Béla Bartók
(1881-1945)
Concerto for Orchestra, Sz. 116, BB 123
Composed 1943
On October 29, 1940, Hungarian Béla Bartók and his wife, Ditta Pásztory, arrived in New York, where the future initially looked bright. Finding this safe haven for his family was more important than any opposition to Hungary’s rising pro-Nazi regime. Unfortunately, he found limited success as a performer in the United States due to his difficult repertoire and cold performance persona. He wrote to his son, “if things are bad everywhere, one prefers to be at home.” Throughout his life, financial difficulties compounded bouts of ill-health.
Considered to be the father of ethnomusicology (the study of music within its cultural context), Bartók had, since 1905, devoted himself to transcribing the folk music of rural villages across Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. He sought to trace and learn from folk traditions’ authentic musical elements in order to infuse them into his own music.
In 1943, after delivering lectures on “New Hungarian art music” at Harvard University, Bartók collapsed and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital where he was diagnosed with leukemia. Hoping to help with his medical expenses, Hungarian-American conductor Fritz Reiner and violinist József Szigeti approached Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and champion of new music, about commissioning a new work. The commission was offered with the understanding that Bartók might be too ill to complete it; it was intended partly as financial aid for his final days. Bartók hesitated, but accepted on the condition that half of the $1,000 fee (roughly $18,500 today) be paid upon acceptance and the remainder upon completion.
During a stay at a private sanatorium at Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains from August to October 1943, Bartók composed his Concerto for Orchestra in just fifty-four days. Despite his illness, he worked enthusiastically. The piece premiered in December 1944, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The Concerto can be considered Bartók’s “symphony,” combining his life’s work in folk-music research with late-Romantic formal structures. It is a “concerto” because every section of the orchestra is given virtuosic opportunities. It even has a few excerpts that are standard audition material for conductors! The work is organized as a large-scale arch, a form Bartók particularly favored: the outer movements share characteristics, while the central Elegia serves as the work’s “kernel.” It is flanked by two intermezzi and two outer sonata-allegro movements, a form traceable to Haydn symphonies.
The first movement opens with a quotation from Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle, creating a hollow, brooding atmosphere. It is a quotation of a Transdanubian song, whose text recalls the grief of losing his mother in 1939:
From here is seen the graveyard’s border
Where rests she who was the light of my eyes.
The grave holds her, whom I would hold.
Now only I know how thoroughly I am orphaned.
The movement then combines the fugato techniques of established musical tradition with peasant scales and irregular rhythms.
In the second movement, originally titled Presentando le coppie (“pairwise presentation”), a side drum acts as the master of ceremonies. Pairs of instruments are introduced, each with its own character and pitch interval. Following a brass chorale, the pairs seem to adopt one another’s customs and manners.
At the center lies the Elegia, a quintessential example of Bartók’s “night music”: atmospheric textures evoking nocturnal natural sounds such as bird calls and rustling leaves, depicted by soft trills, glissandi (sliding notes), and rapid arpeggios. Its main theme, first heard in the violas, recalls the laments of Transylvanian funeral songs.
The fourth movement has been interpreted as a depiction of cultural impotence under authoritarian violence. A young lover, representing an idealistic nation, serenades his beloved before being interrupted by a drunken mob whistling a trivial melody (a quotation of Shostakovich’s Seventh and Lehár’s Merry Widow). Trombone glissandi suggest the mob’s grotesque interruption, and their trails of violence. The lover cannot finish his song with a broken instrument, and his tears reduce him to silence.
The finale is a true orchestral tour de force. Listen to the electrifying timpani and basses in the opening seconds of the movement, shifting the meter beneath the perpetual motion of the violins. A trumpet introduces a fanfare that grows increasingly brilliant through successive brass entrances. A timpani glissando leads into a delicate passage reminiscent of Javanese gamelan music, followed by fugato writing and a return of the opening material. The music briefly becomes stagnant before a lone bassoon, beneath icy, whispering strings, propels the orchestra toward its bombastic and virtuosic conclusion.
Instrumentation – three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings
Duration – 37 minutes
~ Tomás García
Georg and Joyce Albers-Schonberg Assistant Conductor
Princeton Symphony Orchestra
