Bela Bartok (1881 -1945)
Violin Sonata No.1, Sz 75
Violin Sonata No.2, Sz 76
Contrasts, Sz 111
The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok occupies, as any great
composer must, a unique position, his vital musical language inimitable and at
once recognisable. He was born in 1881 in Nagyszentmiklos, in a region of Hungary
later acquired by Romania, the son of the director of a government agricultural
school, a talented amateur musician. After the latter's death in 1888, the
family moved, settling first at Nagyszollos, later to form part of Czechoslovakia.
For a time Bartok was sent away to school in Nagyvarad, where he lodged with
his mother's sister, later to return to his mother and sister, when progress at
the school seemed inadequate. He had had his first piano lessons from his
mother and had shown significant musical interest and promise in these early
years. Serious and consistent musical training, however, proved difficult until
his mother found a position on the teaching staff of a teachers' training
college in Pozsony, then part of Hungary and at one time its capital and now,
as Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic. Here Bartok studied with
Laszlo Erkel, a son of the distinguished Hungarian composer Ferenc Erkel, while
the city itself offered opportunities for amateur performance and for hearing concerts
and operas. In these years he developed his own very considerable ability as a
pianist, while composing in a largely derivative style. Completion of his
studies at school was followed by the decision to embark on professional musical
studies not in Vienna, where a scholarship was offered, but in Budapest,
following the example of his school-fellow Erno Dohnanyi, four years his
senior.
In spite of ill health, which had dogged his childhood
and adolescence,
Bartok was able, during his earlier years at the Budapest
Academy, to devote his attention very largely to performance as a pianist,
with some professional engagements. His work as a composer was resumed through
a study of recent scores by Richard Strauss and by a growing interest in
Hungarian national music, a field that had remained unexplored and
misunderstood by composers such as Liszt, whose Hungarian Rhapsodies had relied
on a more German and sophisticated source than the music of the people. Bartok's
early career began as a pianist, after a brief period of study with his friend Dohnanyi,
with appearances in Vienna and Berlin. At the same time his first major composition,
Kossuth, a hero's life, based on the life of Lajos Kossuth, leader of
the Hungarian revolt against Austrian suzerainty in 1848, won predictable
success at home. His attention as a composer, however, was now drawn to
Hungarian folk-music in all its amazing regional variety .Into this he
undertook considerable research, in collaboration with Zoltan Kodaly. This
interest had an overwhelming effect on his composition, allowing him to
develop, in a direction very different from that taken by Kodaly, a musical
idiom that was both fundamentally Hungarian and essentially his own. Ironically
it was at home that Bartok was least able to make an impression on the public
as a composer. In 1907 he joined the staff of the Budapest Academy as a piano
teacher, holding the position for the next thirty years, but it was only abroad
that his work as a composer began to attract very considerable interest. The
situation at home was not helped by the political events that followed the
defeat in 1918, the consequent division of Hungarian territory, the economic
difficulties of the country and the brief period of communist rule under Bela
Kun, followed by the inevitable reaction, under Admiral Horthy. The proposed
establishment of an archive of Hungarian folk-music under the direction of Bartok
came to nothing, but he was eventually able to retain his position at the
Academy, while gradually concentrating considerable attention on his career as
a performer abroad, thus introducing his work to a wider audience than was ever
possible in Hungary, even had general taste developed a greater degree of
discrimination and interest in the contemporary.
In the 1930s Bartok was able to devote himself more
consistently to the classification and publication of research material, with,
in 1936, an expedition to Anatolia, in the company of the Turkish composer Adnan
Saygun, the results of which were published posthumously. Meanwhile political
events in Germany had their repercussions in his own professional life.
National Socialist censorship of music in Germany and questions about Bartok's
own racial credentials led him to forbid performances of his music in Germany,
and the occupation of Austria, and consequent changes in the management and ownership
of Universal Edition, Bartok's publishers and for long his supporters, made the
situation still more difficult. A concert appearance in New York with Szigeti
in the spring of 1940 was followed the next year by appointment as a Visiting
Assistant at Columbia University, which he held for two years, until the end of
1942. Bartok's final years were spent in deteriorating health and with some
financial uncertainty, although there were commissions for new works, some of
which were fulfilled, while others were either rejected or left unfinished at
his death in 1945. Significantly enough, this last period in America brought one
of his best known works, the Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by Koussevitzky
in memory of his wife, with the viola concerto, commissioned by William
Primrose, and the third piano concerto left to be completed by others.
Bartok's first sonata for violin and piano was written in
1903 and coolly received by Leopold Auer and other members of the jury of the
Prix Rubinstein in Paris in 1905. The first numbered and published sonata, the Violin
Sonata No.1, in three movements, was written in the last three months of
1921 and dedicated to the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi, great-niece of
Joachim, who gave the performance of the work with him in London on 24th March
1922, followed by performance in Paris, in both places providing a very
significant introduction of his work as a composer. Between July and November
in the same year he wrote a second sonata for Jelly d'Aranyi, which she first performed
with the composer in London on 7th May 1923. Both sonatas are highly original
and often astringent in idiom, at times showing overt Hungarian influence in
rhythmic figuration, the choice of certain melodic intervals and at times in
mood. It was for Jellyd'Aranyi that Ravel, a composer also fascinated by the
problems of combining string timbre with the percussive qualities of the piano,
wrote his Tzigane.
Both Bartok's numbered violin sonatas have ambiguities of
tonality, although the composer himself regarded the first as in C sharp minor
and the second as in C major. The former ends, indeed, with a piano chord that
combines C sharp major and C sharp minor, to which the violin adds the note B,
the seventh. The first of the three movements opens with the first three notes
of the chord of C sharp minor, but the piano figuration, pedalled to produce
sonorities reminiscent, it has been suggested, of the Indonesian gamelan,
obscures this tonality , while the violin enters with a sustained C natural.
There are suggestions of the influence of Schoenberg in occasional use of what
might appear to be part of a series of the twelve semitones of the scale, while
the device of displaced octaves, in which some of the notes of a melody may be
raised or lowered an octave, may also be associated with Schoenberg. The
opening gamelan-like texture, however, suggests rather the language of Debussy,
echoed in an occasional suggestion of the whole-tone scale. The rhythm of the
violin part, on the other hand, is often essentially Hungarian. Although this
may not be at once apparent, the first movement is broadly in tripartite
sonata-form, with an exposition, a central development and a recapitulation.
The form of the second movement is more easily heard. It is ternary in
structure with the two elements of the first section re-appearing in the third,
framing a central section that makes use of two other elements. The movement
opens with the violin alone, then joined by the piano in gentle chords. There
is a further passage for solo violin, joined once again by the piano. The
middle section makes use of initial syncopation, followed by sharply rhythmic
double stopped chords from the violin, which introduces the final section, at
first with sustained chords from the piano, below a violin line that has all
the feeling of an improvisation. The last movement needs less explanation,
bursting upon the listener with all the vigour and energy of a Hungarian
peasant dance that brings the two instruments together in mood.
The second of the two sonatas has only two movements, the
first allowing a dialogue between violin and piano, the latter opening with a
melodic line that almost suggests recitative. A relatively harsh climax is
followed bya return of this opening texture and melodic contour. The second
movement continues, without any perceptible break, the violin now playing
pizzicato, before both instruments embark on vigorous material owing much to
Hungarian peasant music. This second movement, which is in the form of a rondo,
like the third movement of the first sonata, makes use of material derived from
the first movement, providing music of fascinating variety, excitement and
agitation gradually subsiding into tranquillity, with a final widely-spaced
chord of C major.
If the combination of violin and piano presents problems
in the reconciliation of timbres, the addition of a clarinet may be thought to
add a further complication. Bartok, in Contrasts, chooses rather to emphasise
the differences between the percussive piano, the wind instrument and the
violin. Contrasts was commissioned by the American jazz clarinettist
Benny Goodman, through the agency of Szigeti. It was written in 1938 and the
first performance, which included only the Verbunkos and the Sebes,
was given in New York by Benny Goodman, Joseph Szigeti and the pianist Endre
Petri in January 1939. There were subsequent performances and a recording of
the work made with Bartok as the pianist. Contrasts was published in
1942 with a dedication to Goodman and Szigeti. The three movements of Contrasts
are in the general form of Hungarian dances, as the movement titles indicate.
The Verbunkos was familiar as a recruiting-dance employed in the
recruitment of soldiers to serve in the Imperial armies. A contrasting slow
movement provides repose between the outer movements, the work ending with a Sebes,
a fast dance. Attention has been drawn to connections between Contrasts
and the last of Bartok's six string quartets, completed in November 1939, not
least in the opening clarinet melody of the Verbunkos. This first
movement includes a cadenza for clarinet, while the second, Piheno
(Relaxation) includes elements reminiscent of the gamelan in the piano part and
in the generally introspective mood of Bartok's music evoking the night. Sebes
opens with the violinist playing on a mistuned instrument, like some village
fiddler, the bottom string of the violin raise and its top string lowered a
semitone. Various string techniques are used, as in the string quartets. A
clarinet in A is used for the first two movements and for the gentler central
section of the final Sebes, with a B flat instrument otherwise used in the last
movement. In general the piano plays a subsidiary part in music that contrasts
particularly the clarinet and violin. Benny Goodman had originally suggested a
two-movement work, in the style of the Hungarian lassu and friss evident in the
second violin sonata, the whole to be of a length to fit two sides of a
twelve-inch record. Bartok’s insertion of a slow movement added further to a
work that was already some four or five minutes too long. The final recording
in April 1940 ran to two discs.