Hungarian Folksongs (a selection)

Fekete föd from Eight Hungarian Folksongs (1907-17)

Annyi Bánat from Eight Hungarian Folksongs (1907-17)

Hatforintos nóta from Twenty Hungarian Folksongs (1929)

A tömlöcben from Twenty Hungarian Folksongs (1929)

Régi Keserves from Twenty Hungarian Folksongs (1929)

Eddig való dolgom from Eight Hungarian Folksongs (1917)

Párositó 1 from Twenty Hungarian Folksongs (1929)

As well as assiduously collecting folk music in Hungary and neighbouring countries, Bartok transcribed it, analysed it, classified it and made efforts, as he said, to “introduce it to the public at large and to encourage developing a taste for it.” Not just any folksong would do, however, and certainly not in its raw state: “A meticulous selection is needed and the choice pieces should be presented in a musical arrangement in order to make them more palatable to the taste of the public. If brought from the fields into the towns, folksongs have to be dressed up… But one must take care to cut their new clothes so as not to cramp their fresh country style. Whether arranged for choir or for the piano the accompaniment should merely try to conjure up the image of fields and villages.”

Fekete föd, the first of the Eight Hungarian Folksongs arranged for voice and piano between 1907 and 1917, is a characteristic example of the modest approach adopted by Bartók in his earlier folksong settings. The pentatonic melody is, indeed, “dressed up” but in a piano part clearly designed to recall the countryside sound of the cimbalom. The equally sad, similarly pentatonic Annyi Bánat from the same collections is all the more poignant for the simplicity of its setting.

The next three items in this group - Hatforintos nóta, A tömlöcben and Régi Keserves - come from a later collection, the Twenty Hungarian Folksongs of 1929, where each song is presented as a comparatively developed piece. Bartók’s comparison of the process of folksong arrangement to “mounting a precious stone” seems particularly apt in the case of Hatforintos nóta: a little round dance accompanied by droning and wheezing bagpipes is presented four times in alternation with a canonic variant on the piano. A tömlöcben and Régi Keserves are both laments. The melody of the first is introduced over pedal-sustained dissonances and is ever more agitated on each repetition until it finds a kind of tranquillity in the actually no less dissonant ending. In Régi Keserves, which is harmonised largely by accretions of fifths, the unusually flexible vocal line is so expressive as to move the piano to make a briefly sympathetic comment between the two halves of the song.

Eddig való dolgom, written for a soldier’s concert in Vienna in 1917, comes from the earlier collection and, in its undarned misery, most effectively offsets the uninhibitedly exuberant and brilliantly witty Párositó, the first of the two lively wedding-song settings in the later collection.