Bela Bartok Fifty Years After

Transcription

1 Notes from the Editor Bela Bartok Fifty Years After This issue of MQ contains an essay on B la Bart6k's For Children, Sz. 42, a work written and revised during the years This set of pieces appropriately contains nearly all the defining characteristics of Bart6k's mature work. It offers a precis of his unique place in twentieth-century music history. In For Children the first stage of the influence of Bart6k's discovery of what he and Zoltiin Koddly regarded as a forgotten but authentic and genuine Hungarian folk tradition can be heard. From 1905 on, Bart6k and Koddly documented a musical world linked to the rural peasantry of Hungary. As Judit Frigyesi argued in an article in this journal ("Bela Bart6k and the Concept of Nation and VoWc in Modern Hungary," MQ 78:2), Bart6k had little use for the urban Gypsy-inspired traditions of so-called Hungarian folk music the style hongroise so popular in Budapest and all over the world. The large modern metropolis was a new experience for young Bart6k when he arrived at the Budapest Conservatory in Its culture and politics repelled him. Bart6k's experiences in Budapest and western European capitals in the early years of this century, particularly his encounter with the music of Wagner and Strauss, led him to search for a modernist musical vehicle through which to assert a revisionist ideology of Hungarian nationalism distinct from a nineteenth-century romantic allegiance to myths of a nation of Magyar nobles. This gentry patriotism was dramatically expressed in Mihaly Munkacsy's fin de siecle murals depicting the victory of Arp&d in the historicist parliament building of Budapest. Aristocratic nationalism was, to Bart6k's generation, compromised by its accommodation with the Habsburg monarchy and, despite the Ausgleich of 1867, its essentially German character. Despite his regard for the stark realist portrait of rural life that suffused the writings of Zsigmond M6ricz, Bart6k, to the end of his life, idealized the Hungarian peasant as pure and untainted by modernity and urban culture. The peasant's culture, the art and music, could therefore serve as the basis of a renewal of the Hungarian nation. The young Bart6k carried into his reconceptualization of nationalism an uncritical and typical prejudice against the "Gypsy" peoples. The pieces in For Children can be seen as an early statement of Bart6k's life project. In these works a novel modernist musical language is evident, one comparable to but distinct from contemporary 423

2 424 The Musical Quarterly innovations in western Europe. Ironically, Bart6k's modernism was derived from a culture (e.g., Hungarian) often regarded as peripheral by Germans, French, and English. Furthermore, it stemmed from a premodern and preindustrial world threatened by economic progress and technological modernity. The basis for an antimodern modernism rural peasant culture was the source of a new purified spirit for the nation. As would be the case in many of Bart6k's compositions, in a single work of music politics and aesthetics were argued in tandem. Music became a vehicle for the cultural and aesthetic development of a new political era. The inevitable sharp break with the corrupt practices of the past was rendered audible. Bart6k distilled in music designed to be usable in the home by a young cadre of amateurs a new path for the development of a national culture. What in German is expressed by the word Erzjehung (upbringing, education), became part of Bart6k's ambition. As in his 1911 Bluebeard's Castle, Bart6k integrated the new Hungarian element within a modernist European framework. The rhythmic and tonal character of the material in Blue' beard has a fresh sounding folk-inspired cast. But as the closing bars of the work and the music of the "fifth door" scene demonstrate, Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra remains a powerful and favored model. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Bart6k in New York City. Owing to the work of many scholars, particularly Tibor Tallinn, myths about Bart6k's American years are slowly being dispelled. The traditional picture of Bart6k as unappreciated, ignored, and abused in America has experienced revision. Few emigrants arrive to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University. Nevertheless, of the major figures in twentieth-century music, Bart6k remains the most unappreciated, not in the least because he was, despite his massive scholarly output and many essays, rather more circumspect and elusive as a personality than Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Unlike the music of Stravinsky or Schoenberg, the full range of Bart6k's music has yet to take its place on the concert stage. The early work is rarely played. Much of his music is, in fact, not well known. Western audiences and critics have shown a preference for two types of Bart6k's works. The most modernist works (mostly dating from the 1920s) have appealed to critics as demonstrating Bart6k's independent route toward a posttonal modernism. They remain popular subjects within the university world and have sustained a high reputation among self-styled sophisticates and cognoscenti. The popular later works, such as the Third Piano Concerto or the Concerto for

3 Bartdk Fifty Yean After 425 Orchestra, continue to have a wide and enviable following. They are the very works modernist critics dismiss as compromised and thin. A few masterpieces from the 1930s, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, for example, are cherished by all. Bluebeard's Castle makes an occasional appearance, but in the theater, neither The Wooden Prince nor The Miraculous Mandarin are ever seen in their entirety. Even Bart6k advocates such as Malcolm Gilles, in his recent Bartdk Companion (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), demonstrate a by now traditional but unfortunate habit of underestimating the so-called minor works. Gilles continues to defend Bartok on the basis of too few self-evident masterpieces. The time has come to give all of Bart6k's work a hearing and its rightful place in the repertory. There is no reason not to delight in Kossuth, the Suite No. 1, or especially the Four Orchestral Pieces the way we welcome the early and sometimes less well known work of the twentieth-century masters with whom Bart6k is so often compared: Schoenberg's GurreUeder or PeUeas and Stravinsky's Firebird. The reasons for reconsidering the full range of Bart6k's output are best expressed in the uncannily perceptive remark made by Arthur Honegger in In his preface to the French Bart6k biography by Serge Moreux, Honegger wrote: Most writers have agreed to hold Schonberg and Stravinsky responsible for the reaction which set in after Debussy. Some would have included Erik Satie; I personally would nominate Bart6k instead. These three are the authentic representatives of the musical revolution of that generation. Less direct and sparkling than Stravinsky, less dogmatic than Schfinberg, Bart6k is perhaps the most profoundly musical of the three and best manifests a close-knit organic development. l Bart6k was an "authentic" representative of a musical revolution in part because he viewed the search for originality within a teleology of post-wagnerian music history as more than a matter of personal pride and ambition. Art, for his generation in Budapest, which included Georg Lukacs, Endre Ady, Karl Mannheim, and Beia Balasz, was inextricably tied to politics and cultural reform. More than Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Bart6k prefigured the interrelationship among popular culture, the scholarly community, and the traditions of concert music characteristic of our so-called postmodern era. Alone among the great modern composers, Bart6k was a scholar whose research into folk music and modern research techniques firmly shaped his desire to see to it that modernist music communicated at

4 426 The Musical Quarterly first hearing. The endless theoretical speculations into the intricacies of Bart6k's structures, particularly his rigorous and subtle command of formal symmetries (which Honegger recognized as Bart6k's grasp of "close-knit" musical logic), should not obscure Bart6k's idealized notions about musical communication derived from his time spent in the countryside after As Heinrich Schenker pointed out as early as the 1890s, the true mystery and unique metaphysical dimension of music's character as an art form are most striking in the simplest examples of music, such as a folk song or a lullaby. In accessible simplicity lie uncanny greatness and genius. This, according to Schenker, distinguished music from poetry, prose, and painting, where the artistic dimension was the result of additive complexity. 2 The challenge for Bart6k was to transcend illustrative and descriptive romanticism, generate a formalist modern vocabulary and idiom, and contribute to the political and cultural renewal of one's community. All this Bart6k achieved. At first Bart6k was influenced by Wagner and Strauss. In a desire to become liberated from a traditional Hungarian penchant for German models, he and Koda'ly turned to Debussy. Bart6k, because of his Hungarian project, felt free to borrow and appropriate Western models into his own work. He was not as rigid as Schoenberg and was less inclined than either Schoenberg or Stravinsky to mask a form of cultural chauvinism in the language of internationalism. The modernism of the immediate post-world War II era may appear to have earned the modifier "international," but in terms of Schoenberg's twelve-tone mode of composition, there was little doubt in Schoenberg's own mind that he had achieved something for "German" music in modern times that in his view Brahms, Mozart, and even Wagner had done in past eras. What was strikingly honest about Bart6k's ambitions and his music was the clarity with which he linked the musical and the national. His music was at once modern, Hungarian in a novel manner, and also international. The politics of national self-representation in music were reconciled openly with the notions of modernism and music as a crosscultural language. In contrast, although Schoenberg's formal modernism in the late 1920s was argued as being normative and superior, it was more an extension of a German cultural conceit than is comfortable for us to recall. Schoenberg assumed the German posture that classical German culture in music was superior precisely because it alone transcended provincial national self-expression. Honegger's surprising claim that of the "big three" of twentiethcentury music, Bart6k "is perhaps the most profoundly musical" may,

5 Bartdk Fifty Years After 427 in the view of late twentieth-century posterity, turn out to be correct. Bart6k managed to combine the virtues of a Wagnerian ambition toward the symbolic and metaphysical with the elegance and surface brilliance of Stravinsky. Whimsy and humor were not Schoenberg's forte. Yet few works came as close to achieving the aspirations of the Gesamtkunstwerk as Moses und Aron, The searing and sustained power of the music match the daunting subject matter the essence of the divine, the limits of language, and human faith. One can hardly imagine a greater scope or greater courage on the part of an artist. But Bluebeard's Castle and The Miraculous Mandarin are no less ambitious, profound, or successful. Even the surface of these two Bart6k scores unmask the complex ambiguities and terrors of the human psyche and experience. Stravinsky's genius, despite the overlay of the prose published by the composer in collaboration with others, primarily Robert Craft, was not, in the same manner, located in the realm of the philosophical in ideas, as Schoenberg would have put it. Stravinsky, in Schoenberg's vocabulary, was more about style and fashion. No doubt the time has come to dispense with a pejorative notion of what the idea of style implies. The contrast between style and idea derives from an early twentieth-century philosophical debate about structure and surface in art and language which may no longer be relevant. Stravinsky's stylized command of musical time, sonority, and rhythmic detail is stunning. But Honegger may, finally, still have been right. Bart6k managed to combine the craft of Stravinsky with the seriousness and almost obsessive philosophical and psychological searching characteristic of Schoenberg. And given his concern for music education he reached a wider audience than both of them. At first glance, what recommends Bart6k to us after fifty years are perhaps two more trivial dimensions to his work. The first is suggested by James Parakilas's article. If ever we needed a strategy to attract children and a younger generation to music and its possibilities as an evolving form of life in contemporary culture, it is now. More than his nearest rivals, Bart6k was concerned with the quality of musical culture among the population at large. His work in this regard needs to be honored and emulated. The second dimension concerns the fact that we live in an age when the expression of exclusive ethnic and national identity has once again become popular. As the avoidable but catastrophic events in the former Yugoslavia make all too plain, only by finding a way to link ourselves to an apparently historically legitimate coherent group and separate ourselves from

6 428 The Musical Quarterly others at the expense of others do we as individuals seem to find sufficient meaning in our lives. It makes no difference that expressions of national or ethnic solidarity are themselves fictions with little "authenticity." Given this contemporary ethos, and given the demise of a tradition of rigid formalist modernism in music, Bart6k might very well serve as model for today. He managed to find a noncliche"d, nonhackneyed, and noninvidious manner of expressing ethnic and national pride. He transcended the familiar and nasty midcentury divide between the national and ethnic pride on the one hand and the cosmopolitan, the rootless, and the decadent on the other. Whether it is in debates in the United States Bart6k's last home about immigrants, the priority of English, assimilation, and ethnic pride, or in propaganda within the former Communist bloc countries about foreigners, Jews, and cosmopolitans as opposed to loyal nationalists and a blood-and-soil national culture, we need to find ways to use group identity as a basis for human solidarity, not human conflict. After World War I Bart6k sought through his work and his study of folk musics the common thread among ethnic groups and diverse cultures. Insofar as art and music make any difference at all, Bart6k much more than Stravinsky or Schoenberg, despite their respective claims to internationalism has much more to teach the international community in the late twentieth century. In that most crucial sense, Bart6k now appears to us, fifty years later, as he did to Honegger: "the most profoundly musical of the three." Leon Botstein Notes 1. Arthur Honegger, preface to Serge Moreux, Beia Bartdk, transl. by G. S. Fraser and Erik de Mauny (New York: Vienna House, 1953; reprint, 1974), Heinrich Schenker, "Mehr Kunst," in Neue Revue (1897). Reprinted in Helmut Federhofer, ed., Heinrich Schenker ah Essayist icnd Kriaker (Hildesheim: Olms, 1990),