Music: The Bartók Revival

Like many another composer, Hungary’s Bela Bartók lived and died a poor man. His sour and peppery music was bitterly condemned by many critics; audiences seemed to like it even less. Mostly it got played, if at all, before esoteric little groups of modernist composers and musicians, who had built up a tolerance to what the uninitiated regarded as barnyard music.

When he died of leukemia in Manhattan last September at 64, Bela Bartók’s final hospital bills and burial expenses were paid by the big-money boys of composing, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (Irving Berlin, Deems Taylor, etc.). He had never belonged.

Last week Bartók’s music was being played as it never was when he was alive. In the past month in Manhattan, concertgoers have heard eight Bartók performances by New York’s Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York City Symphony.

Posthumous Justice. The explanation was partly sentimental: most of the solo artists and conductors took no fee, but specified that the money should go to Bartók’s sick widow. But Bartók’s closest friend and fellow Hungarian, Violinist Joseph Szigeti (rhymes with spaghetti), insisted that there was more to the Bartók revival than that. Said he: “It’s not planned but spontaneous. It has an element of the bad conscience, like all posthumous justice.”

Szigeti and Bartók spent some time together at Davos, Switzerland (the locale of The Magic Mountain) in 1928, while Bartók was treated for consumption and Szigeti recuperated from pneumonia. Szigeti remembers him as a slight, frail man with the burning blue eyes of a zealot, whose hair had turned white at 22. They later played in concerts together all over Europe. Said Szigeti: “He was an anachronism . . . who should have lived in the times of Haydn and Beethoven. He couldn’t fit into big business.”

Wails & Dissonances. Bartók based his music on thousands of Hungarian folk songs he had recorded on primitive cylinders in remote Hungarian provinces, some as early as 1905. He always traveled as far as he could from the railroads, and sought out the oldest shepherds and peasants he could find. When their banshee-like wails could not be transcribed into the conventional musical scale, Bartók adopted five-and twelve-tone scales. His counterpoint was as orderly and frugal as his life, but in concert halls it came out dissonant.

Says Szigeti: “The mental inertia of the music-listening public is something so terrifying it is better not to think of it. Our sluggish mental habits make so much great music seem esoteric. We shut out our participation because we are afraid. Bartók is one of the imperishable creative artists. His position is less likely to be corroded by the years than that of Sibelius or Strauss or Prokofiev.”

One of Bartók’s own favorites was his early (1907) Portrait No. 1 in D, in which a tender strain of violin melody was originally played by the concertmaster from his seat in the orchestra. Bartók once begged Szigeti: “You must rescue it, take it out of the orchestra.” Last week Szigeti played it as a violin concerto, with Leonard Bernstein’s New York City Symphony, in its first Manhattan performance. Said the New York Herald Tribune: “How music of such extraordinary value can have escaped [our] attention . . . for four decades is difficult to understand.”