Mixed reception: an introduction

With the premiere of his ambitious symphonic poem Kossuth (1903) in Budapest on 13 January 1904, twenty-two-year-old Béla Bartók seemed to have instantly achieved the status of a national icon. For weeks to come critics in no less than seventeen publications would echo the applause that had brought Bartók to the stage some dozen times.

Yet such unbridled enthusiasm hardly typified Bartók's reception in Hungary during his lifetime. For most of his career he was as frequently castigated by Hungarians as embraced. Even more painfully, Hungary's most prestigious musical organizations, the Opera and the Philharmonic Society, often simply ignored him. As was the case with a number of composers of his generation, a troubled relationship with the public was almost guaranteed by Bartók's allegiance to the difficult aesthetics of modernism. In Hungary, however, where musical style was often explicitly bound to the expression of magyarság (Hungarianness), the progressive (hence implicitly cosmopolitan) political stance Bartók's music was taken to represent erected further barriers to acceptance. Accordingly, reactions to Bartók's music in Hungary during his lifetime were heavily laced with social criticism, while his reception in Western Europe reflected more generic concerns about modern music. Bartók's Hungarian reception serves to remind us that not only his music, but modernist art in general – despite its appeals to abstraction and universality – carried culturally specific social messages that depended for their decoding on the contexts in which they were received.

Ever since his Academy graduation in 1903 Bartók had looked forward to visiting America. His piano teacher István Thomán had encouraged him to attend the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis in 1904, but this plan fell by the wayside as Bartók failed to develop the same international following as a pianist that his model, Dohnányi, had done.

It would be another quarter of a century before Bartók finally visited the United States. For ten weeks in the winter of 1927–28 he undertook a successful coast-to-coast tour, sometimes in association with such Hungarian colleagues as the violinists Joseph Szigeti and Jelly Arányi, and the conductor Fritz Reiner. He hoped to return soon as he liked the people and concert fees were comparatively high. Moreover, Hungarian-American friends persuaded him in 1928 to enter his Third String Quartet in a competition of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, for which he subsequently won joint first prize of $3,000. But the Depression put an end to his plans for an American return. The Philadelphia prize money instead helped to maintain something of his standard of living in the early 1930s. Bartók's second visit, of April–May 1940, was altogether more purposeful. Although performing in numerous concerts, including a prestigious appearance with Szigeti at the Library of Congress and recording his recent Contrasts (1938) with Benny Goodman and Szigeti, Bartók's aim was to determine if he should move to the United States. That brief visit provided him with a strong, and unexpected, reason to do so.

Bartók wrote more solo works for violin than for any other instrument except his own, the piano. In fact, the violin is just about the only instrument besides the piano for which Bartók wrote solo works at all, aside from the cello version of the First Rhapsody (1928), originally for violin, the clarinet part in Contrasts (1938), playing alongside the violin, and the Viola Concerto (1945, incomplete). The piano works, taken as a group, have been the subject of several extensive studies, but the solo violin works have usually been discussed individually or in small groups. As for the Viola Concerto, its incompleteness and the problems surrounding the different performing versions have understandably compelled scholars to focus on the source situation and touch on stylistic issues only tangentially.

A noteworthy difference between the respective genres of violin and piano works has to do with form. With the exception of the 44 Duos (1931), the violin works adhere exclusively to the two- or three-movement forms of sonata, concerto or rhapsody, while among the compositions for piano, one notes a large number of short character pieces (bagatelles, burlesques, dirges, sketches, or simply ‘pieces’) alongside works like the Suite or the Sonata. By considering all the solo violin/viola works in one integrated survey, one begins to see a distinct stylistic thread spanning Bartók's entire career, one that cuts across lines of genres and style periods as they are normally perceived.

Béla Bartók's compositional output defies straightforward categorization. He is often bracketed with Hindemith and Stravinsky as a composer of non-serial music during the first half of the twentieth century, rather than with the twelve-tone composers of the Second Viennese School. Yet what sets him apart from all these composers is his interest in folk music and the assimilation of folk- and art-music influences in his works. His lifelong commitment to folk music, not just its collection and transcription but also its analysis and systematic classification, is unsurpassed.

This book brings together many leading exponents in Bartók research and endeavours to provide a concise yet comprehensive insight into current thoughts and ideas surrounding the historical, cultural and musical appreciation of his works. Even fifty-five years after the composer's death important documents continue to be translated from Hungarian to English, some of which challenge long-standing interpretations of cultural and political issues surrounding the music. The diversity of approaches to Bartók research is demonstrated in this volume through historical, performance-orientated and analytical perspectives within the organization of material into three main sections: ‘Contexts’, ‘Profiles of the music’ and ‘Reception’.

For Bartók there were a great many political and social issues that underlay his musical philosophy. Lynn Hooker opens the first section of this book with a presentation of the political, social and cultural circumstances that surrounded Bartók in Hungary from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. This extends to include the eminent musicians and literary scholars with whom the composer shared some important affinities during this rapidly changing modern world.

In his essay on the authorial performance tradition, Hermann Danuser distinguishes four means through which composers can transmit their ideas of the interpretation of their works: ‘first by performance instructions given in the text of the work, second, by their conception of performance communicated orally or in writing, third, by the realization of “exemplary” performances, and fourth, by fixing the authorial performance on a recording medium in the twentieth century’.

Bartók utilized all these opportunities to convey his ideas of the performance of his music throughout his career. He edited his compositions carefully with an abundance of descriptive expressions and signs, indicating tempo and character, phrasing, dynamic shading, articulation and accents, their combinations, sometimes introducing novel signs for special effects. To further define the character of the composition, he indicated the tempo and tempo changes with metronome markings, and from the 1930s, he also started to provide the expected time to perform the work in the score at the end of each composition or individual movement.

Most of the elements of Western musical notation, however, are only approximations and need interpretation. There are conventions that the composer may take for granted but these might become forgotten in time. For this reason, any clarification about musical notations by a composer represents inestimable value. However, even armed with the systematic explanations of the performing signs Bartók employed in his instructional editions of classical music, there remain uncertainties in the interpretation of the score since certain nuances cannot be noted in a practical way without becoming too complicated and obscuring basic elements of the composition.

On 26 September 1945, Béla Bartók died in New York City, more than 4,000 miles from home. Since he had left Hungary and entered voluntary exile in 1940, war-torn Europe had heard little of his music. As the war ended, though, nations began to rebuild or reform their concert programmes. Composers searched for new stylistic directions that would make sense to them, and implicit in their questions about new music was a desire to assess the value of recent musical styles, including Bartók's. As his last works received their European premieres in 1946 and 1947, it also became possible to evaluate his career as a historical whole, and to see in its changing course a path that could either be followed or rejected. The political turmoil of the early post-war years ensured that these musical questions carried political significance; as we shall see, musical and political judgements about Bartók's music continued to be as inseparable after his death as they were during his lifetime. In particular, growing antagonism between Soviet and American zones of influence in Europe meant that the musical aesthetics of the two regions diverged sharply, and this division left a deep impression on responses to Bartók's music after the war.

Bartók's mature compositions for voice are spread across a range of musical genres. Aside from the opera discussed in the previous chapter, there are six works for voice and piano, six for unaccompanied choir, one for double choir and orchestra with soloists, one for choir and piano, and there are also further arrangements of these works for voice and piano, voice and orchestra, and choir and orchestra. The common thread connecting the mixture of genres is folk music: not surprisingly, Bartók's passion for folk song is even more manifest in his vocal works than in his instrumental music. He wrote only two cycles of ‘art’ songs and his discovery of peasant music infiltrated even these. As he pointed out in 1920, there was no other vocal tradition in Hungary from which to develop a modern vocal style: ‘[w]e Hungarians have nothing but our parlando peasant melodies … to solve this question’, he wrote.

The use of peasant materials also carried a message, however: Bartók's initial aim in arranging folksong was to clarify a contemporary misunderstanding about the omnipresent gypsy music of Budapest, which was celebrated as Hungarian folk music. As his career progressed, his use of peasant materials came to intertwine increasingly with his nationalistic and then humanistic vision: whether or not he intended them to be active ‘agitators’, texts from folk sources came to embody his critical view of urban society. As József Ujfalussy wrote in 1971 of Bartók's From Olden Times (1935), ‘every word and every tone in this work was an undisguised political appeal’. The presence of text leads this ideological aspect of folklorism to dominate his vocal works.

Diverse analytical methods based upon pitch organization in Bartók's music are, with a single exception, products of the second half of the century. To see them and their differences in perspective, it will be well to summarize first what happened generally in the earlier half of the century and after that to outline briefly the particular circumstances facing the Bartók analyst. During the first two decades of the century it was the new sounds of all avant-garde music that provoked the most immediate and sharpest response from critics, but naturally enough, discourse about the music itself was conducted largely along aesthetic rather than technical lines. A shift occurs in the 1920s, the landmark being Schoenberg's development of his twelve-tone method and the debates surrounding it. During the next two or three decades, the literature fairly bristles with technical discussions: pantonality, atonality, bitonality, polytonality and pandiatonicism are some of the terms that date back to this period; even Bartók, a notorious non-participant in these discussions, weighs in with the term polymodality. A second landmark is produced in Paul Hindemith's The Craft of Musical Composition, perhaps the first comprehensive theory of pitch organization of twentieth-century music. This tradition-oriented theory, largely dismissive of Schoenbergian assumptions, was influential for a while, but eventually fell into neglect, exactly in proportion to the ascendancy of Schoenberg's ideas and their ramifications. The latter came to be the principal force in the thinking of most analysts during the second half of the century, especially in America.

Our knowledge of Augustine's world has transformed itself in the last generation. Ever since the work of Gibbon, at least, the fourth and fifth centuries had been marginalized in the historical imagination even of specialists. Gibbon described the decline of the Roman empire as “the triumph of barbarism and religion” (in the form of Christianity). This was too good a story to disregard, and the evidence was overwhelming and unambiguous.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Augustine's work and influence, both in his own period and in the history of Western philosophy after it. Patristic philosophy and theology, and every area of philosophy and theology in the later medieval period, manifest the mark of his thought. In fact, at least until the thirteenth century, when he may have had a competitor in Thomas Aquinas, Augustine is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the medieval period. Furthermore, although his influence is somewhat less after the medieval period, it is still important. Many of his views, including, for example, his theory of the just war, his account of time and eternity, his understanding of the will, his attempted resolution of the problem of evil, and his approach to the relation of faith and reason, have continued to be important up to the present.

There is an enormous scholarly literature on Augustine's account of free will, and it is remarkable for the range of views it contains. Historians of philosophy read Augustine on free will so variously that it is sometimes difficult to believe they are reading the same texts. John Rist says: 'There is still no consensus of opinion on Augustine's view of each man's responsibility for his moral behaviour . . . There are those who attribute to Augustine the full-blown Calvinist position that each man has no say in his ultimate destiny . . . Other interpreters reject this view in varying degrees. They will not hold that for Augustine man's will is enslaved, or they would dispute about the sense in which it is enslaved and the sense in which it is free.'

It is not hard to determine what Augustine meant by predestination. In one of his last works, written for those who opposed him mainly on the issue of predestination, he has this to say about his doctrine: “This is the predestination of the saints, nothing else: plainly the foreknowledge and preparation of God's bene- fits, by means of which whoever is to be liberated is most certainly liberated.” His doctrine has a dark corollary. If you are not one of the saints - one of those looked after by God - you are most certainly lost; your lot in life is to remain part of a ruined race, squandered in sin (massa perditionis). The doctrine of predestination and its corollary, the inevitable ruin of those not predestined to be redeemed, fairly encapsulate a career's worth of theological reflection on Augustine's part. He had arrived at a relentlessly God-driven account of human redemption, and if his own assessment of his development can be credited, he had begun from a place not too dissimilar. I will be marking some of the turns in Augustine's trek to his doctrine of predestination, at least in passing, but the question I most have in mind is less one of how he gets there than why he bothers. What moves him so to emphasize God's role in redemption that to even some of his own most loyal supporters, he seems to have all but obliterated the human part?

Knowledge of the soul is central to Augustine's search for wisdom, as is seen in his claim that he desires “to know God and the soul” (Sol. 1.2.7). And when Reason, with whom he converses in the Soliloquia, presses him as to whether he does not desire to know anything more, he answers, “Absolutely nothing. ” Later he expresses the same desire in his prayer, “God ever the same, may I know you, and may I know myself” (Sol. 2.1.1). Though all living beings have souls, Augustine's principal interest is the human or rational soul. He uses the Latin anima for soul in general, while reserving animus or mens for the rational soul. In his earlier writings he defines the human soul in Platonic fashion as “a certain substance partaking in reason and suited to rule the body” (De quant. anim. 13.22) and says that “a human being, as seen by a human being, is a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body” (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 1.27.52). In later writings he places more emphasis upon the unity of the human being. Though Augustine says that a human being is “a rational soul which has a body,” he also says that “the soul which has a body does not make two persons, but one human being” (In Johannis evangelium tractatus 19.15). A human being can be defined as a single substance with a body and a soul: “If we should define a human being such that a human being is a rational substance consisting of soul and body, there is no doubt that a human being has a soul which is not the body and has a body which is not the soul” (De Trin. 15.7.11).