Béla Bartók

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Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók in 1927
Background information
Birth name	Béla Viktor János Bartók
Born	March 25, 1881
Origin	Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary
Died	September 26, 1945 New York , United States
Occupation(s)	Composer pianist

Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and collector of Eastern European and Middle Eastern folk music. Bartók is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He was one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology, the study and ethnography of folk music.

Contents 1 Childhood and early years 2 Early musical career 3 Middle years and career 4 World War II and later career 5 Music 5.1 Reception 6 Selected works 6.1 Stage works 6.2 Orchestral works 6.3 Concertante works 6.4 Choral works 6.5 Chamber works 6.6 Piano works 6.7 Arrangements by others 6.8 See also 7 Media 8 Sources 9 References 10 External links 10.1 Recordings

[edit] Childhood and early years

Bartók was born in the small Transylvanian town of Nagyszentmiklós in Hungary (today Sânnicolau Mare, Romania).

He learned to play the piano early: by the age of four he was able to play 40 songs, and his mother began teaching him at the age of five.

After his father, the director of an agricultural school, died in 1888, Béla's mother, Paula, took her family to live in Nagyszőlős (today Vinogradiv, Ukraine), and then to Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia). When Czechoslovakia was created in 1918 Béla and his mother found themselves on opposite sides of the border.

[edit] Early musical career

He studied piano under István Thoman (a former student of Franz Liszt) and composition under János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest from 1899 to 1903. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who would become his lifelong friend and colleague. In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem which honored Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848.

It was the music of Richard Strauss, whom he met at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902, that had the most influence on his early work. Soon his music began to be influenced also by the music of Claude Debussy that Kodály had brought back from Paris. His large scale orchestral works were still in the manner of Johannes Brahms or Richard Strauss, but also around this time he wrote a number of small piano pieces which show his growing interest in folk music. Probably the first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 (1908), which has several folk-like elements in it.

In 1905, inspired by both their own interest in folk music and by the contemporary resurgence of interest in traditional national culture, he and Kodály undertook an expedition into the countryside to collect and research old Magyar folk melodies. Their findings came as somewhat of a surprise: previously, most people had considered real Magyar folk music to be Gypsy music. The classic example of this misperception is Franz Liszt's famous Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which were actually based on popular Gypsy tunes of the time.

In contrast, the old Magyar folk melodies discovered by Bartók and Kodály bore little if any resemblance to the popular music of the Gypsies. Instead, the songs they found were almost all based on pentatonic scales similar to those found in various Oriental folk traditions, notably those of Central Asia and Siberia. (Indeed, Kodály later discovered striking parallels between some ancient Magyar songs and songs of the Mari and Chuvash peoples of north-eastern Russia.)

Bartók and Kodály quickly set about incorporating elements of this real Magyar peasant music into their compositions. While Kodály would frequently quote folk songs verbatim and write pieces derived entirely from authentic folk melodies, Bartók's style was more of a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism. He rarely used actual peasant melodies in his compositions, but his melodic and harmonic sense was still profoundly influenced by the folk music of Hungary and Romania, and he was very fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music.

In 1907, he landed a job as piano professor at the Royal Academy. This allowed him to stay in Hungary rather than having to tour Europe as a pianist.

[edit] Middle years and career

In 1909, Bartók married Márta Ziegler. Their son, Béla Jr., was born in 1910.

In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to his wife, Márta. He entered it for a prize awarded by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they said it was unplayable, and rejected it out of hand. The opera remained unperformed until 1918, when Bartók was pressured by the government to remove the name of the librettist, Béla Balázs, from the program on account of his political views. Bartók refused, and eventually withdrew the work. For the remainder of his life, Bartók did not feel greatly attached to the government or institutions of Hungary, although his love affair with its folk music continued.

After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission prize, Bartók wrote very little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music (in Central Europe, the Balkans, Algeria, and Turkey). However, the outbreak of World War I forced him to stop these expeditions, and he returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince in 1914–16 and the String Quartet No. 2 in 1915–17. It was The Wooden Prince which gave him some degree of international fame.

He subsequently worked on another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss, following this up with his two violin sonatas which are harmonically and structurally some of the most complex pieces he wrote. He wrote his third and fourth string quartets in 1927–28, after which he gradually simplified his harmonic language. The String Quartet No. 5 (1934) is somewhat more traditional from this point of view. Bartók wrote his sixth and last string quartet in 1939.

The Miraculous Mandarin was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content, a sordid modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder.

Bartók divorced Márta in 1923, and married a piano student, Ditta Pásztory. His second son, Péter, was born in 1924. For Péter's music lessons Bartók began composing a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces, Mikrokosmos, which remains popular with piano students today.

[edit] World War II and later career

In 1940, as the European political situation worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók was increasingly tempted to flee Hungary.

Bartók was strongly opposed to the Nazis. After they came into power in Germany, he refused to give concerts there and switched away from his German publisher. His liberal views (as evident in the opera Bluebeard's Castle and the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin) caused him a great deal of trouble from conservatives in Hungary.

Having first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly emigrated to the USA with Ditta Pásztory, settling in New York City. Péter Bartók joined them in 1942 and later enlisted in the United States Navy. Béla Bartók, Jr. remained in Hungary.

Bartók did not feel comfortable in the USA, and found it very difficult to write. He was also not very well known in America, and there was little interest in his music. He and his wife Ditta would give concerts, and for a while, they had a research grant to work on a collection of Yugoslav folk songs. However, their finances were always precarious. Also, Bartók's health was increasingly uncertain.

His last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6, were it not for Serge Koussevitsky commissioning him to write the Concerto for Orchestra, at the behest of the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner (who had been Bartók's friend and champion since his days as Bartók's student at the Royal Academy). This quickly became Bartók's most popular work, and one which would ease his financial burdens. He was also commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin to write a Sonata for Solo Violin. This seemed to reawaken his interest in composing, and he went on to write his Piano Concerto No. 3, an airy and almost neo-classical work, and begin work on his Viola Concerto.

Bartók died in New York from leukemia on September 26, 1945 at age 64. He left the viola concerto unfinished at his death; it was later completed by his pupil, Tibor Serly. His other notable students include Jack Beeson.

He was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, but during the gradual fall of Hungarian communism in the late 1980s, his remains were transferred to Budapest, Hungary for a state funeral on July 7, 1988 with interment in Budapest's Farkasreti Cemetery.

There is a statue of Béla Bartók in Brussels, Belgium near the central train station in a public square, Place d'Espagne, and another in London, opposite South Kensington Underground Station. There is also a statue in front of one of the houses Bartók owned in the hills above Budapest (now a museum).

[edit] Music

Paul Wilson lists as the most prominent characteristics of Bartók's music the influence of the folk music of rural Hungary and eastern Europe and the art music of central and western Europe, and his changing attitude toward (and use of) tonality, but without the use of the traditional harmonic functions associated with major and minor scales (Wilson 1992, p.2-4).

Bartók is an influential modernist (though see Reception below) and his music used or may be analysed as containing various modernist techniques such as atonality, bitonality, attenuated harmonic function, polymodal chromaticism, projected sets, privileged patterns, and large set types used as source sets such as the equal tempered twelve tone aggregate, octatonic scale (and alpha chord), the diatonic and heptatonia seconda seven-note scales, and less often the whole tone scale and the primary pentatonic collection (ibid, p.24-29).

He rarely used the aggregate actively to shape musical structure, though there are notable examples such as the second theme from the first movement of his Second Violin Concerto, commenting that he "wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all twelve tones and still remain tonal". More thoroughly, in the first eight measures of the last movement of his Second Quartet, all notes gradually gather with the twelfth (G♭) sounding for the first time on the last beat of measure 8, marking the end of the first section. The aggregate is partitioned in the opening of the Third String Quartet with C♯-D-D♯-E in the accompaniment (strings) while the remaining pitch classes are used in the melody (violin 1) and more often as 7-35 (diatonic or "white-key" collection) and 5-35 (pentatonic or "black-key" collection) such as in no. 6 of the Eight Improvisations. There, the primary theme is on the black keys in the left hand, while the right accompanies with triads from the white keys. In measures 50-51 in the third movement of the Fourth Quartet, the first violin and 'cello play black-key chords, while the second violin and viola play stepwise diatonic lines (ibid, p.25).

Ernő Lendvai (1971) analyses Bartók's works as being based on two opposing systems, that of the golden section and the acoustic scale, and tonally on the axis system (ibid, p.7).

[edit] Reception

Some of Bartók's works have been criticized for their use of tonality and nontonal methods unique to each piece; Milton Babbitt, for example, praises the "identification of the personal exigency with the fundamental musical exigency of the epoch" yet concludes that "Bartók's solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated." The problem is Bartók's praised use of "two organizational principles" - tonality for large scale relationships and the piece-specific method for moment to moment thematic elements - worrying that the "highly attenuated tonality" requires extreme non-harmonic methods to create a feeling of closure. Presumably Babbitt preferred Arnold Schoenberg's completely atonal non-piece specific method of twelve tone music. (Maus 2004, p.164)

[edit] Selected works

Works are catalogued with the designation Sz. (Szöllösy).

[edit] Stage works

• Duke Bluebeard's Castle, opera
• The Miraculous Mandarin, ballet-pantomime
• The Wooden Prince, ballet

[edit] Orchestral works

• Dance Suite (1923)
• Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1937)
• Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939)
• Concerto for Orchestra (1942–43, revised 1945)

[edit] Concertante works

• Piano
  • Piano Concerto No. 1 (1926)
  • Piano Concerto No. 2 (1932)
  • Piano Concerto No. 3 (1945)
• Violin
  • Violin Concerto No. 1 (1907-1908, 1st pub 1956)
  • Violin Concerto No. 2 (1937-38)
  • Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (1928–29)
  • Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra (1928, rev. 1935)
• Viola
  • Viola Concerto (1945)

[edit] Choral works

• Four Slovak Folksongs (1917)
• Cantata Profana (after a Romanian song) (1930)
• From Olden Times (1935)

[edit] Chamber works

• Sonata for two pianos and percussion
• String Quartets
  • String Quartet No. 1
  • String Quartet No. 2
  • String Quartet No. 3
  • String Quartet No. 4
  • String Quartet No. 5
  • String Quartet No. 6
• Contrasts, for clarinet, violin, and piano (1938)
  • Piano Quintet (1903-4)
  • Violin Sonatas
  • Violin Sonata No. 1
  • Violin Sonata No. 2
  • Violin Sonata No. 3
• Violin duets (44 Duos)

[edit] Piano works

• Fourteen Bagatelles Op.6 (1908)
• Two Romanian Folk Dances (1910)
• Allegro barbaro (1911)
• Elegy Op. 8a, 8b (191?)
• Piano Sonatina (1915)
• Romanian Folk Dances (1915) These were also arranged for piano and violin as well as an orchestral version
• Suite for Piano, Op. 14 (1916)
• Improvisations Op. 20 (1920)
• Piano Sonata (1926)
• Im Freien (Out of Doors) (1926)
• Mikrokosmos - These include the 6 Dances in Bulgarian Rhythym dedicated to Harriet Cohen (1926, 1932–39)
• 42 Hungarian Folk Dances (For Children)
• Pieces for Little Children

[edit] Arrangements by others

• Suite paysanne hongroise (arranged by Paul Alma, for flute and piano or orchestra)

[edit] See also

• Category:Compositions by Béla Bartók

[edit] Media

[edit] Sources

• Maus, Fred (2004). "Sexual and Musical Categories", The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1580461433.
• Wilson, Paul (1992). The Music of Béla Bartók. ISBN 0300051115.
• Gillies, Malcolm. "Béla Bartók", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed May 23, 2006), (subscription access)

[edit] References

• Antokoletz, Elliott (1984). The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Kárpáti, János (1975). Bartók's String Quartets. Translated by Fred MacNicol. Budapest: Corvina Press.
• Lendvai, Ernő (1971). Béla Bartók: An Analysis of His Music. London: Kahn and Averill.

[edit] External links

• Bartók Béla Memorial House, Budapest
• A chronological list of Bartók's compositions
• Free scores by Bartók at IMSLP (Public domain)
• Bartók and his relationship with Unitarianism
• A Genius on the IRT - Béla Bartók in New York review of Agatha Fassett’s chronicle of the last years of Bartók’s life
• Classical Cat page of Bartók links
• Discography at SonyBMG Masterworks

[edit] Recordings

• Kunst der Fuge: Béla Bartók - MIDI files
• Contrasts: Verbunkos (7.10 mb), Contrasts: Piheno (5.86 mb), Contrasts: Sebes (8.26 mb). Helen Kim (violin), Ted Gurch (clarinet), Adam Bowles (piano). From Luna Nova New Music Ensemble