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The exhibition is based largely on the original
material of the Budapest Bartók Archives where the composer’s
Hungarian legacy is preserved as permanent deposit from the
composer’s heirs. Its holdings of primary sources are
complemented with copies (mainly high quality colour copies) of
compositional autographs and letters from the composer’s
American estate generously donated to the Archives for scholarly
use by the composer’s younger son, Peter who owns the
manuscripts left in the US in his private collection.
With this
exhibition, we wish to capture something of Bartók’s
significance especially as a composer who was also an
ethnomusicologist. His personality is addressed primarily on two
pages, Portraits of the Man and
Private Life. The former is accompanied by quotations from
recollections while the latter includes a few particularly
important passages from Bartók letters to female confidentes of
various periods of his life, the violinist Stefi Geyer in 1907,
his first wife Márta Ziegler and his second wife Ditta Pásztory,
as well as a few personal recollections of family members such
as that of his son Peter about an excursion. Private Life is
contrasted with Public Life, a page intended to provide a
sketchy picture of Bartók’s career through snapshots of his
professional life as concert pianist, participant of festivals
and conferences, and teacher.
A series of
six further thematic pages address characteristics of Bartók’s
work. Dichotomies point to the significance of contrastive pairs
such as “ideal” and “grotesque” (or “distorted”)
paradigmatically formulated in the Two Portraits 1908–1911),
which replaced as op. 5 the early (and discarded) Violin
Concerto (1907–1908) written for Stefi Geyer, a work also
completed as a two-movement composition. Pairing is also present
in Bartók’s music as the combination of slow and fast movements
(e.g. in the rhapsody form), the contrast of his tragic opera
and the fairy-tale ballet of The Wooden Prince and, more
generally, as folk music versus higher art music, folksong
setting or “original” composition and, finally, even as the
fundamental differentiation between East and West. The symbiosis
of folklore research and modernism (also a contrast) in Bartók’s
activities is the subject of Folklore and Avant-garde whose
point of departure is provided by a striking passage in a Bartók
letter, in which he mentions some new folksong arrangements and
in the same breath describes in some detail compositional ideas
for his probably most progressive and shocking piece, The
Miraculous Mandarin.
Serge
Moreux’s apposite concept of a folklore imaginaire in Bartók’s
music is best and most palpably represented by the Dance Suite,
composed (side by side with Zoltán Kodály’s Psalmus hungaricus)
for the 50th anniversary of the unification of Buda and Pest in
1923. The international career of the piece, started two years
later at the Prague contemporary music festival, is shown on
Imaginary Folk Music. Reviews of the festival (including one by
Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno) testify Bartók’s renown while the
composer’s own comments illuminate the political as well as
musical significance of his composition.
His “Personal Credo” addresses, again, a single work of seminal
importance, Cantata profana, whose text, compiled by the
composer himself, is based on two fragmentary versions of the
same ballad that survived as words for the ritual winter
solstice songs in Romania, the colinde. In contrast to the Dance
Suite, here it is the sources, rather than the reception of a
work, that are presented, the first notation of the colindă
melodies and texts in Bartók’s folksong collecting books and a
fair copy prepared for the scholarly classification of the
colindà collection that resulted in a monograph,
Melodien der
rumänischen Colinde (1935).
Advising the interested amateur Octavian Beu writing about the
Romanian inspiration behind his music in 1931, Bartók was quick
to make it clear that in his Cantata only the text was derived
from folklore. Although he again and again emphasized the
central significance of East-European peasant music for his
style in general, he also admitted some stylistic difference
between his more overtly folk inspired compositions and his more
“abstract” ones, especially the string quartets and the piano
concertos. When speaking about it to the Belgian scholar Denijs
Dille (many years later first head of the Budapest Bartók
Archives), he referred to the “more rigid framework” (or
“stricter setting”) of these more lofty genres. His analyses of
his Fifth String Quartet (1934) and the Second Piano Concerto
(1930–31), which are on show on the last-but-one page,
demonstrate exactly this intellectual aspect of some of his
compositions, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936)
and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussions (1937) written for
Basel also belonging here.
The final page, Folklore and Nationalism, attempts to address a
question that is not only implicit in any oeuvre inspired by
folk music but was directly commented upon by Bartók himself,
especially in his 1937 article “Folk Song Research and
Nationalism” and in the late essay “Race Purity in Music” (1942)
which, with far-reaching political significance, argues for the
healthiness and greater riches of “impurity” in folk music.
On Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók’s life and work seem particularly relevant during
a period of European integration that is just happening before
our eyes and to an extent that was previously certainly never
even dreamt of, especially not during the composer’s life when
Europe was repeatedly divided by two “World Wars.” Bartók’s
unquenchable interest in (and, as he himself expressed, love
for) the peasant music of different nations, ethnicities, groups
and territories has set an unparalleled example for us today.
Béla Bartók, composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist, was born
in Nagyszentmiklós in Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare in Romania)
in 1881 and died in New York in 1945. His childhood was plagued
with various illnesses. After the early death of the father
(Béla Bartók, Sr.), when he was only 8 years old, his mother
(Paula Voit) struggled to raise her two children, Béla and her
younger daughter, Elza, wandering from town to town before
finally settling in Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) where
Béla received thorough musical instruction and completed his
grammar school studies. Following in Ernő (Ernst) von Dohnányi’s
footsteps, four years his senior and also coming from Pozsony,
he studied piano (with Liszt pupil István Thomán) and
composition (with Hans Koessler) at the Budapest Royal Academy
of Music between 1899 and 1903. Although he was immediately
recognized as a powerful talent as both pianist and composer,
his career was not an easy one. After writing his first
grand-scale “nationalist” compositions (notably the Kossuth
Symphony, a work soon withdrawn, the Rhapsody for piano and for
piano and orchestra, and the First Orchestral Suite), he
discovered peasant music as a more indigenous and more
“authentic” source of something particularly “Hungarian” in
music and began to collect folk music on a regular basis and to
write modern, often experimental works (Fourteen Bagatelles for
piano, First String Quartet) using folk music-derived
modernistic material. The development of his new musical style
was also influenced by the personal crisis of his unrequited
love towards the violinist Stefi Geyer in 1907–1908. In 1909 he
married Márta Ziegler who bore him his first son Béla, Jr.
(1911–1994). For more than a decade, he devoted most of his
energies to field trips to remote areas of pre-First-World-War
Hungary that also included large areas of partly or mainly
Slovak and Romanian speaking ethnic groups. Quite early in his
research, Bartók turned to the collection of folk music from the
minorities as well. He was particularly interested in archaic
features of peasant music that he described as a “natural
phenomenon” whose study should be considered as “scientific”
work. His extensive collections include some 3500 Romanian, 3000
Slovak and 2700 Hungarian melodies.
From 1906, he often worked together with fellow composer and
ethnomusicologist Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967). In search of
ancient musical cultures, Bartók even collected rural Arab songs
in Algeria in 1913 and later he visited Turkey in 1936. His
collecting activity, however, practically ended in 1918 soon
before the partitioning of Hungary in the wake of the First
World War and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
By then, especially after the successful premières of his
ballet, The Wooden Prince (1914–17), and opera, Duke
Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) in 1917 and 1918, respectively, he
had established himself as the leading composer of his
generation in Hungary. From that time on, his compositions were
published by Universal Edition, Vienna and he could start to
build up an international career as pianist and, more
importantly, composer regularly visiting Paris, London and other
musical centres of Europe. He also toured the United States and
the Soviet Union in the later 1920s.
1923 marks his divorce from his first wife and his marriage with
his young pianist pupil, Ditta Pásztory. Their child, Péter
Bartók, was born in the following year.
Bartók’s piano music, e.g. Allegro barbaro (1911) and
Out of Doors (1926) and his pedagogical compositions, e.g..
For Children (1909–1910) and Mikrokosmos
(1932–39), as well as the Forty-four Violin Duos (1931) occupy a
significant place in 20th-century composition, and his six
String Quartets (composed between 1908 and 1939) are considered
among the finest modern representatives of the genre. Some of
his larger scale orchestral works also had a significant
world-wide success from their first performances, especially the
Dance Suite (1923) and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
(1936), the first of his compositions commissioned by the Swiss
conductor and patron Paul Sacher. His pantomime, The
Miraculous Mandarin (1918–19, orchestration 1924), is also a
classic masterpiece. These works put him close to the rank of
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the two most famous composer
innovators of his generation. As author of numerous studies and
editor of extensive volumes of folksong collections, Bartók was
considered as a leading authority on East-European folklore.
Following Nazi Germany’s occupation of Austria, he changed
publishers to the London based Boosey and Hawkes and started to
arrange for his departure from threatened Hungary and Europe
and, in 1940, he went to the United States. Apart from giving
concerts, he was mainly occupied at Universities (Columbia
University, from which he received an honorary doctorate, and
Harvard University). During his American exile, his fatal
illness, leukaemia, soon made its appearance. Still, he was able
to compose some great masterpieces, such as the Concerto for
Orchestra (for conductor Serge Koussevitzky, 1943), the Sonata
for Solo Violin (for the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, 1944) and his
Third Piano Concerto written for his wife, and he was able to
complete the preparation for publication of most of his folk
music collections, which were, however, only posthumously
published.
Impress
The exhibition was initiated by
The Hungarian Embassy in Copenhagen
It was supported by
The Hungarian
Ministry of National Heritage
The Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Thanks are due to
Peter Bartók
Gábor Vásárhelyi
Concept:
Budapest Bartók Archives
Institute for Musicology
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Graphics design:
Museum of Music History
Institute for Musicology
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Internet version:
Andocsek Computer Ltd.
The exhibition
is based on the collection of the
Budapest Bartók Archives
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