A giant of 20th century music,
Bela Bartók was a brilliant and original composer who drew
inspiration from both his classical contemporaries - most
notably Wagner and Strauss - and the folk melodies of his
homeland. A pianist, theorist, music historian and teacher,
Bartók wrote primarily for instruments rather than for
voices, and over the course of his career revolutionized
virtually every concept of tonality (or lack thereof) in
existence.
Born in Hungary in 1881, Bartok
began his musical studies on the piano at age five. His
mother was his first teacher; after his father died in 1888,
the Bartok family moved to Czechoslovakia, where Bela
continued his piano studies and took up composition. At age
eleven, he made his first public appearance, playing his own
piano music. After several more years of honing his keyboard
skills, Bartok enrolled in the Royal Academy of Music in
Budapest. Here he studied the works of the late Romantics,
and became intensely involved in the multi-disciplinary
movement of nationalism which was taking Hungary by storm.
While at the Academy, he became closely associated with the
great composer Zoltan Kodaly - a relationship which would
have inestimable impact on the course of musical composition
and education. The pair began a far-reaching study of the
folk music idioms of Hungary, and published a collection of
folk song settings in 1906.
Bartok started his professional
career as a pianist, and made several successful tours of the
European continent after his graduation from the Academy in
1902. He did not pursue composition as a primary activity
until after his appointment to the piano faculty at the
Budapest Academy in 1907. From this time on, he wrote reams
of orchestral, chamber and solo music, taught theory, and
performed solo recitals and concert engagements throughout
Europe and in the United States.
In 1940 Bartok moved to the United
States to get away from the Nazi expansion, and was given a
teaching position at Columbia University in New York City. It
is one of the great tragedies of 20th century music that he
was never accorded the adulation in America that he so richly
deserved; with the exception of some noted musicians -
conductor Serge Koussevitzky and violinist Yehudi Menuhin in
particular - he was generally misunderstood and ignored by
the musical establishment. One respite from this lamentable
situation was the happy relationship Bartok rekindled with
the great Hungarian conductor Fritz Reiner, who had known the
composer during their student days in Hungary. Reiner would
remain for the rest of his distinguished career one of
Bartok's most powerful proponents, playing and recording a
number of his brilliant compatriot's works with every
orchestra he commanded. As it turned out, Bartok's career in
the United States ended almost before it began; he contracted
leukemia in the early 1940s, and died in the fall of 1945,
unaware of the monumental status he would achieve after
death.
Bartok wrote a large volume of
piano works, most notably the brilliant Mikrokosmos
(1926-37), a six-book collection of piano teaching pieces
which, although simple in form, show his genius as a harmonic
and rhythmic innovator. He also wrote a wealth of chamber
music; his six string quartets are absolute masterpieces of
structure and balance, more so than any works since the music
of Mozart and Haydn. In these quartets, Bartok used an
original system of tonal organization which drew as much from
the non-Western scales of Hungarian folk music as it did from
any traditional sense of tonality. Each quartet is a unique
marvel of simple melodies, rough dissonances, rhythmic
complexity and harmonic abstraction.
Perhaps the best-known works of
Bartok are the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), commissioned by
Serge Koussevitzky for performance by the Boston Symphony,
and the remarkable Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste
(1936), which demonstrates Bartok's complete command of
counterpoint and canon. Both of these works defy description;
they are crafted with such intelligence, such sensitivity to
orchestral sonorities, such inspired harmonic layers and
movement, and such emotional power, that they comprise some
of the undeniably greatest music written in this century.
Another of Bartok's masterpieces
is the Solo Sonata for Violin. This fiendishly difficult work
has challenged every violinist of the first rank for the last
fifty years, and, like the solo sonatas and partitas of Bach,
stands as one of the most rewarding works for any solo
instrument. His concertos, particularly the Concerto No. 2
for Violin and Orchestra, are among the greatest works ever
written for solo instruments and orchestra. In his original
blending of tradition and contemporary musical elements, in
his ability to turn any ensemble into a rhythmic force, and
in the unforgettable harmonies and tonal colors he invented
for various ensembles, Bartok stands alone as one of the most
important composers in modern history.
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