| from Bartok's "Concerto for Orchestra", Second Movement |
May 2001
Bartok began his creative career full of high hope for the future. He wrote his first symphonic poem when he was just twenty two years old. The piece was greeted with acclaim in Budapest but also brought about his first visit to England when it was played by Hans Richter in Manchester early in 1904. The first Suite for large orchestra achieved success when it was first played in Vienna late the following year. With these successful performances behind him, it would be easy to imagine that Bartok was on his way to the production of a long list of orchestral works, and that his fame would soon spread throughout Europe and the New World.
Nothing
of the kind happened. The first
Suite was followed by a second in 1907; during the next five years Bartok
produced three more orchestral work: Two Portraits(19908), Two Pictures(1910),
and Four Pieces(1912). For the rest
of his life-thirty-three years-he wrote only two more works for full orchestra,
both on commission: the Dance Suite in 1923 and the Concerto for Orchestra
twenty years later. Two important
scores of relatively smaller scale were composed during the 1930s: the Music for
String Instruments, Percussion, and Celesta, and the Divertimento for string
orchestra. That is all.
The
compositional style of Bartok’s late teens shows many of the influences of
other composers such as Brahms, liszt and Wagner, the latter two composers
becoming the subject of a detailed study whilst he was a student at the Budapest
Academy of Music between 1899 and 1903.
Bartok’s
first orchestral work , Kossuth, indicates that he had learned a good deal from
Liszt. This symphonic poem in ten
sections based on the career of the lower nobleman Lajos Kossuth, the leader of
the 1848 Hungarian revolution. Bartok considered it to be Hungarian in every way.
The Hungarian flavour derives from the essentially petty-aristocratic
pseudo-folk verbunkos tradtion ; a tradition which arose in the middle of the
eighteenth century as an accompniment to military recruitment ceremonies.
The roots of this tradition traces back to a amalgam of musical styles,
high and low, and was mainly disseminated by gypsy musicians. The gypsy or ‘Hungarian’ scale with its idiosyncratic
augmented seconds between the third and fourth notes and between the sixth and
seventh notes is a stereotypical
feature of the verbunkos
style. Bartok reassimilated the verbunkos
tradtion in his other pieces such as the Sixth String Quartet. The third
idea of the Introduzione of the Concerto for Orchestra , which reappears in the
Elegia, for example, is a stylized verbunkos
gesture.
The
First Suite for Orchestra (1905), retain the influence of the verbunkos, though
by 1905 Bartok was much less interested in Strauss, and was rediscovering the
works of Liszt. His discovery of
Hungarian music in 1905 had less of an initially dramatic consequence than his
Straussian epiphany. For example in the third movement of the serenade-like
Second Suite for Orchestra (1905-1907) a melody appears whose structure bears
the influence of the old-style peasant music.
Bartok’s
borrowings from peasant music are generally applied on the microscopic scale: he
tends to adopt the scale forms, phrasings, metres, rhythms, or rough melodic
contours of folk-sources, and he often employs them within what initially appear
to be
In
1907 Bartok became interested in the music of Claude Debussy, The appearance of
the whole tone scale is an obvious influence. This whole tone flavour can be
found in the Two Pictures (‘images’) for orchestra , where it saturates the
final section of the impressionistic first picture, ‘In full flower’, and
the second , ‘Village dance’. The
first is an Adagio in which Bartok demonstrates his preoccupation with French
impressionism, with its pedals and ostinatos, its consecutive perfect intervals,
and especially its whole tone scales. The
Village Dance itself makes prominent use of segments of the Whole-tone scale,
but seldom more than four successive notes comprising the Lydian tetrachord, and
has a peculiarly Bartokian sound. Whole-tone
fragments can also be found in the second movement of the Concerto for
Orchestra.
The
opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, and the ballet The Wooden Prince, have similar
influences. Duke Bluebeard’s
Castle Op. 11 of 1911, the first fruit of Bartok’s maturity, bears witness to
the overwhelming influence of Hungarian peasant music without ever quoting a
single original peasant melody. The
opera’s Hungarian quality is guaranteed by the pervasive influence of the
Hungarian language on the vocal rhythms, and the sustained use of pentatonicism.
His
third theatrical work was the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, composed between
1918 and 1919 and orchestrated in 1923. The
musical language of this piece shows a marked intensification both in terms of
the level of dissonance and of chromaticism: the regular throughput of the
pitches of the chromatic scale makes the work appear at some points to be
virtually atonal. This is partly sue to the influence of Schoenberg.
His attitude to atonality was ambiguous; writing in 1920 he suggested
that his own music was moving in that direction, and that he did not believe
there to be a conflict between atonality and the use of triads or consonant
intervals such as the major third, perfect fifth or octave, formations which
were generally avoided by composers of the Second Viennese School because of
their tonal implications.
Bartok’s
last major orchestral the Concerto for Orchestra was written between 15
August and 8 October 1943, as the result of a commission from the Koussevitzky
Foundation. Both the harmonic and
the melodic elements of the Concerto represent a distillation of Bartok’s
maturest style: the tendency toward
more strongly affirmed tonality, lucid textures, plastic rhythms, is here
intensified. The ‘ parlando
rubato’ of the introductory section, as well as the intervallic structure of
its melodies, is firmly rooted in Hungarian peasant music.
The musical forms are strongly classic in function and intention, with
first and the last movement in sonata form, and in the second and third
movements, they seem chain-like. Bartok
admitted that the use of this particular title was due to the virtuosic nature
of the orchestral writing, in which virtually every player becomes a soloist.
Although
the Concerto is fundamentally tonal, in that it has clearly defined pitch
centres and makes strategic use of functional triadic harmony, it is a work
whose chromaticism can frustrate attempts to view it simply as a late-flowering
diatonic piece. This chromaticism
results from the superimposition of different modes which share the same
fundamental note. The work is
saturated on the motivic level by themes derived from the motivic fragment
called the Germinal motif. This
melodic formula is not derived from any conventional western diatonic mode,
although it is octatonic. Such a
pattern can be found in both the Arab scale starting from its third note, and in
several of the Serbo-Croatian melodies that Bartok transcribed from the Milman
Parry collection.
Overall,
the Concerto for Orchestra offers a much compromising approach.
In the beginning, the piece offers an admirable introduction.
Its tonalities are never obscure, even when clouded and ‘misty’ as in
the Elegia. Most of its melodies
are immediately attractive, and many are easy to sing.
In other words, the musical
language of the work is, however, the culmination of a process of simplification
and crystallization of Bartok’s style in terms of density of dissonance and
increased use of triadic harmony, a process which began around 1930, after a
period of experimentation which had seen the composition of such works as The
Miraculous Mandarin, the two Violin Sonatas, the middle pair of String Quartets,
and the First Piano Concerto. This
process reflects Bartok’s conviction, expressed in print in 1938, that
contemporary music ‘ought to be directed at the present time to the search for
that which we call “inspired simplicity”.
Bibliography:
The Life and Music of Bela Bartok by Halsey Stevvens, Third Edition,
prepared by Malcolm Gillies. Cambridge University Press
Cambridge
Music handbooks: Bartok: Concerto
for Orchestra by David Cooper. Clarendon Press
Oxford