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Béla Bartók 1881–1945

The death of Béla Bartók in New York at the end of September deprives twentieth-century music of one of its greatest masters. In depth and range his influence can be compared only with that of Schönberg and Stravinsky, but it was more secret than theirs and far less apparent. Bartók’s music has never become widely or thoroughly known; it has never been a battle-cry; which has at least saved it from the grosser forms of misunderstanding. In his early years he had no external aid, as, for instance, Stravinsky had in the Russian ballet, by means of which works in new idioms could get a wider hearing. He wrote no work which caused a headline riot, but could gradually become familiar as it was carried by the glamour of novelty and spectacle. He was free from any sort of advertisement. Nor did Bartók, like Schönberg, form a new technical and aesthetic school in the very holy of holies of an ancient tradition; nor could he, for Hungary had in music no such tradition. Perhaps this is why he found his own individual (his modern) style before either Schönberg or Stravinsky found theirs, and why his earliest works are fresher than theirs, less dated. He could travel with less luggage.

His existence was for the most part as isolated as his works. Except for invitations to foreign capitals to play, say, one of his piano concertos – he was a brilliant, unique pianist – he remained in his native Hungary, teaching the piano, sorting his immense collections of folk-music, and steadily composing. For the last few years Bartók had been living in the U.S.A. where he went after being exiled for standing out against the new order in Hungary.

It is for his scholarly activities in folk-music that he is probably best known. From his twenties, with his friend, Zoltan Kodály, he had been unearthing layer after layer, type after type of the old pre-gipsy music of Hungary and the neighbouring countries, and of Arabia even. This music entered deeply into his consciousness, and his folk-music arrangements are models for all time. It also served as basis for an indigenous style. Bartók took it as basis for his own developments, very radical ones, for his ideas of expression were radical, and he was not one of those who leave folk-music as they find it. We are faced here not only with the strangeness of the raw material, but with the strangeness of Bartók’s uniquely original mind.

There were from the beginning three other determining influences on Bartók. Behind his earliest works, such as the Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, the Deux Portraits and Two Suites for orchestra there stand, to be sure, Brahms and Wagner and Strauss; but Liszt was the dominating influence, and his admiration for Liszt never left him. It is well known that even those who find Liszt’s compositions unsatisfactory as finished works of art, admit that they contain, especially the later ones, a profusion of the most imaginative ideas eminently capable of being worked out by his successors if only they possess an equal imagination and, perhaps, a greater integrity. These ideas were by no means exhausted by Busoni and Ravel. They are very plainly seen in, for instance, Bartók’s magnificent, tragic and highly original Elegies, op. 8/b, for piano, and there are others. These Elegies have a Lisztian wildness and temperament, but the intensity of expression is matched by an equal intensity of will. Bartók is separated from his contemporaries in Vienna by three barriers: Liszt; the piano (for he wrote piano music rather than music for piano, to use Stravinsky’s distinction); and folk-music. Hence the freshness of his texture compared with others.

Another great and lasting influence on Bartók was Debussy. This was not only of the superficial kind that appeared in the work of all the young composers of that time to whom Debussy’s music had come as a revelation and a promise of release. Not that Bartók ever imitated; or perhaps he had only to imitate in order to be in fact original. Besides, expression was always his aim, not effects of association. What he learned from Debussy was new possibilities in the handling of notes and in the scope of music; simplicity of expression and texture; direct statement without necessary and therefore academic complications; the importance of our music of the individual note, of sonority, which should lead to a new logic of melody and harmony adapted to express new types of rhythm. The piano piece ‘Music of the Night,’ and the slow movements of the Dance Suite for orchestra, the fifth Quartet, the Sonata for two pianos and percussion, and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta are wonderful examples in Bartók’s most mature style of the direct aesthetic influence of Debussy.

The common feature of the really significant composers of our time is the search for means with which to relate, contrast and unify all the valuable discoveries which cannot be contained within the control of the classical key-system. Not to add patch after patch to the old cloth, but to find architectonic principles capable of fulfilling over an incomparably wider range of material what the old key relationships fulfilled over theirs, is the goal. For these, if found, would mean the solution of the problem of how to write large-scale works nowadays, how to have Beethoven’s scale if you have the will and a like mind.

And Beethoven was the third great influence on Bartók. The affinity lies very deep. Bartók has the same ruthless will to form, to personal form, the same intensity of violence and tenderness, the same compelling, childlike directness of vision. These qualities may give his music its frequent harshness, even uncouthness, but they give it also its reality, its power and value.

Bartók’s earliest works show command of the romantic techniques then in vogue and they attained some measure of popularity. It is indeed unaccountable that they have not won a permanent place in the concert repertory. With the Fourteen Bagatelles, op. 6, for piano, Bartók sacrificed popularity and became the most advanced composer of the day. These short pieces are a landmark in his career and a complete dictionary of modern music. In them can be found all the devices which Bartók has since exploited. They are the testament of his whole development. Their characteristics are economy to the point of starkness, the use of Magyar scales for both melody and harmony, great freedom in the use of subsidiary notes, rhapsodic and insistent rhythms. They are lyrical and dramatic statements, like Beethoven’s Bagatelles. There followed many more piano works, the Esquisses, the Ten Easy Pieces, to name only a few, all of the same concentration and expressive energy. To this time also belong the Allegro Barbaro, his most famous piece and for many people the essence of Bartók, the four volumes of real and beautiful children’s pieces, many folk-song arrangements, the ‘Deux Images’ for orchestra, op. 10, and the first String Quartet, op. 8. The Images should be played more; they are an excellent introduction to Bartók, as fresh and new in sonority now as when they were written, and easier on the ear than most of the later works. The Quartet, op. 8, was his first large-scale masterpiece, the first also of a series of six quartets constituting probably the greatest contribution to the chamber music of our time. The first movement, lento, has a wonderfully rich and indefinitely expressive polyphonic texture. The second, in a livelier triple rhythm, develops quietly out of the first with as much variety of expression, and is given at climaxes that Kodály-like volupté which Bartók so rarely uses. The last, allegro vivace, has a wilder mood expressed with a bold and novel use of dissonance.

By 1920 Bartók had written an opera, ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’; two ballets, ‘The Wooden Prince’ and ‘The Wonderful Mandarin,’ which develops the Allegro Barbaro manner; and the second String Quartet (1915-17), one of his greatest works. The first movement of this quartet is both passionate and serene. Its polyphony is even more highly developed than that of the first quartet. One is occasionally surprised to find the harmony reminding one of Scriabin, though it is completely transformed by Bartók’s very personal melodic line and masterly texture. As for the style, there might have been no music since Beethoven’s posthumous quartets. The second movement is in the Allegro Barbaro manner, and the last, lento, is utterly stark, bare, lonely and tragic. Bartók had written nothing so uncompromising before. We do not find this mood again until the slow movements of the Piano Sonata (1926) and the Divertimento for Strings (1939).

The second Sonata for violin and piano (1923) can be considered, technically, as the second landmark in Bartók’s development. It is at once a consolidation of his former practice and a starting-point for still further explorations. The two movements are mature examples of very characteristic moods, the freely rhapsodic and the stylized dance-movement of elaborate and violent rhythms. The violin part is purely melodic, the piano part almost entirely percussive, using what may be called chord-clusters. Being thus free from the complexities of counterpoint, it serves as a particularly clear example of the chief features of Bartók’s technique.

Tibor Serly, the Hungarian-American composer and Henry Pleasants, in an extremely interesting joint article in ‘Modern Music,’ covered much of Bartók’s practice under one general category. This is the principle of the unresolved passing-note, from which follows the unresolved passing-chord and, more important still, the unresolved neighbouring tonality. Bartók had in harmonizing music of folk-origin always drawn his harmonies out of the scale of the tune. Frequently in original composition he mixed his modes. It would seem thus far that the music could be analysed in the same way as the music of other neo-modalists, however much more radical Bartók’s treatment might be. But in a more advanced stage it could be analysed in terms of polytonality. At a more advanced, or freer, stage still his melody seemed almost indistinguishable from that of the so-called atonalists. Indeed his melody often did become as free as theirs. But in reality it is very strongly anchored to a definite tonality. The superficial appearance of atonality is due to the fact that the ear does not at first easily perceive the subsidiary tonalities within the principal one. The anchorage, though, is essentially diatonic. A rider to this principle will further explain why the tonality is now immediately perceived. Frequently the unresolved passing-note is interchangeable with the note of resolution. It is not therefore difficult to imagine the complexity, the possibilities for variety and freedom within the strong control of simple relationships which this technique breeds when contrapuntal motion is used. Yet the triad is at the base of this system. The results are to be seen in the immense structures of the later quartets. In them Bartók has shown that it is possible to organize all and any kinds of material in a consistent, intelligible style. The importance of this for the future is enormous. By these means also he avoids the feeling of perpetual modulation, whether effected by diatonic chromaticism or chromatic diatonicism.

Bartók is of course primarily a melodic composer, and a great contrapuntist. The feeling is always carried by the melodic line and its rhythm. Harmony as such is subordinate. It points the rhythms, gives relative emphasis in the phrasing, and strengthens the tonality. By means of dissonance it keeps the line to clear, clean-cut, vigorous articulation. It is not for nothing that Bartók made an extensive and thorough study of composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For they also treated harmony as a function of melody as against the nineteenth-century composers who more and more did the reverse until a dead end was reached. Bartók saw (nor was he the only one) that there were possibilities of development from eighteenth-century practice other than that taken by the romantics, which was one of more and more chromaticism. From 1923 on Bartók has consciously developed his technique with the principles of the eighteenth century but with all the resources and experience of a twentieth-century composer. What, then, is his relationship to neo-classicism? It is certainly quite different from Stravinsky’s.

To speak of contemporary composers in terms of classicism and romanticism as if they could be essentially either in an age which itself is neither may seem to many people futile. The terms are, however, useful for historical reference and for a short-hand way of drawing attention to analogies, however incomplete. And the slogan ‘neo-classicism’ forces the question on one’s attention. ‘Neo-classicism’ is the word for a specialized way of writing and a certain attitude towards music, but it does not necessarily have any relation to other or wider meanings of the word classicism. Bartók is not neo-classical in this sense, nor does his espousal of eighteenth-century principles make him any the more so. But there are phases in his development for the labelling of which the words classical and romantic are useful. I am not thinking so much of the Form v. Feeling imbroglio, for clearly in great music they are balanced, as of whether (1) the composer has the feeling or idea and then finds the notes, or (2) whether he trusts his musical material (which, anyway, has feeling inherent in it) to develop appropriately. The second will have as much symbolism (content) as the first, but, granted the requisite feeling and aesthetic sense, is likely to be more integrated and capable of longer flights. The first is likely to be immature, new, the second mature, old. The first I call romantic, the second classical. Bartók’s earlier works tend to the romantic, his later to the classical. When style cannot be taken for granted, as at present, the progress of a significant composer will be from romanticism to the equilibrium of classicism, as goal. This is a measure of the importance of Bartók’s life: that maybe the technical means he found for achieving equilibrium will be the means by which composers of the future will find it too; for to them it may be the common vocabulary and stable syntax which we have been looking for since the eighteenth century.

Bartók’s later works, then, the fruit of earlier victories, start in or around 1926 with the first Piano Concerto and Piano Sonata. Much use is made of imitation, canon and fugue, also of what some people would call rondo, others concerto grosso form. The style of the sonata is nearer to the Italian Concerto of Bach than to any classical sonata form. These works and those that follow are characterized by extreme harmonic acerbity reinforced by the rhythmic insistence stemming originally, surely, from the Waldstein Sonata – the ‘Allegro Barbaro’ manner – and by very close conjunct movement in the melody and counterpoint. Poetical in conception as the slow movements are, they too are just as uncompromising.

With the second Piano Concerto comes greater emotional freedom in the fast movements, and therefore more grandeur, more, too, of the old characteristic élan, and the slow movement has a calm, unearthly beauty.

The third and fourth String Quartets followed in 1927 and 1928, the fifth in 1934. They are all superb examples of the later style and models of what boldness can be achieved within the limits of perfect quartet style. The two latter are in five movements, the central one acting as a centre from which the others radiate. All the movements of both leave unforgettable impressions. Later Bartók used the same principles in the broader manner suitable to symphonic writing in the superb Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Since then Bartók’s works have had a new buoyancy, emotional expansion and ease. This applies even to the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, still on the fauve side; and the Violin Concerto as well as the Divertimento for Strings are, without being any the less original, positively ingratiating. From all accounts the new Concerto for Orchestra is too. This emotional ease comes back to chamber music in his most intimate and gentle work, the sixth Quartet. Lastly mention must be made of the 153 piano pieces called Mikrokosmos. They are not only a complete course in piano-playing, but a breviary of modern composition in general and of all the methods of Bartók’s later style in particular.

It is indeed a tragedy for music that Bartók should die in the midst of this new period, his creative powers going from strength to strength, and just as he was making some contact with audiences.

Béla Bartók was born on May 25, 1881, in a place then Hungarian but now Yugoslav, and his early years were spent in various parts of the old dominion of Hungary. He received his schooling in Pressburg and went from there to the Royal Hungarian Musical Academy at Budapest where he studied piano and, under Hans Koessler, composition from 1899 to 1903. He was appointed professor of piano at the Budapest Conservatoire and there produced his one-act opera ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ in 1911 and in 1917 a ballet ‘The Woodcut Prince.’ Works of his were given regularly at the International Festivals of Contemporary Music. He took refuge in America when the Nazis overran his country and remained there till his death at the end of September.

Musical Times, November 1945