Bella Bartok

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Concerto for Orchestra and The Miraculous Mandarin

Bartok's music is both primitive and modern. His Hungarian roots inspired him to mix Eastern European melodies with the throbbing, pulsing beat of exotic, primitive rhythms. It is wild, but controlled; frenzied, and serene, expressing every human mood and emotion. Tracks: 1. Bartok The Miraculous Mandarin Part I 2. Bartok Concerto for Orchestra Finale 3. Bartok Concerto for Orchestra Intermezzo Interrotto 4. Bartok The Miraculous Mandarin Part IV 5. Bartok The Miraculous Mandarin Part III 6. Bartok The Miraculous Mandarin Part II 7. Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, Elegy 8. Bartok Concerto for Orchestra Introduction Bartok Concerto for Orchestra,Game of the Pairs 10. Bartok: A Modern Master 11. Bartok: Living in Troubled Times 12. Early Life of Bartok 13. Guide to Concerto for Orchestra Movement I 14. Guide to Concerto for Orchestra Movements II-V 15. Listeners Guide to Bartok: Elusive Success 16. Listeners Guide: The Miraculous Mandarin. 17. Listeners Guide: Exploring Folk Songs

Tradition and Modernism During the course of his career, Bla Bartks compositional style evolved from a Romantic nineteenth-century idiom indebted to Liszt and Richard Strauss to a decidedly modern one. The composer expanded his musical vocabulary with modal scales and with new types of harmonies

based on traditionally dissonant intervals seconds and sevenths as well as on fourths, as Gerard Schwarz discusses on the Conductors Guide CD of this album. He developed new rhythmic patterns modelled on those of Balkan and North African folk music, and he explored unusual instrumental colors and textures. Especially during the 1920's and early 1930's, when his innovative tendencies reached their height, these innovations earned Bartk a reputation as an uncompromising modernist with a penchant for harsh, unfamiliar sounds. To more conservative listeners, this was as much as being a musical anarchist, and for many years Bartk went unappreciated and largely unperformed, particularly in his native Hungary.But Bartk was no revolutionary. He had a deep knowledge of and regard for musical tradition, and certain traditional ideas and procedures remained part of his work as a composer. He favored sonata form, the venerable pattern of thematic exposition, development and reprise so characteristic of the classical masters, which he used in his Concerto for Orchestra and other compositions. He also valued traditional counterpoint and often developed his melodic ideas through fugal imitation.Beginning in the late 1930's Bartk shed the most acerbic elements of his style and moved toward an accessible modernism that placed a premium on expressive and even pleasing melodies. In place of pungent dissonance he offered an original use of conventional chords and traditionally consonant intervals, and the formal clarity of his compositions grew even more pronounced. These qualities inform his Concerto for Orchestra and other late works. Today it seems odd that Bartks music was once dismissed as the scribblings of a musical fanatic. The freshness of his melodic invention, the keen interest his rhythms provoke, the colorful qualities of his orchestration, the beauty of his compositional architecture and the deep expressiveness of his best music is self-evident. For all this and more, Bartk stands among the great figures of twentieth-century music. Bartks Early Life and Career Bartk came of age during the end of the nineteenth century and the twilight of Romanticism in the arts. He matured with the age of modernism. Although he became acomposer of international stature, his soul and music were rooted in his native Hungary. Bartk was born in 1881 in Nagyszentmiklos, a provincial town that today lies in Rumania, just across the border from Hungary. His mother played the piano and gave young Bla his first lessons in music. In 1888, Bartks father died, an event that put considerable strain on the family. For five years the Bartks led a peripatetic existence, as Blas mother tried to make ends meet on a school teachers salary. Finally they settled in the Hungarian city of Poszony. There Bartk was able to cultivate his already well-developed musical aptitude. He studied piano, harmony and composition, and when he was eighteen he gained admission to the Vienna Conservatory, one of the most prestigious music schools in Europe. Surprisingly, he declined the opportunity to study there, enrolling instead at the Academy of Music in Budapest. Hungary was, at this time, part of the Hapsburg empire, ruled by Austria. As was true also in Bohemia (the main part of what became Czechoslovakia), many Hungarians resented Austrian domination, feeling themselves relegated to second-class status within the empire. That resentment gave rise to nationalist sentiments, a pride in Hungarian ethnicity and culture. These feelings were beginning to exert a strong influence on Bartk. His decision to reject the offer to study in Vienna and remain in Hungary instead was the first clear sign of the patriotic impulse that would guide much of his subsequent work.When Bartk graduated from the Academy of Music, in 1903, he had taken only a few hesitant steps as a composer. But he soon came to understand some of the difficulties composers would face in the new century. Although the harmonies of his early works ventured nothing more audacious than Liszt and Richard Strauss had already written, this was still too daring for much of the concertgoing public. But he was an accomplished pianist, and he soon began to make concert appearances in Hungary and elsewhere. The young musician might have been satisfied to divide his energies between composing and performing, but a new interest would soon claim his

attention. Nationalism and Folk Music In 1904, Bartk heard an authentic Hungarian folk song that quite captivated him. Upon further investigation, he began to understand that the rural villages of Hungary constituted a vast repository of folk music generally unknown to the outside world, even to the residents of Budapest. Bartk was fascinated with this music. Although much of it was centuries old, it sounded startlingly fresh to his ears. Moreover, it seemed to Bartk the musical embodiment of his nations soul. As such, it resonated with the spirit of Hungarian nationalism that had already taken hold of him. Bartk spent a number of summers traveling through the rural parts of his country and recording the songs of the peasants who lived there. At first he did this simply by writing the melodies on paper as best he could. Soon, however, he began using a portable gramophone recorder, a device advocated by Zoltn Kodly, another Hungarian composer who shared Bartks love of folk music. Kodly and Bartk became collaborators in an monumental effort to record, classify and publish the folk songs of the Hungarian peasants. Later they broadened their research to include Slovakia, the Balkan peninsula (most of Rumania, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia and Albania), and eventually parts of North Africa and Turkey. Bartk spent years working on folk music. During this time he recorded and transcribed into written form thousands of songs from many hundreds of villages. He also wrote scholarly articles about the village music of southeastern Europe. He was passionately devoted to this work and became a major contributor to the new field of ethnomusicology.Bartks research proved extremely important for the preservation and appreciation of Hungarian and Balkan folk music. But aside from its intrinsic value, this work also had a great impact on his composition. Just as Dvok, a generation earlier, had appropriated certain rhythmic and melodic characteristics of Czech folk song into his orchestral and chamber music, so Bartk began to draw ideas from the village songs and dances he recorded during his field trips. Remarkably, these traditional melodies propelled his music beyond the late-Romantic idiom of his earliest pieces and into a more modern style. Their modal scales and irregular rhythms provided a fresh alternative to the dependable meters, smooth lines and familiar chordal harmonies that had been the hallmarks of music during the nineteenth century. Bartk often evoked the sound of Hungarian, Balkan or north African folk music in his compositions, writing passages that clearly imitate village songs or dances. But even apart from such obvious simulations, folk music brought a freedom to Bartks compositional thinking, a willingness to consider new rhythmic and melodic formulations. Growing Mastery In the first flush of excitement over his ethnological research, Bartk abandoned composition for two full years. When he returned to writing his own music, it bore the influence of the folk melodies he had come to know and love. It also grew more assertively modern, prompted by the examples of Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg as well as the peasant musicians he had encountered on his field trips. Significantly, however, Bartk never became a follower of any other important composer of the early twentieth century. Schoenberg surrounded himself with a school of disciples, Debussy and Stravinsky had many imitators. But Bartk pursued his own path, developing a musical style that was wholly original.Bartk gained skill and assurance as a composer gradually over the first decade and a half of the new century. By 1917, when he completed his ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, he had developed a colorful and expressive style and an ability to use this with considerable virtuosity. Recognition of his stature as a composer was slow in coming, but during the 1920's and 1930's Bartk began to gain admirers among musicians throughout Europe and eventually even in America. Among those who thought highly of his work was the clarinetist Benny Goodman, who commissioned Bartk to write a work featuring

his instrument. Dark Days During this time, Bartk continued to perform as a concert pianist. He also taught at the Academy of Music in Budapest, where he had received his advanced musical training. Although he might easily have moved to Paris, Vienna or some other city with a more cosmopolitan musical life, Bartk retained an abiding loyalty to his homeland. He remained in Hungary even in the face of a right-wing government he found repugnant. Bartk was not active in political affairs, but he had strong ideals about peace, freedom and universal brotherhood. In protest to the governments efforts at censorship and repression of dissent, he refused to perform as a soloist in his native country. Later, he instigated similar boycotts of Nazi Germany and Fascist Spain and Italy.As the 1930's grew to a close, the political situation in Hungary and the rest of Europe deteriorated alarmingly. The outbreak of World War II brought the crisis to a head, and Bartk decided it was time to leave. He managed to obtain passage and visas for the United States, and in October 1940 he and his wife sailed for America.Settling in New York, Bartk secured part-time work doing research in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. With only a modest salary, no students and very few concert opportunities, the composer and his wife lived in precarious financial circumstances. Discouraged and tired, Bartk composed no new music during his first three years in this country. In the spring of 1943 he was hospitalized with the first signs of leukemia. Final Years It was at this low point in Bartks life that something like a miracle happened. In May 1943, the composer received a visit in his hospital room from Serge Koussevitzky, the renowned conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who brought with him a request for a new orchestral work. Actually, this commission had been arranged by two of Bartks supporters, the conductor Fritz Reiner and violinist Joseph Szigeti, but knowledge of their intervention had to be kept from the composer, since it was certain that his pride would prevent him from accepting an offer he suspected of being tainted by charity.In the event, the identity of Bartks benefactors was kept a secret, and the commission proved a formidable tonic. Bartk worked on it throughout the summer of 1943, finding that the return to composition dramatically restored his spirits and health. Through working on this [piece], he told a friend, I have discovered the wonder drug I needed to bring about my own cure. By autumn his Concerto for Orchestra was complete, and on December 1, 1944 Koussevitzky led the premiere. Since then, the Concerto for Orchestra has emerged as one of the most frequently played orchestral scores from the modern era.Bartk spent his last two years pursuing the two activities that always meant the most to him: conducting researching into folk music and composing. He wrote his Third Piano Concerto for his wife to perform after he was gone, and composed a violin sonata on commission from the celebrated performer Yehudi Menuhin. He had nearly finished a viola concerto when he passed away in September 1945. Only a relative handful of musicians recognized his genius at that time, but Bartks reputation has grown steadily since his death. Today he stands among the giants of twentieth-century music. Concerto for Orchestra Bartoks Concerto for Orchestra is his most popular orchestral composition and one of the most familiar of all his works. Of it, the composer wrote:The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single orchestral instruments in a concordant or soloistic manner. The virtuoso treatment appears, for instance, in the fugato sections of the development of the first movement (brass instruments) or the perpetuum mobile-like passage of

the principal theme in the last movement (strings), and especially in the second movement, in which pairs of instruments consecutively appear with brilliant passages. The piece opens with a somber declamation by the low strings; they are answered by atmospheric tremolo and scale figures in the violins and flutes and, presently, by an ominous motive from the trumpets. This last figure is taken up by the bulk of the orchestra, the music accelerating to an impressive climax. All this serves as an introduction to the main body of the first movement, which launches forth on an energetic melody presented by the violins. Two other ideas are prominent during the course of the movement: a vigorous subject heard in the trombones and a gently rocking theme introduced by the oboe. Bartk titled the second movement Game of Couples, a reference to the succession of duet passages that forms the bulk of this portion of the work. We hear in turn pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes and trumpets, leading at last to a chorale melody for the brass. The ensuing third movement is a haunting elegy, stark and funereal.Bartk also gave a title to the fourth movement, calling it an interrupted intermezzo. It begins with a folk-like melody given to the oboe and proceeds to a more pastoral subject in the strings. Into this placid music, however, comes the clarinet with a melody rather similar to the march theme in Shostakovichs Seventh Symphony, a work Bartk had heard during its famous radio broadcast in 1942. Soon the entire orchestra has taken up this tune, enjoying a humorous romp before the more sedate initial material reasserts itself. Bartk then closes the composition with a colorful finale. The flavor of its themes is distinctly Hungarian, and a brilliant fugal development forms its central episode. The Miraculous Mandarin, Opus 19 Throughout his life, Bartk had reason to complain of the publics refusal to approve his compositions. Criticized for their supposedly harsh modernism and for their use of Balkan folk music, many of the scores now regarded as the composers most important achievements were either ignored or condemned outright when they first appeared. Few suffered so complete a failure as did his pantomime ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. Bartk wrote this work in Budapest during the winter of 1918-19. Like many dramatic compositions that emerged from central Europe in during the dark years surrounding World War I, it employed a kind of lurid Expressionism in which sex, violence and the macabre contributed to an air of decadence and mystery. (Other famous works of this kind included such operas as Richard Strauss Salome, Alban Bergs Lulu and Bartoks own Bluebeards Castle, as well as Arnold Schoenbergs song cycle Pierrot Lunaire.) The story on which it was based yields nothing to our present-day films or TV dramas in terms of shock value. Its action takes place in a shabby room in the slums of some nameless city and centers on a trio of thieves and a young girl in their keeping, she being forced to sit provocatively in a window and lure passers by inside, where the thieves can rob them. In Bartks ballet, her first victim is an old libertine who has seen more prosperous days. When he is discovered to have no money, the thieves rudely throw him out. Next comes a youth who proves equally impoverished. The third catch is a strange-looking man in Eastern dress, the Mandarin, who stares with piercing eyes as the girl entices him with an erotic dance. His lust finally aroused, he reaches for his temptress, but she, put off by his weird appearance, starts to flee. The Mandarin pursues her, but suddenly the thieves, armed to the teeth, jump out of hiding. Astonishingly, the violence they wreak on the Mandarin has no effect: he just continues to stare passionately at the girl. At last she takes him in her arms and kisses him. Only then do the Mandarins wounds begin to bleed, and he perishes in an ecstatic love-death.The sordid character of this plot prevented The Miraculous Mandarin from being premiered in Bartks native Hungary. When a production finally was mounted in Cologne, Germany, in 1926, the ballet received such scathing notices that it was withdrawn after a single performance. A subsequent performance in Prague fared no better. Bartk was extremely proud of his score, however, and with good reason. It is a tour de force of vivid and original orchestral sonorities, executed with great skill. The opening passage of The Miraculous Mandarin sets a sinister and frenetic tone; the three extended clarinet solos, representing the girl luring her

victims from the street, are convincingly seductive; the Mandarins appearance is marked by imposing outbursts from the low brass, and his dance with the girl progresses from tentative waltz steps to a wild contrapuntal chase, leading to the ballets powerful conclusion. Throughout all of this, Bartks strong harmonies and orchestral colors compliment the rhythmic energy of his ideas. Suggestions for Further Listening If you enjoyed the music of Bla Bartk presented on this album, you may wish to hear other works by this composer. Here are some of Bartks major compositions. All are readily available on compact disc recordings. Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta: Scored for a double string orchestra with percussion and the bell-like celesta, this four-movement composition opens with a fugue worthy of Bach and proceeds through dynamic and witty developments, some atmospheric night music to a finale that includes evocations of a Hungarian village dance. Not just one of Bartks most accomplished works, this is one of the landmarks of twentieth-century composition. Concertos for Piano and Orchestra: Bartks three piano concertos stand among the outstanding compositions in this genre from the twentieth century. The first two, written in 1926 and 1931 respectively, show Bartks modernist tendencies at their height. Much of their music is marked by driving rhythms, sharp, angular textures and a sense of tremendous power. By contrast, the Third Piano Concerto, which Bartk composed in his final years for his wife to perform, is mild and melodious. The second movement, in particular, has the character of a hymn to nature. Dance Suite: Composed for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the union of the cities Buda and Pesth to form the Hungarian capital, this work has a strong nationalist flavor. Although all the melodies Bartk employs here are his own, their kinship with folk songs and dances of Hungary and its neighboring countries is unmistakable. Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra: Bartk composed his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in 1937 to perform with his pianist wife, taking the unusual step of including a substantial part for a large percussion battery. In 1943 he expanded the music into a concerto, which he and his wife performed with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of his former student, Fritz Reiner. Like the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, this work features haunting night music and passages that imitate the sound of the peasant dances Bartk recorded during his years of folk music research. Contrasts (for violin, clarinet and piano): Bartk wrote this piece to perform with the famed clarinetist Benny Goodman and the violinist Joseph Szigeti. Two of its three movements are approximately in the style of East European folk dances, while the other presents a lyrical meditation. String Quartet No. 4: Bartks six string quartets are the most original and important body of music in this venerable genre since Beethoven. In these works, Bartk extended the tradition of quartet composition into a new era and revitalized it through a wide range of formal and expressive innovations. While all of Bartks quartets are highly regarded, the Fourth is widely considered the finest of the six. Its music represents an extraordinary synthesis of expressive intensity and taut formal control. The works tonal idiom is generally chromatic and dissonant, but its workings are clarified by lucid motivic development and contrapuntal rigor.

Ern Lendva analyzes Bla Bartk's works as being based on two opposing systems, that of the golden ratio and the acoustic scale,[39] though other music scholars reject that analysis.[2] In Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta the xylophone progression occurs at the intervals 1:2:3:5:8:5:3:2:1.[40] French composer Erik Satie used the golden ratio in several of his pieces, including Sonneries de la Rose+Croix. http://www.musicallyspeaking.com/bela_bartok.html

Phillaharmonic
Infernal Bartk by Malcolm Gillies
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During the 1950s the Hungarian-born violinist Adila Fachiri came across a few yellowing sheets of manuscript music. They were headed "In memory of 23 November 1902" and were a musical recollection of a happy family party that Adila and her family, the Arnyis, had shared with a shy Budapest music student called Bla Bartk. On 6 July 1955 at one of her last Wigmore Hall recitals in London Fachiri gave the much-delayed premire of this lateadolescent party piece. A youthful Donald Mitchell recorded for The Musical Times that it was "a spotless morceau de salon, the perfect stuff of a guessing game. Strauss might come to mind, and even Mendelssohn, but Bartk never." How is it that the mild-mannered Bartk of 1902 could be so different from the Bartk who was branded a "barbarian" by the French press in 1910? Who inspired the headline "Is it music?" in London's Daily Mail in 1923? And whose music was summarized as "piquant and cacophonous" by Time magazine on his death in 1945? The Infernal Dance: Inside the World of Bla Bartk series of concerts exposes works written by Bartk as early as 1903 (the symphonic poem Kossuth) and as late as 1945 (Piano Concerto No. 3). There are the stage works, which all originate in the 1910s, two very different works from the 1920s (Dance Suite, Piano Concerto No. 1), and two mellow fruits of his final years of exile in America (Concerto for Orchestra and his concluding piano concerto). Five of the series' works come from the golden' decade of Bartk's compositional maturity, the 1930s. Yet each is written for different resources and in radically different forms: the Cantata Profana (1930), Piano Concerto No. 2 (1930-31), the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), Violin Concerto No. 2 (1937-8) and his Contrasts (1938), a quasi-improvisational trio commissioned by Benny Goodman. As you listen to these concerts I am sure you will find yourself wondering why one piece sounds more radical or more conservative than the next. Why do his works from the 1940s sound so innocuous, even pleasant, compared with some works from the 1910s and 1920s, which seem so angry? And why do his pieces sometimes remind you of works by other composers, particularly contemporaries such as Stravinsky, Debussy, or his compatriot Zoltn Kodly (a landmark work by each of whom is included in the series)?
Over 2011 the Infernal Dance series reviews a substantial chunk of Bartk's musical output. It deliberately juxtaposes pieces that will sometimes make you wonder, like Donald Mitchell back in 1955, whether you are really hearing the same composer at all. If you followed the Philharmonia Orchestra's City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935 series in 2009 you will start to see similar trends: the inroad of modernism over these early decades of the twentieth century, and various influences that come from beyond music altogether, from the broader arts or even driven by cataclysmic historical events. Perhaps the hardest concept to grasp is how Bartk, through his explorations into folk music, was propelled into writing those infernal' pieces that gained him such notoriety with the critics. Were there actually two or more Bartks? The nice Bartk who wrote more or less

enjoyable settings of the folksongs he had collected; and the nasty Bartk who seemed to want to rattle and bang at the cage door of music history? Just after his death, as a newly communist Hungary came under the shadow of socialist realist doctrines of art, that is exactly what happened. The compositional legacy of the recently departed Bartk was dismembered. The various Bartks were identified and separated. For in 1948 musical modernism was condemned by the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow because of its "bourgeois influence", "formalism" and "abstraction"; in short, for its "decadence". What was needed was music which reflected the happy reality of life in socialist states, which "organically linked with the people and their folk music and folksong all this combined with a high degree of professional mastery" (Andrei Zhdanov, 1948). The Party in each new Eastern European satellite rapidly followed suit with a revision of musical valuations. By 1950 Bartk's output had effectively been divided into three categories. As Danielle Fosler-Lussier has recently elaborated in her book Music Divided (University of California Press, 2007), there were banned works, works to be performed only rarely, and fully approved works. To distribute the works in this Infernal Dance series across these classes:

Banned: The Miraculous Mandarin, Piano Concerto No. 1, Piano Concerto No. 2; Rarely to be performed: Duke Bluebeard's Castle, The Wooden Prince, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Cantata Profana, Contrasts; Fully approved: Violin Concerto No. 2, Concerto for Orchestra, Piano Concerto No. 3, Dance Suite. (In 1950 noone even recalled Bartk's early work Kossuth but it would surely have been approved.)

Many of Bartk's chamber works were also banned outright, including his String Quartets Nos 3-5, the two violin sonatas and his Piano Sonata of 1926. It was only in 1955-6, as Hungary inched towards its catastrophic revolution, that the ban on modernist works started to be undermined. Surprisingly, given the Cold War tensions of the time, it was the Concerto for Orchestra, which Bartk had composed in exile in capitalist America, that gained most ready acceptance during these grim Cold War years, because of its folksy tunefulness. The Miraculous Mandarin was the most condemned not just because of its bourgeois, expressionist style but also because of its overtly sexual content. But Bartk seems to have pleased noone with his adults-only pantomime. It was equally condemned by the political right ("immoral"), the political left ("formalist") and the Catholic Church ("dirty"). This three-part classification of Bartk's works is useful. I suspect that it tallies with the experiences of many concert-goers at symphony concerts today. Bartk's "approved" works are pleasant, have recognizable tunes and are even reminiscent of earlier styles in musical history. Piano Concerto No. 3 has, indeed, been described both as Mozartian and Beethovenian, while the Violin Concerto No. 2 showed how you could even write twelve-tone tunes la Schoenberg but do it ever so nicely!
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The rarely to be performed' works present a sliding scale of challenges to musical comprehension and sometimes even to stylistic acceptance. The third movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, for instance, is intriguing but unnerving. Most of the traditional reference points of music are missing or obscured. Somehow, we are within a

glass prism playing some sort of musical chess game. But we are unsure how we got there, or exactly what it means. And then there are the banned' works, where Bartk''s dissonance, formal innovation, rhythmic ingenuity or instrumental innovation or all of these, even all at once become very hard to handle. Our psychic security as listeners is threatened because our ears tell us that just too few of the rules of classical' music are any longer in operation. We are in insufficient control of our listening experience. When we start to hear the tooting of car horns in The Miraculous Mandarin or when Bartk starts splitting the musical atom', the semitone, into quarter tones in this same work, then we have to let go of that musical inheritance of previous ages and try to construct a new rule book! Of course, the dictates of post-war socialist realism had their mirror image in another, contemporary set of musical values. Many of the more progressive Western musicians in that early Cold War decade saw precisely Bartk's banned' works as the real thing: if musical history is ultimately about progress, then these were the works to be promoted, as in them Bartk really was pushing at the musical frontiers. In this interpretation, the more tuneful final-period Bartk was a compromised figure, who had pulled back from the logic of his own innovations of the 1910s and the 1920s, "retreating into romantic security", the potential for which the theorist Theodor Adorno saw as early as 1929. In 1947 one critic Ren Leibowitz even detected a tinge of "moral weakness", a disquieting "lack of purity", and accused poor, dead Bartk of not having the courage to cross the "threshold of a new world". These radically conflicting evaluations of Bartk's oeuvre highlight the importance of understanding Bartk's approach to folk music, for that is the central and fixed element across all the works and all the styles of his maturity. All of Bartk's compositions after about 1906 have some debt to, or connection with, folk music. First, there are the arrangements of actual folk dances or folksongs, which Bartk wrote throughout his life, even into his final American years. They parallel what he called his "original compositions". Until 1921 he even distinguished his arrangements from his original compositions by giving an opus number to the latter, but not to the former. The Romanian Folk Dances (1915), perhaps Bartk's most performed work and without opus designation, is one such arrangement. The tunes are presented as transcribed, and Bartk gives them simple, sometimes even romantic, harmonizations. In 1941, in a review of the connection between his compositions and folk music, Bartk identified three different approaches to folk arrangement: where the folk melody is mounted like a jewel (as in the Romanian Folk Dances); where the folk melody and accompaniment are almost equal in importance; and where the melody is "only to be regarded as a kind of motto" for further creative development. For Bartk this was the cross-over point with his "original compositions". The folk element becomes a spur for creative explorations, sometimes quite radical ones. Bartk's Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs for piano (1920) show this inspirational power of the original folk melodies in full forces. And, for that reason, Bartk recognized the work as an "original composition", with opus number.
Bartk's banned' works, in particular, progress one step further in this sublimation of original folk sources. Even the motto' function is now removed. No discernible folk source is left. As Bartk goes on to describe: "the influence of folk music . . . appears more or less in the general spirit of the style . . . [and] in many cases themes or turns of phrases are deliberate

or subconscious imitations of folk melodies or phrases". For the socialist realists around 1950, as for many listeners today, the more deeply Bartk sublimates his folk sources the more challenge these works present. And from where did Bartk draw this all pervasive folk influence? His main concentration as an ethnomusicologist was with Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian folk music, and he produced multi-volume, analytical collections of each of these. So, it is not surprising that he would recognize these three ethnic musics as most influential upon his style as a composer. But he was occasionally influenced by Arabic, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish folk music, having produced one research volume on each. In a deleted line to his 1941 review he even confessed to "American influences (I mean, of course, the jazz)". As the degree of sublimation of these various folk sources increased, the degree of sureness about the origins of particular melodic or rhythmic characteristics decreases. These characteristics merge into the "general spirit of the style" that was, from around 1907-8 insecurely, and then from around 1918 much more securely and distinctively, Bartkian. Folk influence and indebtedness is only half of the story, however. Although Bartk once said that his happiest days were those spent in the villages of central Europe collecting folksongs, he did not go native' or seek to deny the mainstream of Western music. Rather, Bartk's ear was always cocked to the latest musical trends in Western Europe and North America. Igor Stravinsky was a huge influence, or sometimes catalyst, upon his compositional directions, not just with his pre-War ballets that culminated in The Rite of Spring but also in his neoclassical works of the inter-war years. The Miraculous Mandarin and the first two piano concertos both have strong Stravinskyan connections. Claude Debussy was an early model for Bartk as he tried to create impressionist-like textures in his own works in the period of 1908-12. The techniques of Debussy are heard not just in Bartk's musical techniques of this time, but also in the way he sought a more natural form of Hungarian word-setting and sharper delineation of dramatic characters. The connection with Debussy is most evident in Bartk's opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911), but also is heard in two orchestral works not being performed in this Infernal Dance series: Two Pictures (1910) and Four Pieces (1912). As late as 1920 Bartk is found dedicating one of his piano Improvisations "to the memory of Claude Debussy". Although Bartk stated that he never wrote atonal music, considering it antithetical to the folk basis to all his art, nonetheless he did follow the evolving career of Arnold Schoenberg with keen interest. In the period of 1918-22 he did definitely veer towards atonality. Indeed, his subsequent veering back to more settled tonality and adoption of a more baroque or neoclassical style is what many in the European avant-garde considered regrettable. The innovations of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowki, particularly in aspects of string technique and the creation of a north African, or Arabic, sound world, did also interest Bartk in the early 1920s, as can be heard in the orchestration of his The Miraculous Mandarin (completed in 1924) and also in his two violin sonatas of 1921-2. Among Hungarian compatriots Bartk's closest compositional companions were Ern Dohnnyi and Zoltn Kodly. Dohnnyi influenced him early on, indeed was coaching Bartk over the summer of 1903 when he completed the writing of Kossuth, and helped him gain that work's early performance in Manchester. Later on, their paths frequently crossed. Indeed, it was Dohnnyi for whom Melchior Lengyel had intended the libretto of The Miraculous Mandarin, rather than Bartk. Kodly, however, was personally much closer to Bartk. Their common interests in folk music collection and analysis as well as the contemporary currents of composition led them to the closest form of "mutual influence", both as ethnomusicologists and composers. Their collaboration lasted for thirty-four years. It was to Kodly that Bartk would turn first for musical guidance, sometimes for competitive challenge. But they had sufficient differences of focus: Kodly remained much more strictly concerned with Hungarian culture while Bartk

was more gregarious; Kodly became increasingly involved in national musical education while Bartk retained a much greater involvement in musical performance; Kodly was the more trained scholar while Bartk was more the all-round practical musician. Most appropriately, this Infernal Dance series includes one of Kodly's best known orchestral works, Dances of Galnta (1933). "Let us say something of the composer, too. You can see him on stage, in tails And in the street, with his hat off, Walking in the morning sun. He is as thin as a fish bone, As white as a lily, But if he sits down at the piano He turns into a dragon, Rattles, cries, and sometimes barks, So that the sky becomes dark, and the walls of the houses crumble." (Bla Bartk, by Lajos Kassk, trans. Peter Laki) Malcolm Gillies 2010 Malcolm Gillies is the Philharmonia Orchestra's consultant to the Bartk: Infernal Dance project. He features on a number of online videos about the series.

http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/bartok/notes_and_articles/infernal_bartok#content1

Bella Bartok