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Bartók, Béla (Viktor János)
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Bartók, Béla (Viktor János)
(b Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary [now Sinnicolau Mare, Romania], 25 March 1881; d New York, 26 Sept. 1945).
Hungarian composer. The greatest musician ever produced by Hungary, Bartók was not only a
composer but also an excellent pianist and a thorough student of folk music. His folksong research
had a penetrating influence on his music, yet so too did his reverence for composers of the past,
especially Beethoven and Bach, and his awareness of the musical present. All this gave rise to a
very original and perfectly homogeneous style, Hungarian in tone but universal in its expressive
power.
1. The early years
Bartók was brought up by his mother after his father's early death, and it was she who encouraged
the musicality he showed from infancy, both in composing and in playing the piano. In 1898 he
gained a free scholarship to the academy in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but
he chose instead to follow his older friend Dohnányi in studying in Budapest, where he was a
composition pupil of Hans Koessler. This was a decisive move, for it brought him into contact with
the Hungarian nationalist movement: in 1902 he wrote his first songs with Hungarian texts, and the
next year he produced the symphonic poem Kossuth, celebrating in Straussian terms the life of the
national hero. Then, in 1904, he made the discovery that opened the way to a specifically Hungarian
musical style: he heard for the first time a real Hungarian folksong, not one of the Gypsy tunes used
by Liszt and Brahms.
During the next few years he produced a steady stream of musical arrangements and scholarly
articles based on the folksongs he was collecting, often in collaboration with his friend Zoltán
Kodály. In 1907 the two men took appointments at the Budapest Academy, and, in the face of
opposition, they set about bringing a new vitality and national pride into Hungarian musical life.
Bartók's First Quartet (1909) is typical of this period in combining features from Hungarian folk
music with others taken from contemporaries in the West (Strauss's influence now wanes in favour
of Debussy's), and in doing so within the most testing of classical genres.
His next major effort was a Hungarian opera, Bluebeard's Castle (1911; Budapest, 1918), in which
he follows Debussy and Musorgsky in finding a vocal style to suit the particular qualities of his
language. The brilliant orchestration still leans in the direction of Strauss, and also Debussy, whose
influence is predominant in the fairy ballet The Wooden Prince (1917). Here the most distinctively
Bartókian element is a grotesque dance led by the xylophone, comparable to the once notorious
Allegro barbaro for piano (1911). A successful production of the ballet in 1917 led to the staging of
the opera in the following year, and Bartók now began to receive wider attention. The Viennese
publishing house of Universal Edition (who handled the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern)
took over his scores, among the first works to benefit being the Second Quartet (1915–17), which
shows Bartók beginning to build a coherent style on the basis of folksong. New influences now
began to enter his music. The Three Studies for piano (1918) and the two sonatas for violin and
piano (1921 and 1922) stand on the brink of atonality and show an acquaintance with Schoenberg
in the contrapuntal freedom of their wide-ranging lines, while the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin
(1918–19; Cologne, 1926) recalls in part The Rite of Spring. Before long, however, these influences
had been fully absorbed; the orchestral Dance Suite (1923) was both Bartók's first great popular
success and the first work in a ‘middle period’ of supreme confidence and maturity.
2. The years of maturity
Bartók was now an international figure. Between the wars he toured Europe and America as a
concert pianist, writing for himself the Sonata and the suite Out of Doors (both 1926) as well as the
first two piano concertos (1926 and 1930–1). Both of these had their first performances at festivals
of the International Society for Contemporary Music, in which Bartók took a leading part from its
foundation in 1922. However, he retained his teaching post in Budapest, and he continued his
studies of folk music, though he made no more collecting expeditions. One of his main tasks as an
ethnomusicologist was the classifying of variants of a melody, and his intensive work on that may
well have contributed to the far-reaching variation technique he developed. This is shown, for
example, in the Third Quartet (1927), a single movement in which the first part is densely worked
from a small motif, the second is a set of canonic variations, and the third and fourth recapitulate the
first and second respectively. From this Bartók proceeded to the symmetrical five-part forms
(ABCBA) of the Fourth and Fifth Quartets (1928 and 1934) and the Second Piano Concerto, all of
which show how he could find the essence of folk melodies and rhythms without actual quotation.
The works of this period also show a continuing interest in new sound resources. Bartók's piano
writing in the First Piano Concerto and the Sonata is often stridently percussive, though there are
also examples here, as in Out of Doors, of atmospheric ‘night music’. In the Concerto, too, he
scrupulously indicates how the percussion players are to obtain novel effects, looking forward to the
Sonata for two pianos and percussion (1937). And in writing for strings, whether in the quartets or
the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), he calls for a wide variety of textures and
playing techniques. The Music for Strings, which characteristically ends by converting a twisting
chromatic theme into an open diatonic one, mirrors a development that was taking place in Bartók's
style. Partly influenced by the elegant counterpoint of Bach (see the opening movement of the
Second Piano Concerto), his music became clearer in harmony and more luminous in spirit. The
change is already well advanced in the Second Violin Concerto (1937–8) and the Sixth Quartet
(1939), for all the expressive intensity of both works, but it is even more marked in the works written
after Bartók had emigrated to the USA in 1940.
Cut off from his friends, depressed by the progress of the war, lacking concert engagements, Bartók
spent his last years in quiet neglect. He completed only two new works, the ebullient Concerto for
Orchestra (1943) and the post-Bachian Sonata for unaccompanied violin (1944), leaving Tibor Serly
to complete the last few bars of the Third Piano Concerto (1945) and to compose the Viola Concerto
(1945) from sketches.
Paul Griffiths
Bibliography
H. Stevens , The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (New York, 1953, 3/1993)
E. Lendvai , Béla Bartók: An Analysis of his Music (London, 1971)
J. Ujfalussy , Béla Bartók (Budapest, 1971) [in Eng.]
T. Crow (ed.), Bartók Studies (Detroit, 1976)
B. Suchoff (ed.), Béla Bartók: Essays (London, 1976)
P. Griffiths , Bartók (London, 1984)
M. Gillies , The Bartók Companion (London, 1993)
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