A portrait of Béla Bartók

But what does it actually mean that Béla Bartók was Hungarian? Born in 1881, he grew up speaking several languages, writing letters in Hungarian and German, learning French early on and later Romanian, Slovakian, English and Italian; according to his son Béla Jr., he »studied the Arabic, Turkish, Bulgarian, Finnish - and at the end of his life the South Slavic languages«. The regions of the Kakan kingdom of Hungary, where Bartók, who lost his father at an early age, spent his childhood and youth, now belong to Hungary and Romania, Ukraine and Slovakia. And the folk music that Bartók, who was allergic to popular Hungarian clichés, collected systematically and passionately for decades (biographer Everett Helm places Bartók the scholar on an equal footing with Bartók the composer) could perhaps be described as »peasant« rather than »Hungarian«.

Bartók knew no national boundaries. In his Second String Quartet, composed during the First World War, he even incorporated musical influences that he had picked up on a trip to Algeria in 1913. The musicologist Karl Böhmer describes the somewhat comical expedition as follows:

»Once again, as with his research into Hungarian peasant music, he was equipped with a phonograph and music paper, and once again he was firmly convinced that he would only find what he was looking for ›in the countryside‹, i.e. far from Algiers, in the oases on the edge of the Sahara. Bartók was convinced that the music of the Arab cities was merely corrupted earlier court music, not ›genuine‹ rural folklore. He wanted to track this down - as he did in Hungary at the time - among the ›rural population‹, a fixed idea that led him on a tour of various oases. On arrival, he set up his phonograph in front of the baffled Berbers and got them to sing into it, whether they wanted to or not. Sometimes he had a ›marvellous, squinting singer‹ in front of him, sometimes reluctant nomads who frightened the composer and his wife with their ›dark looks‹.«

Without questioning Bartók’s musicological merits, this does indeed seem like an idée fixe: his mania for tracking down unadulterated sources, the search for what was genuine and pure. On a concrete historical level, it is a stubborn attempt to document a heritage that was already in the process of disappearing in the frenzied modern age. On a personal level, one could speculate about why the peasant world held such a magnetic attraction for a lonely, sensitive artist. Consolation, sublimation, promise – even redemption? No one like Bartók could ever have been happy in the real rural world, however much he may have imagined it at times. (Even Beethoven fantasised about leaving everything behind and becoming a farmer in his most difficult years, a truly bizarre idea).

Bartók’s notorious aversion to the depraved, corrupt »big city«, as expressed in the squalid milieu of »The Miraculous Mandarin«, must be seen in this context. It is one of the irritating yet exciting contradictions in the composer’s music that he created true milestones of musical modernism despite, or even because, he roundly rejected the urban and the impure.

And his moral purity (to use this difficult word in the affirmative for once) is demonstrated by the fact that Bartók did not let himself be seduced by any blood-and-soil ideology, despite his deep-seated convictions, and never sought or approved of »segregation« in the political sphere. While the young Bartók had landed a naively patriotic hit in 1903 with his symphonic poem »Kossuth«, he no longer pandered to anyone, either musically or ideologically, and certainly not after the drastic »Allegro barbaro« of 1911. And he remained admirably immune when the belief in national, cultural and racial purity spread across Europe like the plague in the 1920s and 1930s. (Without drawing simplistic parallels between the times, one wonders what Bartók would say about Hungarian politics today. Cosmopolitans such as Iván Fischer or András Schiff, Bartók’s legitimate spiritual heirs, leave no doubt about their disgust at the new mood of nationalism now rampant in Europe).

Bartók also remained scrupulous in purely musical terms. He never adopted folk music literally in his works, preferring to compose in an artful and indeed urban manner based on harmonic or rhythmic patterns taken from folk music. And even in terms of his entire oeuvre, there is remarkable diversity: Bartók did not write any major solo works for »his« instrument, despite decades of success as a world-class piano virtuoso. There are extensive collections of »small« piano pieces, some of them familiar from piano lessons, and Bartók wrote three piano concertos for the concert hall, each with its own unique character. But he didn’t compose any important piano sonatas, no mighty rhapsodies, preludes or études as Rachmaninov or Scriabin did.

If we want to look for perfection in a particular genre in Bartók’s work, the body of his six string quartets, composed between 1908 and 1939, is the place to start. Quite a challenge, but a worthwhile one. The Quartet No. 4 of 1928, for example, contains a great deal of »typical« Bartók: the synthesis of Classical-Romantic form with »genuine folk-music« elements; the marked use of percussion, including the legendary Bartók pizzicato where the plucked string has to deliberately click against the fingerboard; and the ring form in the overall structure, in which the first and last, second and last-but-one movements are full of symmetries while the third movement forms the centrepiece.

The Sixth Quartet, on the other hand, dates from Bartók’s last creative phase. After the barnburners and warhorses of the early twenties, the masterpieces showing Bartók at the height of his art date from the early thirties up to his death in exile in America on 26 September 1945. These mature works all seems to be overshadowed by a mood of immense sadness, evincing despair at the demise of the Europe he loved. Yet his late compositions evoke the grandeur and beauty of that crumbling world all the more vividly, partly through a warmer, more appealing tone. One cannot help but wish that Bartók had had no reason to compose such sad music. But the fact that he produced memories both painful and exquisite of human splendour and happiness in a collapsing world is something to be deeply grateful for.

It seems like the mask of a kind man that Béla Bartók gave one of the most complex and simply moving works of the 20th century a title almost devoid of meaning, a title that can be considered a paragon of modesty: »Concerto for Orchestra«. Bartók’s foremost biographer, Tadeusz A. Zieliński, called this immediately accessible work »the pinnacle of Bartók’s entire art« in 2010. It was largely composed in Saranac Lake in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, but it contains the whole story of European music and of the great Béla Bartók. It allows us to look him in the eye, through his many masks.

This article appeared in the Elbphilharmonie Magazin (1/24)
Translation: Clive Williams