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Bella Bartók
Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, BB 33
  • Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania)
  • Died September 26, 1945, in New York City
  • Composed in 1903–04, revised in 1920
  • First CMS performance on March 25, 2011, by pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, violinists Ida Kavafian and Ani Kavafian, violist Paul Neubauer, and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt
  • Duration: 42 minutes

Béla Bartók spent the summer of 1904 in Gerlice Puszta, a summer retreat in present-day Slovakia. While there, he had a transformative musical encounter: he heard his Transylvanian cleaner Lidi Dósa singing a folk tune, which inspired in him a “new plan: to collect the finest Hungarian folksongs and to raise them, adding the best possible piano accompaniments, to the level of art-song.” This spark of inspiration coincided with his completion of his Piano Quintet in C, a large, virtuosic work that owed much to the influence of Johannes Brahms and fellow Hungarian Franz Liszt and represented one of his first lasting accomplishments in chamber music writing.

The premiere performances of the quintet were given by the composer and the Prill String Quartet in November of that year. The piece was well received by listeners: Bartók noted that “the audience liked it to the extent of three recalls.” Many reviewers were likewise impressed, especially Theodor Helm of Pester Lloyd, who wrote that “a consuming inner flame seems to burn in these notes, intense, bold, and demonic. . . . This genuine ‘Sturm und Drang’ work is by a real talent.” Still, the piece was technically demanding to an extent that caused the composer concern. He thought that “the difficulty of my quintet gravely jeopardized the accomplishment of its first performance,” and when he submitted the piece for consideration in the 1905 Rubinstein Composition Competition in Paris, it was rejected on spec: “they declared flatly and categorically that it could not be learned.”

In 1920, Bartók carried out revisions to the quintet, and he performed the new version in January of 1921. He reported being disappointed that this piece, which was written in a post-Romantic idiom, received more enthusiasm from the audience than more recent, timely, modernist offerings on that program. There is a time-honored tradition of composers turning on their most publicly popular works. Ludwig van Beethoven came to resent his Septet, Op. 20, when twenty years after it was written listeners preferred it to his more recent fare. Camille Saint-Saëns was always bewildered by the success of a work for trumpet, strings, and piano that he initially didn’t want to write, and he refused to let the Carnival of the Animals be published before his death, suspecting that this unserious music would overshadow his other achievements. Bartók’s first wife Márta Ziegler and his friend Zoltán Kodály placed the Piano Quintet in that tradition, claiming that the composer had destroyed the manuscript of the piece. In fact, it remained in his archive, and fortunately the work was resurrected in the 1960s.

The quintet opens with a stretch of string counterpoint. The four instruments share a unison pitch, then fan out into an intensifying set of harmonies. After a few dense measures, strings and keyboard come together on a melody of sudden, unanticipated triumph. Bartók marks this celebratory tune throughout the first movement’s slow introduction: he wants us to hang onto it, since it will serve as an anchor point for the rest of the work. An Allegro follows, which displays an expansive, digression-filled sonata form. The first theme, a string of urgent four-note scalar descents that imply the eerie Phrygian mode, is so loose and mobile that it can hardly keep to one key at a time. Bartók takes his time before arriving at a sweet second subject, a duet introduced by the cello and viola that is supported by undulating piano triplets. Throughout the movement, sections are regularly capped off by a clanging closing idea: a string of joyous perfect fourths, followed by a gnarlier Phrygian gesture.

In the second movement, we hear some of the folk-inspired rhythmic innovation that Bartók would develop further in his later works. The keyboard part at the start implies that there are three beats in each measure. But above, the violin presents a typical Bulgarian rhythm of 2+2+2+3 beats, a pattern that playfully swims in and out of alignment with the piano downbeats. Bartók doesn’t use these rhythms all the time; sometimes he drops in more square figures, which extend the phrases to odd, pleasingly asymmetrical proportions. A contrasting episode in the middle of the movement starts as a plain lullaby in 3/4 time but eventually hurtles into a wild, 2/4 jumping dance and a sequence of whining, saucy, chromatic lines in the first violin. 

The remarkable, rich sonority of the string unison that opens the slow movement is only possible because of scordatura, or temporary re-tuning of the instruments. The composer asks the two violinists to bring their low G-strings down to an F-sharp so that all four players can unite on a series of husky declamations. After the violinists tune up and the musicians start playing different notes from one another, their counterpoint is gritty, searing, and often doesn’t resolve in straightforward ways. In his review, Helm noted that a few parts of the piece “certainly sounded alien to some ‘strictly conservative’ ears,” and in this movement we do hear hints of the harmonically daring music Bartók would write just a few years later in his First String Quartet. 

The Adagio leads smoothly to the quintet’s finale, which turns the motto introduced at the outset of the piece into a rollicking Verbunkos. This was a Hungarian military dance form long used to convince people from rural villages to enlist. Army members would display their prowess by moving faster and faster, jumping, and clicking their spurs to music that was played by itinerant bands of Roma musicians. Bartók’s writing in this last movement is intoxicating, fun, and yet linked to all that came before in a very thoughtful, careful fashion. The ending, in which the perfect fourths that closed off passages in the opening movement make an ecstatic return, is among the most unapologetically joyous stretches of music that the composer ever wrote.

Bella Bartók
Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, BB 33
  • Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania)
  • Died September 26, 1945, in New York City
  • Composed in 1903–04, revised in 1920
  • First CMS performance on March 25, 2011, by pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, violinists Ida Kavafian and Ani Kavafian, violist Paul Neubauer, and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt
  • Duration: 42 minutes

Béla Bartók spent the summer of 1904 in Gerlice Puszta, a summer retreat in present-day Slovakia. While there, he had a transformative musical encounter: he heard his Transylvanian cleaner Lidi Dósa singing a folk tune, which inspired in him a “new plan: to collect the finest Hungarian folksongs and to raise them, adding the best possible piano accompaniments, to the level of art-song.” This spark of inspiration coincided with his completion of his Piano Quintet in C, a large, virtuosic work that owed much to the influence of Johannes Brahms and fellow Hungarian Franz Liszt and represented one of his first lasting accomplishments in chamber music writing.

The premiere performances of the quintet were given by the composer and the Prill String Quartet in November of that year. The piece was well received by listeners: Bartók noted that “the audience liked it to the extent of three recalls.” Many reviewers were likewise impressed, especially Theodor Helm of Pester Lloyd, who wrote that “a consuming inner flame seems to burn in these notes, intense, bold, and demonic. . . . This genuine ‘Sturm und Drang’ work is by a real talent.” Still, the piece was technically demanding to an extent that caused the composer concern. He thought that “the difficulty of my quintet gravely jeopardized the accomplishment of its first performance,” and when he submitted the piece for consideration in the 1905 Rubinstein Composition Competition in Paris, it was rejected on spec: “they declared flatly and categorically that it could not be learned.”

In 1920, Bartók carried out revisions to the quintet, and he performed the new version in January of 1921. He reported being disappointed that this piece, which was written in a post-Romantic idiom, received more enthusiasm from the audience than more recent, timely, modernist offerings on that program. There is a time-honored tradition of composers turning on their most publicly popular works. Ludwig van Beethoven came to resent his Septet, Op. 20, when twenty years after it was written listeners preferred it to his more recent fare. Camille Saint-Saëns was always bewildered by the success of a work for trumpet, strings, and piano that he initially didn’t want to write, and he refused to let the Carnival of the Animals be published before his death, suspecting that this unserious music would overshadow his other achievements. Bartók’s first wife Márta Ziegler and his friend Zoltán Kodály placed the Piano Quintet in that tradition, claiming that the composer had destroyed the manuscript of the piece. In fact, it remained in his archive, and fortunately the work was resurrected in the 1960s.

The quintet opens with a stretch of string counterpoint. The four instruments share a unison pitch, then fan out into an intensifying set of harmonies. After a few dense measures, strings and keyboard come together on a melody of sudden, unanticipated triumph. Bartók marks this celebratory tune throughout the first movement’s slow introduction: he wants us to hang onto it, since it will serve as an anchor point for the rest of the work. An Allegro follows, which displays an expansive, digression-filled sonata form. The first theme, a string of urgent four-note scalar descents that imply the eerie Phrygian mode, is so loose and mobile that it can hardly keep to one key at a time. Bartók takes his time before arriving at a sweet second subject, a duet introduced by the cello and viola that is supported by undulating piano triplets. Throughout the movement, sections are regularly capped off by a clanging closing idea: a string of joyous perfect fourths, followed by a gnarlier Phrygian gesture.

In the second movement, we hear some of the folk-inspired rhythmic innovation that Bartók would develop further in his later works. The keyboard part at the start implies that there are three beats in each measure. But above, the violin presents a typical Bulgarian rhythm of 2+2+2+3 beats, a pattern that playfully swims in and out of alignment with the piano downbeats. Bartók doesn’t use these rhythms all the time; sometimes he drops in more square figures, which extend the phrases to odd, pleasingly asymmetrical proportions. A contrasting episode in the middle of the movement starts as a plain lullaby in 3/4 time but eventually hurtles into a wild, 2/4 jumping dance and a sequence of whining, saucy, chromatic lines in the first violin. 

The remarkable, rich sonority of the string unison that opens the slow movement is only possible because of scordatura, or temporary re-tuning of the instruments. The composer asks the two violinists to bring their low G-strings down to an F-sharp so that all four players can unite on a series of husky declamations. After the violinists tune up and the musicians start playing different notes from one another, their counterpoint is gritty, searing, and often doesn’t resolve in straightforward ways. In his review, Helm noted that a few parts of the piece “certainly sounded alien to some ‘strictly conservative’ ears,” and in this movement we do hear hints of the harmonically daring music Bartók would write just a few years later in his First String Quartet. 

The Adagio leads smoothly to the quintet’s finale, which turns the motto introduced at the outset of the piece into a rollicking Verbunkos. This was a Hungarian military dance form long used to convince people from rural villages to enlist. Army members would display their prowess by moving faster and faster, jumping, and clicking their spurs to music that was played by itinerant bands of Roma musicians. Bartók’s writing in this last movement is intoxicating, fun, and yet linked to all that came before in a very thoughtful, careful fashion. The ending, in which the perfect fourths that closed off passages in the opening movement make an ecstatic return, is among the most unapologetically joyous stretches of music that the composer ever wrote.