Béla Bartók: a profile

Bartók’s one visit to Manchester was in February 1904, when he appeared as piano soloist and heard Hans Richter conduct his symphonic poem Kossuth in a Halle concert in the Free Trade Hall. At that time, like many of his compatriots of the same youthful generation, he was a fervent Hungarian nationalist bitterly opposed to Habsburg rule over his country from Vienna and any outward sign of it. He wore Hungarian national dress (though not in the Free Trade Hall) and was dedicated, as he said, to one objective: “the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation.” As a composer, it was his aim to “create something specifically Hungarian in music.” That much is clear from Kossuth which - though it glorifies the adventures of the nineteenth-century revolutionary Lajos Kossuth in a form and a language clearly derived from Richard Strauss - contains much material coloured by what he thought was Hungarian folk music.

Only a few months after he had endured the “storms of wind and rain” in Manchester and was living in the countryside in Gömör, he happened to hear a Transylvanian folk song sung by a Székely nursemaid in the house where he was staying. This was the beginning of the revelation that what he thought was Hungarian folk music, and what Brahms and Liszt had thought was Hungarian folk music, was far from the real thing. Traditional Hungarian-rhapsody material, like the verbunkos and the csárdás so prominently featured in Liszt’s music, had peasant elements in it but, since it was largely the work of gypsy violinists and urban composers, was not an organic product at all. Although he did not begin his researches into peasant folk song until after he had met Zoltán Kodály, who was already experienced in this field, and learned how to use a gramophone to record it, by 1918 he had collected as many as ten thousand examples - not just Hungarian and Transylvanian but also Slovakian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and even Arabic. Though he was no less a Hungarian patriot, Hungarian nationalism was by now far too narrow for him.

Not surprisingly, during the course of his work in collecting, transcribing and classifying folk song Bartók absorbed much of it into his own harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary. Indeed, it was through East-European and and North-African folk song and dance, which has little to do with the major and minor modes and the metrical patterns of conventional music, that he was able to shake off the late romantic idiom he had brought with him to Manchester in 1904. He replaced it with a language that was new and distinctly personal but at the same time developed from natural sources. In his celebration of pure peasant music in the Dance Suite of 1923, the earliest item in today’s programme, there is no trace of Richard Strauss and scarcely anything of what used to pass for the “Hungarian” style.

He wasn’t always to remain so rigorous, however. Verbunkos elements soon found a way back into his music, as the Violin Concerto so attractively demonstrates, and in the Concerto for Orchestra he found room for Budapest operetta, to which he turned for one of the most endearing of all his melodies (while, incidentally, taking Shostakovich to task for bordering on “Viennese cabaret song” in his Seventh Symphony). But even here, where triadic harmonies are back in favour too, the Bartók sound world, a unique phenomenon in twentieth-century music, remains unmistakably intact.