Organic Hungarian: Bartók and folk music

One day in the summer of 1904, when he was living in the countryside in Gömör, Bartók happened to hear a Transylvanian folksong sung by an eighteen-year-old Székely nursemaid in the house where he was staying. It was a revelation. It was the beginning of his understanding 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. The material used by Brahms in his Hungarian Dances and Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsodies, with their prominently featured verbunkos and csárdás elements, was not an organic product at all, he discovered, but the work of urban composers and gypsy violinists. Although he did not begin his researches into peasant folksong until after he had met Zoltán Kodály, who was already experienced in this field, and learned how to use a phonograph to record it, by 1918 Bartók had collected as many as ten thousand examples - not just Hungarian and Transylvanian but also Slovakian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and even Arabic.

Not surprisingly, during the course of his work in collecting, transcribing, analysing and classifying folk song Bartók absorbed much of it into his own harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary. Indeed, it was through East-European 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 replaced it with a language that was new and distinctly personal but at the same time developed from natural sources – as long as they were, as he put it, “clean, fresh and healthy.”

Later in life he relaxed his organic rigour and allowed verbunkos elements to find a way back into his music, as the Violin Concerto so attractively demonstrates. In the Concerto for Orchestra he found room even 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.