Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók: The Composer Who Went Out With a Phonograph

In the summer of 1904 Béla Bartók overheard a nanny from Transylvania, Lidi Dósa, singing to herself. What he heard bore no resemblance to the "Hungarian" music of the concert hall — the gypsy-band idiom that Liszt and Brahms had borrowed and everyone had believed. It was older, modal, and entirely unfamiliar. He spent the next three decades hauling a wax-cylinder phonograph across the Carpathians in pursuit of it, and rebuilt Western harmony out of what he carried home.

The Prodigy from the Banat

Béla Viktor János Bartók was born on 25 March 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, in the Banat region of Austria-Hungary, now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania. His father, also Béla, directed an agricultural school and died suddenly in 1888, when the boy was seven. His mother, Paula Voit (1857–1939), was of mixed German, Hungarian, Slovak and Polish descent, and it was she who taught him. By her account he could distinguish different dance rhythms at the piano before he could speak in complete sentences; at four he had forty pieces by heart. He gave his first public recital at eleven in Nagyszőlős, performing among other things his own composition "The Course of the Danube," written when he was nine.

Budapest and Kodály

From 1899 to 1903 he studied at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest — piano with István Thomán, who had studied with Liszt, and composition with János Koessler. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who became the collaborator and friend of his life. His first public success was Kossuth (1903), a symphonic poem for the hero of the Hungarian revolution.

The Phonograph in the Carpathians

From 1908 Bartók and Kodály went into the field together, collecting Magyar, Slovak, Romanian and Bulgarian melodies and recording them on Edison phonographs rather than trusting notation, which would have flattened everything unfamiliar. They found pentatonic scales with close analogues in Asian traditions. Bartók's claim for the value of the work was blunt: folk idioms could liberate composers "from the tyranny of the major and minor keys." The folklorist Charles Seeger, not a man given to flattery, called him "one of the greatest field collectors of the first half of the 20th century."

The Stage Works Nobody Wanted

Bluebeard's Castle (1911), his only opera, was rejected by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission as unfit for the stage and waited until 1918 for a premiere. The ballet The Wooden Prince followed in 1914–16. The Miraculous Mandarin, written between 1918 and 1926 under the visible pressure of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, was held up over its sexual content.

Axes, Knife Blades, and Night Music

The mature works are structurally engineered: symmetrical axes and golden-section proportions organise Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and the Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939). The six string quartets — 1909, 1917, 1927, 1928, 1934, 1939 — revived a genre that had been dormant and remain the spine of his reputation. Cantata Profana (1930) he called his personal credo. He maintained that his music was tonal while almost never using ordinary major and minor harmony, working instead with pentatonic scales, tone clusters and polymodal writing. He had cymbals struck with knife blades. His "night music" manner set eerie dissonances underneath nature sounds and solitary melodies. Mikrokosmos, six graded volumes for piano, became the standard teaching text of the century, and For Children set eighty authentic folk melodies for small hands.

Teaching, Marriages, and a Refusal

He taught piano at the Liszt Academy from 1907, which spared him the touring circuit; Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti, György Sándor and Lili Kraus passed through his studio. In 1909, aged twenty-eight, he married the sixteen-year-old Márta Ziegler; their son Béla III was born in 1910. He divorced in June 1923 and two months later married his nineteen-year-old piano student Ditta Pásztory, who bore Péter in 1924. Raised Catholic, he became an atheist in early adulthood and converted to Unitarianism in 1916. He collected insects.

After Hitler took power in 1933 Bartók refused to perform in Germany and severed relations with his German publisher. In his will of October 1940 he asked that no street in Hungary carry his name while any still carried Mussolini's or Hitler's.

New York

He and Ditta emigrated in October 1940 and settled in New York. Columbia University gave him a fellowship of $3,000 a year for folk-music research, and the couple catalogued Serbian and Croatian songs in the university libraries. He was respected as a pianist and a scholar and largely ignored as a composer. His shoulder began stiffening in late 1940; fevers followed in 1942; in April 1944 the diagnosis came back as leukemia. Prodded by the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner, he produced the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), the Sonata for Solo Violin (1944) and the Third Piano Concerto (1945), the last written as a birthday surprise for Ditta. The Viola Concerto was left unfinished and completed by his pupil Tibor Serly. He died on 26 September 1945, aged sixty-four. Ten people came to the funeral.

Why Béla Is Called a Genius

Two distinct faculties, rarely found in one person. The first is scientific. Bartók helped found what became ethnomusicology as a field discipline, and Charles Seeger's ranking of him among the greatest collectors of the half-century is a technical assessment from a specialist, not a courtesy. The second is compositional synthesis. Anthony Tommasini puts it most cleanly: Bartók "empowered generations of subsequent composers to incorporate folk music and classical traditions from whatever culture into their works." He did not quote peasant tunes decoratively, as the nineteenth century had done. He took their scales, rhythms and intervallic habits apart and rebuilt harmonic language from the pieces, producing music that is neither tonal in the textbook sense nor atonal.

The counter-case lives inside the achievement. Milton Babbitt objected precisely to the mixture — that Bartók combined tonal and non-tonal methods within single pieces — and concluded that "Bartók's solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated." A method nobody else can use is a constrained sort of breakthrough, and he founded no school. Recognition in his lifetime was thin enough that he died in a foreign country with ten mourners, and the works now most performed, the Concerto for Orchestra above all, are the most approachable rather than the most radical. The word is defensible here, but it belongs to the double life of collector and composer, not to either half standing alone.

Legacy

He was exhumed from Ferncliff Cemetery in New York in 1988 and reinterred after a state funeral at Farkasréti Cemetery in Budapest, beside Ditta, who had died in 1982. Statues stand in Budapest, Paris, London, Brussels, Toronto, Timișoara and Vienna. He entered the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 1999, and his works passed into the European Union's public domain on 1 January 2016.

Achievements

• Kossuth Prize — 1948
• Grammy Trustees Award — 1984
• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1930
• Notable work: Bluebeard's Castle
• Notable work: String Quartet No. 2
• Notable work: String Quartet No. 1
• Notable work: Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
• Instruments: piano
• Genres: opera and classical music