Béla Viktor János Bartók was born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary, now Sinnicolau Mare, Romania. He died in New York City on September 26, 1945.
In late October, 1940, Béla Bartók no longer had a choice. With his wife, he left his native Hungary and made his way to the United States.
World War II had broken out in Europe about a year before, and, after Germany stunned the world by conquering France in just six weeks, the Hungarian government of Miklós Horthy had scrambled in October to be the first minor power to sign on to the Tripartite Pact. That was the notorious treaty among Germany, Italy, and Japan that pledged mutual defense – functionally against the United States, the only power that could threaten all three governments – and defined the future spheres of influence in a fascist-ruled world.
That Hungarian government was led by Miklós Horthy, last admiral of Austria-Hungary’s imperial navy in the waning days of World War I. Horthy had come to power in 1919 by deposing a short-lived, left-wing government that Bartók had actively supported. Despite his fame, the composer had been politically suspect ever since. With his country doubling down on backing the Nazis, Bartók knew he was living on borrowed time. Further, his beloved mother’s recent death had removed the last personal impediment to his leaving.
Unlike other composers who fled Europe’s turmoil for the New World, Bartók never felt at home in the United States. Neither had his fame as a composer made it across the Atlantic, although he was known as a pianist. For the first years of what he considered his exile in America, he made his living as an ethnomusicologist, continuing his parallel musical passion that dated to the first decade of the 20th century. In 1908, his fascination with traditional folk music led him and fellow composer Zoltán Kodály to travel the Hungarian countryside to research and collect traditional music, particularly from the Magyar tradition.
(For most of Europe, “Hungarian” folk music had long mistakenly been equated with “gypsy” music, which instead belongs to the Roma tradition. Magyar, Hungary’s native tongue, is part of the Uralic language family that most likely traces its roots to the northern reaches of what is now central Russia. Its closest cousin tongue is Finnish, and it is not related to the Indo-European languages spoken across the rest of Europe and, by extension, former European colonies like the United States.)
In New York, Columbia University hired Bartók and his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory, to analyze and catalogue its collection of Serbian and Croatian folk songs. Their income was augmented by performing, teaching, and royalties from Bartók’s publishers. They also were supported by a circle of fellow European musicians in America who knew and admired Bartók’s music.
Bartók had suffered several health problems through his life, including sever eczema as a child and tuberculosis as a young man. He developed a shoulder stiffness late in 1940. His symptoms worsened significantly in 1942, but it was not until the spring of 1944 – too late to offer any effective treatment – that he was finally diagnosed with leukemia.
It’s a sad irony that, as his body deteriorated, his musical creativity flourished, leading him to compose four late masterpieces. The most important of these was the Concerto for Orchestra, which has become his most enduringly popular work.
Among the fellow Hungarians that championed Bartók and his music in the U.S. were Fritz Reiner, the Budapest-born conductor who studied piano with Bartók at the Franz Liszt Academy, and Joseph Szigeti, Budapest-born violin virtuoso who had fled the Nazis and the war in Europe in 1939. Together, they approached Serge Koussevitsky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a lifelong champion of new music with an idea.
Koussevitsky’s second wife, Natalie Ushkova, was the daughter of a Russian tea magnate. Although Koussevitsky already was known as a bass virtuoso, his 1905 marriage to Natalie brought him the wealth to launch his conducting career and support young composers by founding a music publishing company. When Natalie died in 1942, Koussevitsky established the Koussevitsky Foundations in her honor. Its purpose was to commission new works and help get them performed. Why not commission a work from Bartók, Reiner and Szigeti asked?
Koussevitsky agreed, and so did Bartók. The result, the Concerto for Orchestra, was written in a stunning 53 days from August to October, 1943. Koussevitsky led the BSO in the premiere on Dec. 1, 1944. It was a hit and immediately entered the standard repertoire, where it has remained ever since. It’s one of only a very few 20th-century pieces to achieve such success.
The concept of a concerto for orchestra wasn’t entirely new in 1943, but neither was it long established. The first work with such a title dates from the 1920s. The idea is to apply the concept of a concerto – a virtuoso showpiece – and apply it to the entire orchestra. That’s in contrast to a symphony, which in theory focuses more on the emotional and intellectual expressiveness of the music. It’s in a sense a false dichotomy, since in either case the music has to be good, but it offers guidance on how listeners might approach a piece.
Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra interestingly follows the traditional outline of neither a solo concerto (usually three movements) or a symphony (four movements). Nevertheless, its five movements do, taken individually, follow fairly traditional structures.
Though the piece is listed as being in F minor, it is filled with tonal ambiguity thanks to its emphasis on harmonic fourths instead of thirds (which stack to form standard major and minor chords), and thanks to Bartók’s invoking characteristics of the Magyar folk music he studied and admired. Those include using the pentatonic and modal scales, and melodies of limited range. Traditional Magyar folk rhythms also drive the piece, especially the figure of three short notes tied to a syncopated long note; that motif appears in the introduction and lies at the heart of the impassioned elegy.
The combination creates an effect that is simultaneously completely modern and somehow mediæval – both of the moment and of all times.
The Introduction starts mysteriously in a style known as “night music” for its sense of dark foreboding. Cellos and basses climb from the depths in fourths; winds and upper strings murmur above. First a solo flute, then two trumpets play the motif that will recur throughout the piece. The strings explode in an intense climax that leads to the main allegro, which follows standard sonata-allegro form.
The second movement is titled “Giuoco delle coppie” (The Game of Pairs). What those pairs are is the game. The obvious pairs are the two players of each woodwind instrument (plus trumpets) who offer their section of the movement’s theme. Each instrument stays locked at a certain interval – sixths for the bassoons, thirds for oboes, fifths for flutes, sevenths for clarinets, and seconds for the trumpets. There are other, less obvious pairs, though: The oboes and bassoons, both double reed instruments, play the inverse of each other’s intervals. (That is, a sixth inverted becomes a third.) The clarinets and trumpets do the same.
The Elegy is the concerto’s emotional high point, turning the folk-inspired motifs and themes of the first movement into searing despair. Bartók never offered a program for the Concerto for Orchestra, but it’s difficult not to hear his sadness at the fate of his home country.
The Intermezzo interotto (interrupted intermezzo) breaks this dark spell with a generally light-hearted mood, albeit with a second theme of aching poignancy. The interruption comes in the form of a raucous, flatulent satire on a theme that was all the rage in 1943 – the inexorable, first movement march theme of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, (Leningrad). It also happens to mirror the frothy “Da geh’ ich zu Maxim” from The Merry Widow by Franz Lehár (also a Hungarian, coincidentally). We don’t know if Bartók is telling us he thinks the Shostakovich is silly, if he was tired of hearing it on the radio, or that he thought it was funny it echoed a pre-World War I operetta. Whichever it is, we know what Bartók’s friends knew: that he had a sense of humor.
A horn fanfare starts the finale, which promptly unleashes a whirlwind of energy. It, too, is in classic sonata-allegro form, and its second theme is a peasant dance introduced in the woodwinds.
Bartók didn’t live long enough to see his creation become a mainstay in the orchestral repertoire, but he did live long enough to decide its ending needed some help. In 1945, as part of some revisions to the Concerto for Orchestra, he wrote a new, longer ending. While the score and players’ parts include both the original and revised endings, the original is rarely played. The revised version is heard tonight.
– Thomas Consolo