Two Pictures, Op.10

The first performance of Bartók’s Two Pictures - in Budapest in 1913, three years after the work was written - was not a great success. Indeed it aroused such opposition, expressed in a storm of boos and hisses, that the composer was prevented from taking a bow afterwards. Listening to the score now, it is difficult to believe that it could have provoked such an extreme reaction. It seems, however, that the objections were not so much to the music itself as to what was perceived as the anti-Hungarian attitude of its composer. According to one critic, the first movement was a “pallid copy of Debussy” while the second movement - by this “apostle of Czech, Romanian, Slovak and God knows what kind of music” - left Hungarian music “high and dry.”

While the first movement certainly does not conceal the influence of Debussy, it scarcely betrays the cause of Hungarian music. It was precisely because of the affinities between modern French and modern Hungarian music - which Debussy himself had noted - that Bartók was able to absorb certain aspects of Debussy’s technique into his own idiom. Without that development Hungary would not have had its symbolist equivalent to Pelléas et Mélisande in Bartók’s next major work, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

Far from being a pallid copy of Debussy, In Full Flower is a rare example of a distinctively Hungarian form of impressionism. So if the opening is similar in texture to that of the first of Debussy’s Nocturnes - the main theme introduced in this case by clarinet over shifting harmonies on the strings - it has its own atmosphere, brooding and increasingly apprehensive. After an uneasy central climax, the air is cleared by a radiant horn solo with a melody reassuringly Hungarian in rhythm and engagingly lyrical in line. When the main theme is recalled, first on oboe and then on cor anglais, the atmosphere is easier and tranquillity is confirmed in a coda of whole-tone flourishes on harp and woodwind with a dying echo of the main theme on flute at the end.

Bartók’s critics were right at least in that the material of Village Dance is Romanian rather than Hungarian in origin. The grotesque treatment of its themes and the deliberately coarse instrumental colouring are no less entertaining for that, however. They are no less effective either in offsetting the nostalgic recall, at the very centre of the rondo construction, of the main theme of the first movement on woodwind against sustained harmonies on the strings and repeated chords on the two harps. The last shaft of humour is the heavily lumbering ostinato that gets quieter and quieter as it accelerates towards a brilliant ending.

Gerald Larner ©2004