Béla Bartók
For other uses, see Bartok (disambiguation). Béla Viktor János Bartók (
March 25,
1881 –
September 26,
1945) was a
Hungarian composer,
pianist and collector of Eastern
European and
Middle Eastern
folk music. Bartók is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He was one of the founders of the field of
ethnomusicology, the anthropology or ethnography of music.
Bartók was born in the
Transylvanian town Nagyszentmiklós (now
Sânnicolau Mare,
Romania), in the
Greater Hungary, part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire which was partitioned by the
Treaty of Trianon after
World War I.
He learned to play the piano early: by the age of four he was able to play 40 songs, and his mother began teaching him at the age of five.
After his father, the director of an agricultural school, died in 1888, Béla's mother, Paula, took her family to live in Nagyszőlős (today
Vinogradiv,
Ukraine), and then to Pozsony (today
Bratislava,
Slovakia). When
Czechoslovakia was created in 1918 Béla and his mother found themselves on opposite sides of the border.
|
Bartók on his high school graduation |
He later studied
piano under
István Thoman and composition under
János Koessler at the
Royal Academy of Music in Budapest from 1899 to 1903. There he met
Zoltán Kodály and together they collected folk music from the region. This was to have a major impact on his style. Previously, Bartók's idea of Hungarian folk music was derived from the gypsy melodies to be found in the works of
Franz Liszt. In 1903, Bartók wrote a large
orchestral work,
Kossuth, which honored
Lajos Kossuth, hero of the
Hungarian revolution of 1848 and incorporated gypsy melodies.
Upon discovering
Magyar peasant folk song (which he regarded as true Hungarian folk music, as opposed to the gypsy music used by Liszt) Bartók began to incorporate folk songs into his own compositions and write original folk-like tunes, as well as frequently using folksy rhythmic figures.
It was the music of
Richard Strauss, whom he met at the
Budapest premiere of
Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902, that had most influence. This new style emerged over the next few years. Bartók was building a career for himself as a pianist, when in 1907, he landed a job as piano professor at the Royal Academy. This allowed him to stay in
Hungary rather than having to tour Europe as a pianist, and also allowed him to collect more folk songs, notably in
Transylvania. Meanwhile his music was beginning to be influenced by this activity and by the music of
Claude Debussy that Kodály had brought back from Paris. His large scale orchestral works were still in the manner of
Johannes Brahms or Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which show his growing interest in folk music. Probably the first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the
String Quartet No. 1 (1908), which has several folk-like elements in it.
In 1909, Bartók married
Márta Ziegler. Their son, Béla Jr., was born in 1910.
In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only
opera,
Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to his wife, Márta. He entered it for a prize awarded by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they said it was unplayable, and rejected it out of hand. The opera remained unperformed until 1918, when Bartók was pressured by the government to remove the name of the librettist,
Béla Balázs, from the program on account of his political views. Bartók refused, and eventually withdrew the work. For the remainder of his life, Bartók did not feel greatly attached to the government or institutions of Hungary, although his love affair with its folk music continued.
After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission prize, Bartók wrote very little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on folk music collecting and arranging (in Central Europe, the Balkans,
Algeria, and Turkey). However, the outbreak of
World War I forced him to stop these expeditions, and he returned to composing, writing the
ballet The Wooden Prince in 1914–16 and the
String Quartet No. 2 in 1915–17. It was
The Wooden Prince which gave him some degree of international fame.
Bartók subsequently worked on another ballet,
The Miraculous Mandarin, influenced by
Igor Stravinsky,
Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss, following this up with his two
violin sonatas which are harmonically and structurally some of the most complex pieces he wrote. He wrote his
third and
fourth string quartets in 1927–28, after which he gradually simplified his harmonic language. The
String Quartet No. 5 (1934) is somewhat more traditional from this point of view. Bartók wrote his
sixth and last string quartet in 1939.
The Miraculous Mandarin was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content, a sordid modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder.
Bartók divorced Márta in 1923, and married a piano student,
Ditta Pásztory. His second son, Péter, was born in 1924. For Péter's music lessons Bartók began composing a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces,
Mikrokosmos, which remains popular with piano students today.
In 1940, after the outbreak of
World War II, and the European political situation worsened, Bartók was increasingly tempted to flee Hungary.
Bartók was strongly opposed to the Nazis. After they came into power in Germany, he refused to concertize there and switched away from his German publisher. His liberal views (as evident in the opera
Bluebeard's Castle and the ballet
The Miraculous Mandarin) caused him a great deal of trouble from right-wingers in Hungary.
Having first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly moved to the
USA with Ditta Pásztory. Péter Bartók joined them in 1942 and later enlisted in the
United States Navy. Béla Bartók, Jr. remained in Hungary.
Bartók did not feel comfortable in the USA, and found it very difficult to write. As well, he was not very well known in America and there was little interest in his music. He and his wife Ditta would give concerts; and for a while, they had a research grant to work on a collection of
Yugoslav folk songs, but their finances were precarious, as was Bartók's health.
|
Béla Bartók memorial plaque in Baja |
His last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6, were it not for
Serge Koussevitsky commissioning him to write the
Concerto for Orchestra, at the behest of the violinist
Joseph Szigeti and the conductor
Fritz Reiner (who had been Bartók's friend and champion since his days as Bartók's student at the Royal Academy). This quickly became Bartók's most popular work and which was to ease his financial burdens. He was also commissioned by
Yehudi Menuhin to write
Sonata for Solo Violin. This seemed to reawaken his interest in composing, and he went on to write his
Piano Concerto No. 3, an airy and almost neo-classical work, and begin work on his
Viola Concerto.
Béla Bartók died in
New York City from
leukemia in September, 1945. He left the viola concerto unfinished at his death; it was later completed by his pupil,
Tibor Serly.
He was interred in the
Ferncliff Cemetery in
Hartsdale, New York, but after the fall of Hungarian
communism in 1988, his remains were transferred to
Budapest, Hungary for a
state funeral on
July 7, 1988 with interment in Budapest's Farkasreti Cemetery.
There is a statue of Béla Bartók in
Brussels,
Belgium near the central train station in a public square, Place d'Espagne.
Paul Wilson lists as the most prominent characteristics of Bartók's music the influence of the folk music of rural Hungary and eastern Europe and the art music of central and western Europe, and his changing attitude toward (and use of) tonality, but without the use of the traditional
harmonic functions associated with major and minor scales (Wilson 1992, p.2-4).
Bartók is an influential
modernist (though see
Reception below) and his music used or may be analysed as containing various modernist techniques such as
atonality,
bitonality, attenuated harmonic function,
polymodal chromaticism,
projected sets,
privileged patterns, and large set types used as source sets such as the equal tempered twelve tone aggregate,
octatonic scale (and
alpha chord), the diatonic and heptatonia seconda seven-note scales, and less often the whole tone scale and the primary pentatonic collection (ibid, p.24-29).
He rarely used the aggregate actively to shape musical structure, though there are notable examples such as the second theme from the first movement of his
Second Violin Concerto, commenting that he "wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all twelve tones and still remain tonal". More thoroughly, in the first eight measures of the last movement of his
Second Quartet, all notes gradually gather with the twelfth (G♭) sounding for the first time on the last beat of measure 8, marking the end of the first section. The aggregate is partitioned in the opening of the
Third String Quartet with C♯-D-D♯-E in the accompaniment (strings) while the remaining pitch classes are used in the melody (violin 1) and more often as 7-35 (diatonic or "white-key" collection) and 5-35 (pentatonic or "black-key" collection) such as in no. 6 of the
Eight Improvisations. There, the primary theme is on the black keys in the left hand, while the right accompanies with triads from the white keys. In measures 50-51 in the third movement of the
Fourth Quartet, the first violin and 'cello play black-key chords, while the second violin and viola play stepwise diatonic lines (ibid, p.25).
Ernő Lendvai (1971) analyses Bartók's works as being based on two opposing systems, that of the
golden section and the
acoustic scale, and tonally on the
axis system (ibid, p.7).
Reception
Some of Bartók's works have been criticized for their use of tonality and nontonal methods unique to each piece;
Milton Babbitt, for example, praises the "identification of the personal exigency with the fundamental musical exigency of the epoch" yet concludes that "Bartók's solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated." The problem is Bartók's praised use of "two organizational principles" - tonality for large scale relationships and the piece-specific method for moment to moment thematic elements - worrying that the "highly attenuated tonality" requires extreme non-harmonic methods to create a feeling of closure. Presumably he preferred
Arnold Schoenberg's completely non-tonal non-piece specific method of
twelve tone music. (Maus 2004, p.164)
Works are catalogued with the designation Sz (Szöllösy).
Stage Works
*
Bluebeard's Castle,
opera*
The Miraculous Mandarin, ballet-pantomime
*
The Wooden Prince,
balletOrchestral Works
*Dance Suite (1923)
*
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1937)
*
Concerto for Orchestra (1942–43, revised 1945)
Concertante Works
*Piano
**
Piano Concerto No. 1 (1926)
**
Piano Concerto No. 2 (1932)
**
Piano Concerto No. 3 (1945)
*Violin
**
Violin Concerto No. 1 (1907-1908, 1st pub 1956)
**
Violin Concerto No. 2 (1937-38)
**Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (1928–29)
**Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra (1928, rev. 1935)
*Viola
**
Viola Concerto (1945)
Choral Works
*
Cantata Profana (1930)
*
From Olden Times (1935)
Chamber Works
*
Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion*
String Quartets Nos. 1-6
*Violin Sonata Nos. 1-3
*Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939)
*Violin duets (
44 Duos)
Piano Works
*
Two Romanian Folk Dances (1910)
Allegro barbaro (1911)
Elegy Op. 8a, 8b (191?)
Bagatellen (1911)
*
Piano Sonatina (1915)
Romanian Folk Dances (1915) These were also arranged for piano and violin as well as an orchestral version
*Suite for Piano, Op. 14 (1916)
Improvisations Op. 20 (1920)
*Piano Sonata (1926)
Im Freien (Out of Doors) (1926)
Mikrokosmos - These include the 6 Dances in Bulgarian Rhythym dedicated to Miss Harriet Cohen (1926, 1932–39)
Arrangements by others
*
Suite paysanne hongroise (arranged by Paul Alma, for flute and piano or orchestra)
See also
*
:Category:Compositions by Béla Bartók*Maus, Fred (2004). "Sexual and Musical Categories",
The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1580461433.
*Wilson, Paul (1992).
The Music of Béla Bartók. ISBN 0300051115.
*Gillies, Malcolm. "Béla Bartók", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed May 23, 2006),
(subscription access)*Antokoletz, Elliott (1984).
The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
*Kárpáti, János (1975).
Bartók's String Quartets. Translated by Fred MacNicol. Budapest: Corvina Press.
*Lendvai, Ernő (1971).
Béla Bartók: An Analysis of His Music. London: Kahn and Averill.
*
Bartók Béla Memorial House, Budapest*
A chronological list of Bartók's compositions*
Recording Contrasts: Verbunkos - Helen Kim, violin; Ted Gurch, clarinet; Adam Bowles, piano
Luna Nova New Music Ensemble*
Recording Contrasts: Pinheno - Helen Kim, violin; Ted Gurch, clarinet; Adam Bowles, piano
Luna Nova New Music Ensemble*
Recording Contrasts: Sebes - Helen Kim, violin; Ted Gurch, clarinet; Adam Bowles, piano
Luna Nova New Music Ensemble*
Classical Cat page of Bartók links*
His biography at Hungary.hu
