Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
Piano Music, Volume 4
The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was born in 1881
in a region that now forms part of Romania. His father,
director of an agricultural college, was a keen amateur
musician, while it was from his mother that Bartók
received his early piano lessons. The death of his father
in 1888 led to a less settled existence, as his mother
resumed work as a teacher, eventually settling in the
present capital of Slovakia, Bratislava (the Hungarian
Poszony), where Bartók passed his early adolescence,
counting among his school-fellows the composer Ernö
Dohnányi. Offered the chance of musical training in
Vienna, like Dohnányi he chose instead Budapest,
where he won a considerable reputation as a pianist,
being appointed to the teaching staff of the Academy of
Music in 1907. At the same time he developed a deep
interest, shared with his compatriot Zoltán Kodály, in
the folk-music of his own and adjacent countries, later
extended as far as Anatolia, where he collaborated in
research with the Turkish composer Adnan Saygun.
As a composer Bartók found acceptance much
more difficult, particularly in his own country, which
was, in any case, beset by political troubles when the
brief post-war left-wing government of Béla Kun was
replaced by the reactionary régime of Admiral Horthy.
Meanwhile his reputation abroad grew, in particular
among those with an interest in contemporary music,
and his success both as a pianist and as a composer,
coupled with dissatisfaction at the growing association
between the Horthy government and National Socialist
Germany, led him in 1940 to emigrate to the United
States of America.
In his last years, after briefly held teaching
appointments at Columbia and Harvard, Bartók
suffered from increasing ill-health, and from a poverty
that the conditions of exile in war-time could do
nothing to alleviate. He died in straitened circumstances
in 1945, leaving sketches for a new Viola Concerto and
a more nearly completed Third Piano Concerto. The
years in America, whatever difficulties they brought,
also gave rise to important compositions, including the
Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the
Koussevitzky Foundation, and a Sonata for Solo Violin
for Yehudi Menuhin.
As a pianist Bartók had had a number of teachers in
the years before his mother settled in Bratislava. There
he became a pupil of László Erkel, son of the wellknown
Hungarian opera-composer Ferenc Erkel, and
after his teacher’s death in 1896, of Anton Hyrtl,
acquiring from both a knowledge of piano repertoire
and of traditional compositional techniques. In
Budapest his piano teacher was István Thomán, a pupil
of Liszt, and his composition teacher, the traditionalist
Hans Koessler. From the early 1890s, at least, Bartók
had written music for the piano, a series of works that
remain unpublished, a fate that he might have preferred
for his Four Pieces, published in 1904. He continued to
write for the piano until he left for America in 1940,
including among these compositions works for concert
performance and pieces designed for students, in the
comprehensive collection Mikrokosmos covering a
level of competence from that of the beginner to that of
the mature performer.
Bartók’s For Children, written in 1908 and 1909
and originally including 85 pieces based on Hungarian
and Slovakian folk-tunes, was first published in four
volumes. Some of the pieces were revised by the
composer in the 1930s and he made a final revision of
the whole work in 1943, writing thirteen new pieces
and reducing the total number to 79, to be published
posthumously in two volumes in 1947, although Bartók
had been able to correct the proposed new edition in
1944. The pieces are described as little pieces for
beginners, without stretches of an octave. They are a
direct reflection of Bartók’s interest in the folk-music of
Hungary, and here also of Slovakia. The melodies, in
various modes, are never forced into the traditional
strait-jacket of academic harmony, but set off by simple
accompaniments that preserve their original character.
For children, as with Mikrokosmos and his Forty-Four
Violin Duets, they offer a much wider view of music
than was once and perhaps is still usual in teaching
material confined entirely to the major and minor scales
and harmonies of common practice.
In collecting folk-music Bartók had soon found that
traditional songs and dances very often had a particular
social function. These are partly reflected in some of
the titles of the pieces included in For Children. The
first volume, based on Hungarian folk-tunes, while not
strictly progressive, does nevertheless include
increasing complications of key signature and rhythm.
As in Mikrokosmos metronome markings and
indications of duration are included, following Bartók’s
later practice, although it has been found that some of
these do not exactly correspond. Some of the pieces are
joined by the concluding direction attacca (ad lib.), as,
for example Nos. 13, 14 and 15 (track 5), giving the
possibility of performance as a connected group. Where
necessary some flexibility is allowed the tunes by the
use of changing time signatures, as in No. 20 with its
use of 3/8 and 2/8, and there are frequent enough uses
of the characteristic Hungarian falling interval and
syncopation in phrase endings. The first volume ends
with a Swineherd’s Dance, with a largely ostinato
accompaniment and final bars that dwindle away into
the distance.
The second volume of the revised edition, based on
Slovakian folk-tunes, includes a set of three variations
on a theme (No. 5) and a Canon (No. 29). Rhapsody
(Nos. 36-37), with its two contrasting elements, moves
briefly into a few bars with five sharps. Other key
signatures are less demanding, although the first
volume has two pieces with four flats. Another
additional demand on a young player is made in the
Rhapsody when chords involving the stretch of an
octave are included, but arpeggiated, before being
shared by both hands, while No. 33 includes
arpeggiated chords of a tenth. Otherwise there are the
expected syncopated rhythms, varied modes and
moods, and accompaniments and arrangements that
bring out the interest of a melody, without denying its
true character. The volume ends with a Dirge and a
final Mourning Song, fading, like the first volume, to
the softest conclusion.
Keith Anderson