BélaBartók

In May 1904 Bartók went to stay with the Fischer family at Gerlicepuszta. He had a piano sent out, practised four hours a day and composed for four or five more. There he heard Lidi Dósa, a young woman from Transylvania in the family’s service, singing to the children in her care, and began writing down her songs. Their Hungarian music differed from the urban entertainment that usually went by that name, and he wanted more of it. Two years later the writer Béla Balázs went collecting with Bartók and recorded in his diary that the frail-looking pianist wore him out: “I was already very tired, but he kept urging and driving me on to collect more!”

1881–⁠1907Budapest Academy and folk song

Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós in 1881, when the town belonged to Hungary; it is now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania. His father, director of an agricultural school, died when he was seven. His mother Paula supported Béla and his sister by teaching, moving between towns before settling in Pozsony, now Bratislava. At the Budapest Academy he studied piano with István Thomán, who had studied with Liszt, and composition with Hans Koessler.

In 1902 Bartók heard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra in Budapest on 12 February, and it made a deep impression on him. He wrote afterwards that Strauss belonged in the line of those who had taken music a step further: “Bach, Haydn-⁠Mozart, Beethoven; and Wagner was the last one.” His own Kossuth, written the next year, celebrated the Hungarian revolutionary and mocked the Austrian imperial anthem. In Bartók’s programme for the eighth section, the Austrian troops approach on the first two bars of the anthem in distorted form, which enter like fugue subjects until the trombones play it loudly. After this came Dósa’s songs and the friendship with Zoltán Kodály. In 1906 the two men published a joint collection of Hungarian folk-song settings. Kodály also brought music by Debussy back from Paris, and in it Bartók found pentatonic phrases that recalled the songs he was collecting.

The tunes entered his scores in different ways. For Children gives young pianists Hungarian and Slovak melodies with accompaniments fitted closely to them. Elsewhere he wrote original songs in the manner of village songs. A quartet could take over the uneven beats and pungent intervals of the songs without quoting a tune. From 1907 he taught piano at the Academy, and the post paid for his own playing and his song collecting. That July he set out on his first collecting trip to Transylvania. In August he told the pianist Etelka Freund that he had found “the Sekler melody types, which I had thought nonexistent”.

1907–⁠23Stefi Geyer and Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

He fell in love with the violinist Stefi Geyer in 1907 and wrote her a concerto. She did not return his love, and the complete concerto was not published in his lifetime. Music associated with her also appears in the First Quartet, which opens slowly and moves by stages to a fast dance. In 1909 he married Márta Ziegler; their son Béla was born the next year.

Balázs wrote the libretto for Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in 1911. It has two characters and seven locked doors. Judith demands the keys, and Bluebeard hands them over one at a time. Each room has its own orchestral sound. Judith finds blood in room after room, and each time the music marks it with a semitone. The fifth door opens on Bluebeard’s kingdom, a full C major chord with an organ beneath it. The opera had its Budapest première in 1918. This came after the ballet The Wooden Prince, another collaboration with Balázs, succeeded in 1917.

The Miraculous Mandarin is set in a city. Three men use a girl to lure customers whom they can rob; the stranger who arrives survives their attempts to kill him until she embraces him. Bartók began the score in 1918–⁠19 and orchestrated it in 1924. It is written with sliding wind lines and pounding repetitions, and its theatre is very different from that of Bluebeard. The 1926 Cologne première provoked a local ban.

War and new borders had curtailed his collecting. He worked increasingly on the recordings and notebooks already in hand, while tours and Universal Edition carried his compositions abroad. The Dance Suite, commissioned for Budapest’s fiftieth anniversary in 1923, joined invented tunes in several folk idioms. That year he divorced Márta and married his piano pupil Ditta Pásztory. Their son Péter was born in 1924. Ditta later became his partner at a second piano.

1926–⁠39Piano works, quartets and Cantata profana

In 1926 he wrote the Piano Sonata, the First Piano Concerto and Out of Doors. In these works the piano is used percussively, and elsewhere its decaying sounds are left to sustain. In “The Night’s Music”, quiet dissonant chords lie behind isolated calls and a sustained melody.

For Cantata profana in 1930, he took Romanian texts about nine hunters transformed into stags and wrote his own melodies. Explaining the work to Octavian Beu on 10 January 1931, he described his guiding idea as “brotherhood between peoples, a brotherhood despite all war and strife”. He said that he remained a Hungarian composer while welcoming Slovak, Romanian and Arabic influences. In the text, the nine sons cannot return to their father’s house because their antlers will no longer fit through the door.

In 1934 he left regular Academy teaching to prepare an edition of some 13,000 Hungarian songs at the Academy of Sciences. Mikrokosmos, assembled chiefly in 1932–⁠39, is a set of 153 piano pieces for students that draws on his findings. In it the two hands imitate each other, play against each other and keep different accents.

Paul Sacher commissioned Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in 1936. Bartók divided the strings into two orchestras. The opening fugue expands from A to a climax on E♭, and in later movements phrases pass from one side of the stage to the other. In the Adagio a xylophone repeats one note and the timpani slide between pitches. The Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion followed in 1937, and Bartók and Ditta played at its première in Basel in January 1938. In the Second Violin Concerto, written in 1937–⁠38, the finale transforms the themes of the first movement, and the slow movement is a set of variations.

1940–⁠45Music in exile

After the Anschluss in 1938, Bartók moved his publishing to Boosey & Hawkes in London. Hungary’s drift towards Nazism made staying intolerable. The Sixth Quartet of 1939 begins each movement with a sorrowful Mesto; by the finale, sorrow occupies the whole movement. His mother died that December. Following a spring concert visit to America, he and Ditta left Europe in autumn 1940.

Concert work was scarce, and leukaemia was taking hold. In 1943 Koussevitzky commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra, in memory of his wife Natalie, and Bartók returned to writing a large score. In the second movement the wind players enter in pairs, each pair playing in its own interval; a grave central Elegy stands between the lighter movements. Koussevitzky conducted the Boston première on 1 December 1944, with Bartók and Ditta in the hall. Four days later Bartók told his son Péter that Koussevitzky had called it “the most significant orchestral work of the last 20-25 years”.

Menuhin commissioned the Sonata for Solo Violin in 1944 and played it in New York on 26 November. “It was a wonderful performance,” Bartók wrote. The Third Piano Concerto was for Ditta, with a quiet Adagio religioso interrupted by birdsong. Bartók died in New York on 26 September 1945, still a Hungarian citizen. He left the last seventeen bars of the concerto to be orchestrated by Tibor Serly, and the Viola Concerto in sketches. His folk-music collections continued to appear after his death. In 1988 his remains were returned to Budapest.