Suite, Op.14 (1916)

Bartók’s researches into folk music were by no means restricted to Hungary. That is where he started in 1906 but three years later he was just as involved in Romanian folk song and in 1913 he was in North Africa collecting examples from the nomadic Arab tribes of Biskra. Unlike Kodály, he was open to “any influence, be it Slovakian, Romanian, Arabic, or from any other source as long as it is clean fresh and healthy!”

By 1916, when Bartók wrote his Suite for piano, Op.14, the varying folk influences were thoroughly absorbed into his personal idiom. Although some of the rhythmic and harmonic innovations he was making at that time - notably in the Second String Quartet - do not derive from folk sources, they are merged in an indissoluble stylistic synthesis. In the Suite, Op.14, there is a strong whole-tone element, particularly in the opening Allegretto, which approaches its final bars with a whole-tone ascent over nearly four octaves. But there is an equally strong Romanian folk-dance flavour in it. In the middle, moreover, there is a hint of the Arab tune sung with such fervour in the second movement of the Second String Quartet.

It is difficult to assign any national character to the augmented triads of the Scherzo, which reflects another aspect of the second movement of the Second String Quartet. But the diminished fifths of the Allegro molto, with its swirling left-hand ostinato, seem to come straight from Biskra. It leads without a break into the Sostenuto which, though a close relation of the Arabian fourth movement of the Dance Suite, is so in form only: daringly constructed choral passages alternate with allusions to a melody which, in its more explicit form in the first movement of the Second String Quartet, is clearly Hungarian.

The Suite Op.14 is an early and highly attractive example of Bartók’s mature style. By the time he wrote it, in 1916, he had thoroughly absorbed the influence of the folk material he had been collecting and analysing over the last ten years - not only in Eastern Europe, incidentally, but also in North Africa - and he was well on his way into developing an idiom that allied those influence with rhythmic and harmonic innovations that have nothing to do with folk music. The Second String Quartet, which he was writing at much the same time, is a parallel example of the Bartók synthesis.

In the Suite Op.14 there is a strong whole-tone element, particularly in the opening Allegretto, which approaches its final bars with a whole-tone ascent over nearly four octaves. But there is an equally strong Romanian folk-dance flavour here. In the middle, moreover, there is a hint of the Arab tune - a memory no doubt of his visit to Biskra in 1913 - which is sung with such fervour in the second movement of the Second String Quartet. It is impossible to assign any folksong identity to the chains of thirds that so impishly skip their way through the Scherzo, meeting jocular minor- second “dissonances” on the way and just a hint of Magyar cadence near the end. But the dance tune that is assembled bit by bit over the swirling left-hand ostinato of the Allegro molto comes straight from Biskra. It leads without a break into the Sostenuto, which ends the work with an unshrinking but poetic exploration of the tragic implications of the harmonies of the opening bars and the fragment of lamenting Hungarian melody that emerges from them in the right hand and persists through most of the piece.