compelling genius.
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Sep 14, 2007 · The experience triggered an "Aha!" moment for Bartok. He became obsessed with tracking down original folk tunes from tiny villages in Hungary and Romania. Together with fellow composer Zoltan...
