bartok

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Bela Bartók , compositor húngaro contemporâneo de Férenczi

1881-1945

A giant of 20th century music, Bela Bartók was a brilliant and original composer who drew inspiration from both his classical contemporaries - most notably Wagner and Strauss - and the folk melodies of his homeland. A pianist, theorist, music historian and teacher, Bartók wrote primarily for instruments rather than for voices, and over the course of his career revolutionized virtually every concept of tonality (or lack thereof) in existence.

Born in Hungary in 1881, Bartok began his musical studies on the piano at age five. His mother was his first teacher; after his father died in 1888, the Bartok family moved to Czechoslovakia, where Bela continued his piano studies and took up composition. At age eleven, he made his first public appearance, playing his own piano music. After several more years of honing his keyboard skills, Bartok enrolled in the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. Here he studied the works of the late Romantics, and became intensely involved in the multi-disciplinary movement of nationalism which was taking Hungary by storm. While at the Academy, he became closely associated with the great composer Zoltan Kodaly - a relationship which would have inestimable impact on the course of musical composition and education. The pair began a far-reaching study of the folk music idioms of Hungary, and published a collection of folk song settings in 1906.

Bartok started his professional career as a pianist, and made several successful tours of the European continent after his graduation from the Academy in 1902. He did not pursue composition as a primary activity until after his appointment to the piano faculty at the Budapest Academy in 1907. From this time on, he wrote reams of orchestral, chamber and solo music, taught theory, and performed solo recitals and concert engagements throughout Europe and in the United States.

In 1940 Bartok moved to the United States to get away from the Nazi expansion, and was given a teaching position at Columbia University in New York City. It is one of the great tragedies of 20th century music that he was never accorded the adulation in America that he so richly deserved; with the exception of some noted musicians - conductor Serge Koussevitzky and violinist Yehudi Menuhin in particular - he was generally misunderstood and ignored by the musical establishment. One respite from this lamentable situation was the happy relationship Bartok rekindled with the great Hungarian conductor Fritz Reiner, who had known the composer during their student days in Hungary. Reiner would remain for the rest of his distinguished career one of Bartok's most powerful proponents, playing and recording a number of his brilliant compatriot's works with every orchestra he commanded. As it turned out, Bartok's career in the United States ended almost before it began; he contracted leukemia in the early 1940s, and died in the fall of 1945, unaware of the monumental status he would achieve after death.

Bartok wrote a large volume of piano works, most notably the brilliant Mikrokosmos (1926-37), a six-book collection of piano teaching pieces which, although simple in form, show his genius as a harmonic and rhythmic innovator. He also wrote a wealth of chamber music; his six string quartets are absolute masterpieces of structure and balance, more so than any works since the music of Mozart and Haydn. In these quartets, Bartok used an original system of tonal organization which drew as much from the non-Western scales of Hungarian folk music as it did from any traditional sense of tonality. Each quartet is a unique marvel of simple melodies, rough dissonances, rhythmic complexity and harmonic abstraction.

Perhaps the best-known works of Bartok are the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for performance by the Boston Symphony, and the remarkable Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste (1936), which demonstrates Bartok's complete command of counterpoint and canon. Both of these works defy description; they are crafted with such intelligence, such sensitivity to orchestral sonorities, such inspired harmonic layers and movement, and such emotional power, that they comprise some of the undeniably greatest music written in this century.

Another of Bartok's masterpieces is the Solo Sonata for Violin. This fiendishly difficult work has challenged every violinist of the first rank for the last fifty years, and, like the solo sonatas and partitas of Bach, stands as one of the most rewarding works for any solo instrument. His concertos, particularly the Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra, are among the greatest works ever written for solo instruments and orchestra. In his original blending of tradition and contemporary musical elements, in his ability to turn any ensemble into a rhythmic force, and in the unforgettable harmonies and tonal colors he invented for various ensembles, Bartok stands alone as one of the most important composers in modern history.

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