Bartok: 20 Years After

...In truth, the composer had experienced, and was still to experience, troubles more than sufficient to test the dictum "Suffering ennobles...

...For a frequently hair-raising account of this, see Agatha Fassett's moving memoir of Bartok's American years, The Naked Face of Genius...

...To us today, though, it certainly appears that Bartok himself, in the works of his maturity and later years, was and remains the supreme master of this rare art: the ability to integrate completely the elements of folk music into his own personal expression...

...Since the new tunes thus "invented" do not differ radically from their models, this method does not produce very different results from those described above...

...It was equally incongruous, of course, to force folk songs into the Procrustean bed of conventional 19th-century harmony and rhythm, as was done many times before Bartok and Kodaly came on the scene—and even afterward, in spite of their example...

...The simplest way, of course, is to take over the folk tune with little or no change, and to write a fitting accompaniment (not simply tonic, dominant and subdominant) with, perhaps, the addition of an opening and a closing phrase...

...Bartok, some felt, had let Schoenberg's side down by failing to commit himself totally to the principles of the 12-tone method...

...In some Bartok compositions of this sort, no two successive tones of any known folk melody may be found...

...This desire tries to hide an inner incompetence and to evade the struggle by comfortable and soul-killing devices.' Bartok vehemently rejected such an attitude, but he also did not believe the exploitation of folk music could in itself guarantee the quality of a composer's, or a country's, music...

...In one, the accompaniment and added phrases are of secondary importance, serving as a mere "ornamental setting for the precious stone: the peasant melody...

...What are the ways,' asks Bartok, "in which peasant music is taken over and becomes transmuted into modern music...

...Rene Leibowitz, today perhaps better known as a conductor of Massenet and Offenbach but in the 1940s a fire-eating Schoenbergian —or, at least, a plausible peddler of Schoenberg's ideas—was particularly incensed by Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, which he considered a horrible example of "impurity" and "compromise.' In turn, one might use Leibowitz' "fearless expose" of Bartok (Transition, Forty- Eight, No...

...It is hard to realize because Bartok remains so vital a part of our musical lives today...

...Bartok himself quotes a contemporary criticism of such procedures: "The ulterior motive behind the movement of collecting folk songs, which has spread all over the world, is love of comfort...

...As Antoine Golea, spokesman of the French serial composers, recently put it, "In saying limitation one says choice, and he who says choice says freedom.' Bartok sought his freedom another way, in the heritage of his country's past...

...Bartok took pleasure in pointing out Stravinsky's use of both methods (quotation and imitation) in the works of his so-called "Russian" period...

...Bartok's words, valid when they were written in 1931, may serve equally well in 1965 as a warning to those of lesser gifts who would seek an easy, foolproof recipe for success—whether its basic ingredient be folk song, the 12-tone method, or the I Ching: "In the hands of incompetent composers neither folk music nor any other musical material will ever attain significance...

...He masters it as completely as a poet masters his mother tongue...

...In 1928, his First Piano Concerto was reviled in New York (by one H. Noble in Musical America) as "one of the most dreadful deluges of piffle, bombast and nonsense ever perpetrated on an audience in these environs...

...Even Olin Downes—hardly an enthusiastic Bartokian—had to give a friendly report on the New York premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra in January 1945, an event the audience greeted with demonstrative enthusiasm...

...If a composer has no talent it will be of no use to him to base his music on folk music or any other music...

...In maintaining that the question of the origin of a theme is completely unimportant from the artist's point of view, Stravinsky is right...

...The question of origins can only be interesting from the point of view of musical documentation.' Finally, we come to the third, and artistically by far the most important, way in which folk music can influence a contemporary composer...

...That Stravinsky never mentioned the sources of his (presumably) folk themes helped prove a point dear to Bartok's heart: "He [Stravinsky] wants to demonstrate that it does not matter a jot whether a composer invents his own themes or uses themes from elsewhere...

...In this case we may say he has completely absorbed the idiom of peasant music which has become his mother tongue...

...The acceptance of Bartok's music by the public and the critics has followed a predictable pattern...

...3 ) , with its heady blend of ill-digested Existentialism and doctrinaire dodecaphonism, as a horrible example of what happens when a critic discusses a work according to esthetic principles which the composer had no intention of following...

...As might be expected, the use of folk materials by Bartok and his colleagues often led to misunderstandings...

...Even in such comparatively simple works as Bartok has in mind here, two main types can be distinguished...

...In the other, "the melody only serves as a 'motto' while that which is built around it is of real importance.'Naturally, there are all manner of gradations between the two extremes...

...Bartok puts it this way: "Neither peasant melodies nor imitations of peasant melodies can be found in his music, but it is pervaded by the atmosphere of peasant music...

...It would better fit outmoded "romantic" notions of what a composer's fate should be if we could bewail the fact that success came to Bartok only after his death...

...The result will in every case be nothing...

...But this very success brought its own detractors...

...Not that this in itself could recompense the proud and touchy Bartok for many instances of real as well as fancied neglect...

...Often, only the rhythm of the original source remains: Listen, for example, to the Scherzo alia bulgarese (its "Bulgarian rhythm' expressed in the unusual time-signature, 4 + 2 + % ) of the Fifth String Quartet...

...Many believe that the composer's greatest freedom is to be found today in total serialization...

...Bartok compares this type of treatment with Bach's handling of traditional chorale melodies...

...A typical example would be the 20 Hungarian Folk Songs for voice and piano (1905-06), prepared in collaboration with Kodaly...

...While a tonal or modal melody can be embedded in a 12- tone structure—as Berg did with the Bach chorale Es ist genug in his Violin Concerto, and Schoenberg with Silcher's 19th-century pseudo-folk song Annchen von Tharau in the variation movement of his Septet—such instances are rare...

...He has a right to use musical material taken from all sources...

...The next step in the contemporary composer's "appropriation" of folk music is the imitation, rather than quotation, of characteristic folk tunes...

...What he has judged suitable for his purpose has become through this very use his mental property...

...Bartok modestly gave credit to Kodaly for having produced the finest examples of this kind of music (he cites the Psalmus Hungaricus in particular...

...Bartok, especially in his earlier years, produced many works which belong in this general category...

...His folk-tune sources have been, so to speak, disembodied, and their essence transmuted into something new and individual...

...In 1965, the same concerto was included in the visiting BBC Symphony Orchestra's Carnegie Hall cycle of classic 20th-century masterworks as a matter of course, and was accepted in an equally matter-of-fact manner by press and public...

...Bartok himself recognized and put into words one (though not the only) reason why he did not wish to work with the 12-tone method: It was incompatible with the folk music which is at the heart of his work...

...There is a desire to become rejuvenated in this spring of freshness, a wish to revitalize the barren brain...

...Bartok has given the best account of the ways in which folk songs may be used creatively by a composer, in his article "The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music' This valuable document, first published in Hungary in 1931, appeared in translation in Bela Bartok, A Memorial Review (Boosey and Hawkes, 1950)—a booklet which has much to offer his admirers...

...This, however, was not true...