Fourteen Bagatelles, Op.6 (1908)

According to the composer, “a new piano style” appeared in the Fourteen Bagatelles in 1908. It was, he said, “a reaction to the exuberance of the romantic piano music of the nineeteenth century, a style stripped of all unessential decorative elements deliberately using only the most restricted technical means.” But the new style is more than a matter of economy: it is also the beginning of a new language born of Bartók’s recent discovery of true Hungarian peasant music and his need to absorb its rhythmic identity and its modal harmonies into his own music.

He chose to call these pieces Bagatelles presumably to indicate not only their brevity but also their experimental nature. In the first of them, for example, the right hand is engaged with a melody in C sharp minor and the left with a repetitive phrase in Phrygian C. Few of the remaining pieces are as calculatedly radical. They tend to be either spirited dances in the folk manner - the comparatively extended No.10 is an early anticipation of the Allegro barbaro - or harmonic speculations, most of them poetically rather than analytically inspired. No.9 has no harmonies at all. Two of the pieces, Nos. 4 and 5, are settings of actual folk material, while much of the atmospheric No.13? could have been transcribed from some village cimbalom improvisation. The last two are autobiographical: Elle est morte is a painfully harmonised lament signalling the end of Bartók’s affair with the violinist Stefi Geyer, Ma mie qui danse a grotesque waltz offering a virulently ironic comment on that same affair (and to be used again as the second of the Two Portraits for orchestra in 1911).