Four Pieces, Op.12

Bartók was not very happy round about the time he wrote his Four Pieces for Orchestra. His one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, his major preoccupation in 1911, had failed to win a prize in the national competition which had stimulated him to write it and no one wanted to perform it. His publisher seemed to be losing interest in him and the New Hungarian Musical Society, which he had recently set up with Kodály and a few other-like minded colleagues, had already collapsed through lack of public support. Severely disillusioned, he withdrew from public musical life and, while retaining his teaching post at the Academy of Music in Budapest, devoted more and more time to folk-song research and correspondingly less to composition. The Four Pieces which he wrote in 1912 was his last work of any size before he completed his one-act ballet The Wooden Prince four years later.

Composed, as Bartók put it, “for my writing desk only,” the Four Pieces remained unheard for as long as ten years and it was only in preparation for their first performance - by Ernö Dohnányi and the Budapest Philharmonic Society Orchestra in January 1922 - that Bartók undertook the task of orchestrating them. So they occupy an anomalous position in that, while they were written in their preliminary two-piano form before The Wooden Prince, they were completed in their definitive orchestral form only after the first version of his other one-act ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. But the anomaly is chronological rather than stylistic. Far from being inconsistent with Bartók’s development, as some authorities declare, they are the direct link between Bluebeard and the Mandarin. The true anomaly is the intervening and retrogressive Wooden Prince. Writing without inhibition for his desk rather than for a theatre management, Bartók anticipated in the Four Pieces most of what was to be regarded as shockingly new in The Miraculous Mandarin.

It is true that the Preludio breathes something of the pastoral atmosphere common to both the impressionistic In Full Flower, the first of the Two Pictures of 1910, and the Wagnerian Prelude of The Wooden Prince. But the broadly lyrical main theme, projected by first horn against a gently shimmering background of E major scales and cluster harmonies at the beginning of the piece, later assumes melodic shapes unmistakably characteristic of the mature Bartók. Indeed, not long after a middle section featuring eerie piano figuration reminiscent of the “Lake of Tears” in Bluebeard, the first violins introduce a variant to be taken up by the Girl in her dance with the Young Man in The Miraculous Mandarin.

The Scherzo shatters the pastoral calm with sounds later to be associated with the violence of the big city in The Miraculous Mandarin. Although there are one or two almost playful episodes and just a hint of a lyrical trio section, the Scherzo is remarkable above all for the sustained energy generated by resourceful use of its main theme and for dramatic imagery so vivid that it was still prominent in the composer’s mind when he was writing his ballet score six or seven years later.

Although the Four Pieces are presented as just that - rather than as a suite or, still less, a symphony - Bartók was clearly concerned that there should be more between them than extreme contrasts. So, although he offsets the violence of the Scherzo with a graceful echo of a formal dance at the beginning of the Intermezzo, he also makes a point of recalling a motif of descending thirds from the Preludio and, in an agitato middle section, of reviving the aggression of the preceding movement.

The Marcia Funebre also refers back to the first movement, legato violins displacing snarling brass for once in an allusion to the embyronic Girl and Young Man of The Miraculous Mandarin. But in general this is a funeral march for the Mandarin himself, whose death is clearly anticipated in the shuddering, dryly articulated rhythms of the last two bars.

Gerald Larner©