Béla Bartók: how Hungarian was he? — Béla Bartók | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

Bartók has been described as the greatest of Hungarian composers, but how Hungarian was he?

Certainly more Hungarian than his only rival to that title, Franz (Ferenc) Liszt. Although the town where he was born is now Sinnicolau Mare in Romania and the city where he did most of his schooling is now Bratislava in Slovakia, those places - then called Nagyszentmiklós and Pozsony respectively - were indisputably in Hungary at the time. His first language was Hungarian; he studied and taught at the Budapest Academy of Music; his declared objective as a young man was “the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation;” and much of his inspiration as a composer derived from Hungarian folk song.

Wasn’t Liszt also interested in Hungarian folk music?

Yes he was, or he thought he was, and he made good use of it in his own music. Many non-Hungarian composers, notably Haydn and Brahms, had been fascinated by Hungarian music too. But Brahms and Liszt were attracted by the colourful exoticism of a kind of music which, while it had a Hungarian element in it, was largely a matter of virtuoso elaboration by gypsy musicians, some of it actually written down by comparatively sophisticated urban composers. The Hungarian folk music Bartók and Kodály discovered, recorded in the field and painstakingly catalogued from about 1903 was a true and ancient peasant music preserved by oral tradition only.

So he was a kind of Hungarian Vaughan Williams?

Up to a point. But for Bartók it wasn’t just a matter of introducing folk song as thematic material and using a few modal harmonies to match. He spent so much time and energy as an “ethnomusicologist” collecting and classifying peasant music - not only Hungarian but also Romanian, Slovakian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Bulgarian and even North African - that he absorbed many of its characteristics into his own creative language. Indeed, he did it quite deliberately, particularly in matters of rhythm, in order to create and idiom that was entirely his own. It was his way out of the late-romantic impasse that Schoenberg and Stravinsky also had the genius to break through and open the way for others to follow.

Did he, like them, have a late-romantic past then?

As a young man he was very much under the influence of Richard Strauss and, before he knew better, he even wrote “Hungarian” music of the kind practised by Brahms and Liszt. He had an unlikely enthusiasm for Max Reger too. But he also had an early interest in Baroque music and then he discovered Debussy, Szymanowski, Schoenberg, Stravinsky… And another vital element in the Bartók sound world is nature itself, particularly the nocturnal soundscape reflected in those “night music” slow movements of his, most evocatively of all perhaps in the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

Bartók has also been described as one of the last of the great composer-pianists, but how great a pianist was he?

Certainly not as great as Liszt, or Rachmaninov or even his very much less radical compatriot Ernö Dohnányi. He did, on the other hand, give well over six hundred concerts in the forty-five years of his performing career. In his own works - above all in the application of the percussive touch that is such a characteristic feature of his music from the Allegro barbaro onwards - he was unsurpassable. He was not the greatest of teachers either, although he was a uniquely imaginative composer of educational pieces and although he did inspire two of his piano students to marry him!

So what about his personal life?

He is said by some of those who knew him, though by no means all, to have been cold and selfish. But that is often said of composers whose undeniable imperative is the composition and the preservation of their music. And it should not be forgotten that, while his firmly held anti-fascist political views made life in Europe extremely difficult for him in the years before the Second World War, he felt he could not escape until his mother died in 1939. He might well have been scarred in his youth by his unrequited love for the beautiful young violinist Stefi Geyer who inspired his intensely romantic First Violin Concerto. But no one who knows the no less melodious Second Violin Concerto, written thirty years later, could accuse its composer of emotional paralysis!

Gerald Larner©