Introduction to Béla Bartók

My love and appreciation for specific composers tends to wax and wane, always in a bit of a flux. This is partly because I am constantly renegotiating my relationship with music. Over the years I have been entirely captivated by composers that I am less enthusiastic about now: Steve Reich is an example. A contrary example is Mozart who I used to think was too "precious" but now I simply adore. Some composers I am perennially taken with like, of course, J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Shostakovich and Stravinsky (though the latter has gone up and down a bit in my estimation). I guess that, for me, the story never comes to an end: there are always new strengths and weaknesses to be discovered. Not in Bach, of course, but in most others!

For much of the time that I have been posting this blog I have not been a huge fan of Béla Bartók, finding his music often too gloomy and dark. This probably came from listening to so much Steve Reich who is often, let's admit it, pretty upbeat. But I find myself leaning more and more toward Bartók recently and I recognize that I haven't given him a fair shake on the Music Salon. Years and years ago I did a post titled The Case of Bartók where the praise was rather half-hearted. Let me try and make up for that by doing several posts on Bartók and revealing what is really remarkable about his music.

But first let's have just a taste of his musical style. This is his well-known Allegro barbaro, composed in 1911 when he was thirty years old:

Why does Bartók's music have such a different flavour from other European music of the time? It partly has to do with the place of Hungary in European history. The Magyars are a people originating in Central Asia that only arrived in Europe late in the 9th century, among the last of the great migrations occurring from the end of the Roman Empire to the emergence of Western Europe from the Dark Ages. They were, therefore, considered by their neighbors to be somewhat "barbaric" in their language and customs. Hungarian is not related to other European languages but is a member of the Ugric language family associated with peoples in Western Siberia.

As we can hear in the piano piece, Hungarian music can have a fiery passion that is at odds with the more calm music of Central Europe. Bartók himself was fascinated with the folk music of Hungary and from his early thirties he devoted considerable amounts of time to the study and collection of folk music not only from Hungary but from Rumania, Bulgaria and even as far as Turkey. He discovered rhythmic and harmonic resources very different from the education in Western European theory he received from the Budapest Academy of Music.

Not to get too bogged down in details, but elements such as modal folksong, harmony based on fourths and irregular meters like 7/4 and 11/8 from Bulgarian folk dance soon found a place in his music. He often created settings for folk songs that combined modal melody with chromatically contrasting accompaniments.

Bartók studied piano with a student of Franz Liszt and was a virtuoso player. He wrote three formidably challenging piano concertos that synthesized a number of influences. Here is the Piano Concerto No. 1 in a spectacular performance with Yuja Wang as soloist and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Orchestra. One of the most bad-ass piano concertos you are ever likely to encounter!