For Len Mullenger
’The Great Composers"
An Occasional Series
by
Dr David C F Wright
based on his article
What makes a great composer?
BÉLA BARTÓK
Béla Bartók is a unique composer. Historically
and musically he is one of the most important composers of all time.
In addition he is, without doubt, a great composer. Firstly, because
his music is, in the main, highly original. He was a solitary figure
in many ways and his music is highly individual. While we may find influences
in his work such as Liszt, Debussy and Hungarian music, his own work
stands apart. His music is, in the main, entirely new and personal.
This amazing newness has only one other comparable innovator, Arnold
Schoenberg.
One of the essentials of being a great composer is
being totally original.
Secondly, he was exceptionally skilful. He was a master
of contrapuntal music and his free use of dissonance make his harmonies
fascinating. His rhythmic effects are both outstanding and stunning
and, sometimes, his music is violent. He was the first composer to accept
the piano for what it was, a percussion instrument. He had respect for
composers of a previous age . Like every great composer and true music
lover he adored Beethoven. In his own String Quartet no. 1 of 1907 he
writes a fugato which is modelled on the first movement of Beethoven's
Quartet in C sharp minor.
There is another fugato in the sensational Sonata for
two pianos and percussion of 1932 where each entry is a fifth above
the previous one and it is written as a strict four part canon there
is another in the finale of the Concerto for Orchestra of 1943.
Thirdly, his music is durable but, perhaps, in a different
way. There is always something new to find in his work. His has a very
unusual handling of tonal relationships even in his early works. This
marks him out as a composer who wanted to be original. He did not want
to copy or emulate anyone else. Or did he?
And, finally, he is one of those composers who never
composed an off-colour piece. You will not find mistakes in his music
or his instrumentation or orchestration, as you will in many other composers
even some revered ones.
Bartók has a wonderful sense of chromatic counterpoint
as seen in his early piano works such as the Esquisses, Bagatelles,
Elegies and Dirges. The Elegies, in particular, have a wonderful sense
of quiet and moving drama with false-relationships with the juxtaposition
of the major and minor. He uses all twelve notes of the scale but it
is not serial music but the free use of chromaticism. He did not want
to be predictable. He avoided diatonic elements although his music often
expresses tonality. His music is often in many implied keys at once
although it is not written in a strictly polytonal way as is the music
of Milhaud.
Although original, he had respect for old methods.
He was a not musically a rebel or censorious. For example, in the finale
of his magnificent String Quartet no. 5, from bar 202 onwards, he begins
a passage with a two-part canon and he cleverly brings it to a unison
conclusion.
There is no doubt that his Music for Strings, Percussion
and Celesta, written for Paul Sacher, is the very finest work ever written
for string orchestra. The opening movement is built up of entries each
on a different note making up all the notes of the chromatic scale.
There is an amazing central climax around the tonality of E flat and,
afterwards, the theme appears in inversion. But this is not a device
as in an academic Bach fugue. It is not mathematics since the theme
is always varied and there are changing linking episodes. The music
is truly inspirational and profoundly moving.
In the slow movement of the Violin Concerto no. 2 of
1937 Bartók uses a canon at close distance. Here is a four-part
canon for pizzicato strings with a counter-melody from the soloist which
four tonalities are exactly the same as the scherzo from Szymanowski's
String Quartet no. 1 written twenty years earlier namely F sharp, D
sharp, C and A. In the finale of the Violin Concerto there is a canon
at a crotchet's distance. The first entry is on G sharp; the second
entry, a crotchet later is on G and the third entry, another crotchet
later, is on F sharp. This dissonance makes for a tremendous tension.
The great quality that I find in Bartók's music
is that it is stripped of all those annoying ingredients that beset
lesser composers. There is no pomp or ostentation; no unvaried repetition;
nothing maudlin or cloying and no boring convention. Yet there is a
unifying whole. For example, the last movement of the String Quartet
no. 6 of 1939 has a clear obvious comparison with the first movement
of the String Quartet no. 1 of 1937 almost as if Bartók knew
this would be his last quartet. The later work is more concentrated
and masterly as opposed to the young experimentalist of the first. But
the same life pulse is there. It is the eschewing of all inessentials
that endears this genius to me.
His music is never overblown as in Schubert (for example,
the Symphony no. 9 and some of the Piano Sonatas), Mahler, Bruckner
(although his music has an amazing spiritual depth) and Elgar. Bartók
was not into padding or, as one composer said, "He did not wear five
overcoats on a hot, summer's day!" He was not arrogant or showy. He
regarded music as a craft where every detail counted and where no note
that did not naturally evolve was discarded.
He did not use devices which only serve as time-spinning.
He would have agreed with Stravinsky that ostinati were ineffective
in contrapuntal writing. He did not use sequences. A sequence is the
same phrase or idea that is repeated and builds up to a climax or resolution.
The theme in the first movement of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 7 is
an obvious example and I suppose Ravel's Bolero is another but it is
a very poor piece. As my friend, the composer John Veale, has often
pointed out Elgar was hopeless at sequences. His never got anywhere
and it was just a device to lengthen his already overlong music. It
is just laziness.
The writing of variations can also be a lazy way of
writing music. Once you have the theme you have all the building blocks.
You do not have to stretch the mind any more. As far as I am aware,
Bartók did not write any sets of variations. Although it has
to be said that writing variations in the serial method takes great
skill and ingenuity.
Bartók had an amazing ear. This meant that he
knew exactly how the music would sound before he played it. He had a
command of texture that is to say how everything blended. He knew what
he was doing and how to do it.
By comparison, Edmund Rubbra often said that when he
had an idea and began to compose he did not now how the piece would
develop or turn out. Bartók knew all these things beforehand.
And yet his music is not mechanical as is Milhaud's or as some of the
procedures of Stravinsky.
The influence of Bartók is tremendous. How many
composers have copied him and mere copying must indicate the shortcomings
of those who copy. How Hollywood has cashed in on the music of Bartók.
For example, the eerieness of the Music for Strings, Percussion and
Celesta has appeared in so many films to denote something sinister.
His aggressive music has also influenced Hollywood.
There is a mystery. Bax's Symphony no. 3 was written
some seven years before the Bartók. The similarity of the opening
movements is so striking even in its form, design and tonality. Bax
did go to Hungary where this symphony was performed. Did Bartók
copy Bax?
Bartók wanted to keep the traditional music
of his native Hungary and of Romania alive hence his collecting folk
songs with his friend, Zoltán Kodály from 1905 inwards.
Had they not written these songs down some may now have been lost. Yet
Bartók also wanted children to known their national heritage
but not be exclusive to one type of music. He composed a vast piano
work For Children in 1908 -9 and it was so important to him that he
revised in 1945, the year of his death. Perhaps he remembered his childhood
at Nagyszentmiklos. He adored children and his interest in them would
be frowned upon today in our suspicious world.
Music goes through fashion. Even today some composers
are unfashionable which may mean that there is no outstanding champion
of their music. Mendelssohn is respected rather than admired. In the
last twenty years music or so, long out of fashion music has benefited
from recordings including, for example, music by Raff, Rheinberger and
Gade, to name but three.
Bartók had his wilderness years as a composer
and one could quote the phrase that no prophet is accepted in his own
country. From about 1908 for a decade he was not well received until
the performance of his ballet The Wooden Prince of 1917 produced in
Budapest which lead to the staging of the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle
in 1918. As a composer he became disillusioned and took up his career
as a concert pianist again. During this time he wrote his first two
piano concertos of 1926 and 1930-1.
The Piano Concerto no. 2 is a towering masterpiece,
the first movement having a wind accompaniment only. Here are all the
essentials for a truly great work. It is original in conception, virtuosic
in design, powerful in communication and rewarding in response. There
is no concerto like it. A good performance reveals how exciting this
work is.
But to return to his first period of disillusionment.
He had fallen in love with the violinist Stefi Geyer and wrote his Violin
Concerto no. 1 for her during 1907-8. It did not have the desired effect
upon the young woman and the work languished in oblivion for years.
Yet he thought that the power of music was irresistible. In 1902 he
had heard Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra which had stimulated
him to be a composer. How could anyone not love great music and respond
to it? Had Stefi no heart?
It is a very beautiful work. Bartók used one
movement of the two movement concerto as one of his Two Portraits for
orchestra. He could not let this lovely music go and he had a difficult
time letting Stefi go.
Bartók was a real man. He was not effeminate.
As with many other composers his early music has an eroticism. This
is displayed in the Violin Concerto no. 1 , Duke Bluebeard's Castle
and the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin of 1918-9. The seductive music
is so real. One cannot miss or doubt its content and objective. The
most obvious comparison is the two first operas of Paul Hindemith, Murder,
the Hope of Women of 1919, the same year as Mandarin, and Das Nusch-Nuschi
of 1920 complete with its Burmese marionettes.
Bartók did not have a happy life. The political
upheavals in his own country of Hungary, particularly of the 1930s,
distressed him deeply. He was both a nationalist and a traditionalist
in many ways. From 1894 to 1899 he had studied with Erkel at Bratislava
which was then known as Pozsony and then went up to Budapest Royal Academy
of Music. His nationalism was always with him and he composed Kossuth
in 1903 which work is sometimes called a symphony, sometimes a symphonic
poem. He became professor of piano at Budapest RAM in 1907 and in 1934
had a salaried post at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to prepare
and publish his folk song collection.
But politics can destroy. It has no interest in aesthetics
or culture. What Stalin did to the musical developments in Russia is
well known. The State and religion do not and must not mix. The State
and music must also be kept entirely separate.
In the Autumn of 1940 Bartók and his second
wife, Ditta, emigrated to the USA, a country still believed to be the
land of the free. His health had collapsed; his services as a pianist
were not required even in America and his music was not heard. It was
Serge Koussevitzky who commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra from
him which encouraged him. Yehudi Menuhin had a sonata for solo violin
written for him but, always being a very inadequate musician, could
never play it well since it was beyond him . William Primrose was interested
in Bartók who composed the Viola Concerto for him which was left
unfinished at the composer's death. Tibor Serly added the final pages.
But let's look at his life in more depth.
He was born on 25 March 1881 in what is now called
Sannicolaul, Romania but was then Nagyszentmiklos (Great St Nicholas).
He had his first piano lesson at the age of five from his mother, Paula.
He suffered a severe reaction to an inoculation for smallpox resulting
in a hideous rash that persisted past his fifth birthday. This may explain
why all his life he was somewhat aloof. His father, a keen amateur musician,
was a director of an agricultural college but died when Bartók
was eight. Mother had to take up teaching again and the Bartóks
moved around a great deal to accommodate the teaching posts offered
by the authorities to Mrs Bartók. The travelling instilled a
love of the countryside and its culture in Béla.
His first public concert was at Nagyszollos, now part
of Russia, where he played Beethoven and a composition of his own called
The Danube which was inspired by geography lessons at school.
They settled in Bratislava in 1894 where Béla
studied with Laszlo Erkel and followed Erno Dohnanyi to the Budapest
Royal Academy of Music. Béla studied piano with Istvan Thoman
and composition with Janos Koessler. But his first year was beset with
serious health problems and he was went to several sanatoriums (some
outside Hungary) to recover. He settled down and in 1891 won the Liszt
scholarship. He had been a great admirer of Brahms but now turned his
attention to Liszt and Wagner. Béla was a brilliant virtuoso
pianist.
In Budapest on 12 May 1902 he heard Also Sprach Zarathustra.
As a result, he studied as much of Richard Strauss as he could. He adored
Ein Heldenleben (who doesn't?) and played it as a piano solo in Budapest
in December 1902 and took it to Vienna the next month. In 1902 he composed
a symphony which is now lost.
The premiere of Kossuth in Budapest on 13 January 1904
created a scandal. In the orchestra were German and Austrians and Kossuth
caricatures a German hymn. Bartók has no sympathy for Christianity
in any form after discovering the serious flaws in Roman Catholicism.
Lajos Kossuth was the hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848.
His first acknowledged work is the Rhapsody for piano
and orchestra, Opus 1, of 1904. That year he heard a woman, Lidi Dosa,
sing the traditional song, The Red Apple, She was a Szekely Hungarian
and he interviewed her and this began his lifelong interest in folk
and traditional music. He began to study folk music of Romania, Slovakia,
Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey and North Africa. He visited Algeria
in 1906. With Kodály he began collecting songs using an Edison
cylinder.
While visiting Transylvania in 1907 he became acquainted
with the Unitarian Church.
The beginning of his first depression was that he was
runner up for the Rubinstein prize of 1905 and he also failed in the
piano competition coming second to Wilhelm Backhaus. Bartók threw
himself into a study of genuine peasant music with his lifelong friend,
Zoltán Kodály.
I had the pleasure of meeting Kodály who was
a gentle and very likeable man. I cannot understand why Walton disliked
him so.
Things changed for Béla. He was appointed professor
of piano in 1907 to succeed his teacher Thoman.
And then there was Stefi Geyer.
Bartók was brought up as a Roman Catholic but
when he was 22, he declared himself an atheist and a follower of Nietzsche
espousing the view that man created God and that God was dead. He said
that if he crossed himself it was in the name of nature, art and science.
He poured out his heart and beliefs in two long letters to Stefi. His
rejection of the Trinity led him to Unitarianism but he did say that
you cannot blame Jesus, the greatest moralist of all time, for all the
false teachings in Roman Catholicism.
In 1909 he married a pupil, Marta Ziegler, and was
invited by Busoni to go to Berlin to conduct one of his own pieces.
This was unsuccessful. Bartók never conducted again.
In 1910 his son Béla was born.
With Kodály and a few others he formed the New
Hungarian Musical Society in 1911 to establish an independent orchestra
but the money was not forthcoming. He was discouraged.
He went to Biskra to study Arab folk music but the
First World War halted this venture.
War and internal politics and Hungarian foreign policy
made life difficult in Hungary and no one more keenly felt this than
Béla Bartók.
On 25 July 1916 he declared his conversion to Unitarianism
and joined the Mission House Congregation of the Unitarian Church in
Budapest in 1917. This was done for two reasons. He believed that members
of the church could obtain further employment for him and he did not
want his son to be exposed to Catholicism. At one time he tried to start
a music committee in the church and he had strict views himself. Only
the organ should be used in church services.
Bartók was a nature lover. He collected all
sorts of specimens: plants, minerals and especially insects. He was
fascinated by insect life - particularly at night.
Another turn in fortunes came but was soon to be crushed.
The Wooden Prince was premiered in Budapest on 12 May 1917 and had fourteen
subsequent performances that season. On 24 May 1918 Duke Bluebeard's
Castle was premiered and ran for a season. Both works were conducted
by the Italian Egisto Tango who pleased Bartók immensely. But
the libretto was written by Béla Balasz, a communist and during
the brief communist rule in Hungary during 1919 Bartók was protected
because he was a friend of Comrade Balasz.
The communist regime fell. Bartók was under
censure. He played his works in London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and
Vienna but not at home. He was angry and wrote his Five Songs, Opus
16 and dedicated them to Béla Reinitz an infamous communist,
known as ‘the assassin of the Hungarian nation’. Of course, Bartók
was very unwise to do this. If it was a punitive measure by him against
the right wing government it is dissent and shows a flawed character.
If it was a personal statement of communist belief it was also unwise.
But what a man is, is reflected in his music. His anger and violence
is clearly an expression of his circumstances and political thinking.
In fact, there is no evidence that Bartók was
sympathetic to communism. He hated all political dominance. When he
makes a clever parody of the main theme of Shostakovich's Symphony no.
7 (The Leningrad) in his own Concerto for Orchestra he is not ridiculing
Shostakovich or the communists in particular but tilting at the Russians
for their vile regime inaugurated by Lenin, whose name appears in Leningrad,
and carried on by that evil tyrant Stalin.
Both Bartók and Kodály were temporarily
suspended from their posts in 1919 for political reasons. They both
hated the fascist regime of the inter-war years.
In 1923, after the success of his two sonatas for violin
and piano, and along with Kodály and Dohnanyi, Bartók
was commissioned to write an orchestral work to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the unification of Buda and Pest. He wrote his engaging
Dance Suite. He was closely associated with ISCM from this time onwards.
In 1923 he divorced Marta and immediately married a
piano student, Ditta Pasztory. Their son, Peter, was born in 1924.
Piano music now occupied him. In 1926 he composed his
sensational Sonata for his second wife, Ditta.
That year saw the first performance in Germany, Cologne
in fact, of The Miraculous Mandarin which was immediately banned because
of its immorality. Mandarin had a similar fate in Prague in 1927 and
it did not reach the stage in Budapest until 1945. Whatever one thinks
of the subject matter, it is an evocative and truly remarkable score.
The following year Bartók embarked on his first
concert tour of America taking with him his Rhapsody and the Piano Concerto
no.1. His String Quartet no. 3 won the Philadelphia Chamber Prize.
His Cantata Profana was completed in 1930 and is scored
for tenor, baritone, double choir and orchestra. It is based on a Romanian
folk story adapted and elaborated by the composer.
In 1930 he attended the French Embassy to receive the
Légion d'honneur but when he was awarded the Corvin Medal he
refused to go to the ceremony because he would have to receive it from
the hand of Admiral Horthy, Hungary's dictator. In the 1930s he refused
to have his music played in socialist Germany or in fascist Italy.
The rise to power of Hitler troubled Bartók.
That Hungary aligned itself with this evil man distressed him further.
But his playing of some of the pieces from his piano work Mikrokosmos,
written over a period of years with his son, Peter, in mind, in 1937
brought a warm response. This is a collection of six volumes of grade
piano pieces numbering 153 pieces. Earlier in his career he had written
85 pieces entitled For Children.
Erno Dohnanyi held sway in the musical life of Budapest.
Bartók had no position or authority and the official policy in
Hungary was very conservative.
The socialism of the Nazis and their persecution of
the Jews led Bartók to compose Contrasts for clarinet, violin
and piano for the clarinettist, Benny Goodman. Goodman was a Hungarian
Jew whose name was originally Guttmann. It is a super piece and it is
widely reported that this work introduced Goodman to serious music.
Hindemith wrote a concerto for him in 1947 and Copland did likewise
in 1948. He was later to play the Mozart concerto with Barbirolli and
he recorded it. It is a good performance even though a little dry.
Bartók began to collect all his manuscripts
together planning to remove them from Hungary, which he did. He left
for the USA in the autumn of 1940 arriving there on 30 October. He embarked
on a concert tour and introducing his Sonata for two pianos and percussion
in which the second pianist was his wife, Ditta. If he had called the
work Sonata for percussion that would have been correct. It is a work
of unequalled conviction with a vitality and rhythmic drive that so
many envy. What a contrast it was to the slow- moving works of so many
other composers who produced slabs of uneventful music.
He was made a honorary doctor of music with Columbia
University. He was also given a grant to pursue his research into folk
music.
But the strain was telling on him. Ill health prevented
him giving lectures at Harvard in 1943 but he did complete the Concerto
for Orchestra commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation at the kind
suggestion of the great Fritz Reiner, whose recording of it is still
the best by far, and written in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky. He composed
his forty four Duos for two violins, the Sonata for Menuhin and began
the glorious Viola Concerto.
He also wrote his lovely Piano Concerto no. 3 in America
which is a nostalgic look back at his hobbies with nocturnal music and
bird calls.
But poverty added to his burdens. It is said that over
Christmas 1944 he literally had no money. His publishers have been blamed
for this neglect but, eventually, ASCAP came to his aid.
He died at the West Side Hospital, New York on 26 September
1945. He had been suffering from leukaemia. Ditta and Peter were by
his side.
The funeral was conducted by Rev Laurence I. Neale,
minister of All Souls Unitarian Church. The interment was at New York's
Woodlawn Cemetery but with the Iron Curtain being lifted, Peter Bartók,
the lay president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church, had his father's
remains transferred to Budapest in 1988. A statue of Bartók stands
outside the Second Unitarian Church in Budapest.
There are so many other studies we could pursue about
this composer. His six quartets are, without doubt, the finest string
quartets ever written. They have never been equalled let alone surpassed
and they never will be. But that is a vast subject in itself.
Copyright
David C F Wright 2002.
This article or any part of it must not be copied in any form whatsoever
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