Culture | Bela Bartok

A sonata in two movements

A musical biography with something for everyone

Bela Bartok. By David Cooper. Yale University Press; 436 pages; £25. To be published in America by Yale in June.

ALONG with Franz Liszt, Bela Bartok, who died in 1945, is regarded as one of Hungary’s greatest composers. Many consider his six string quartets, completed between 1908 and 1939, to be second only to Beethoven’s. Though not as atonal as the work of many of his contemporaries, such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, Bartok’s compositions can be heavy-going, combining influences from Hungarian folk, jazz and Arabic music. In this weighty tome, David Cooper of Leeds University digs into Bartok’s life, interlacing his discussion of the compositions with wider discussions of politics and culture.

Just as Bartok’s music is not for the faint of heart, neither is this book. The level of research is astonishing, at times to the point of scholasticism. And a big chunk of it is filled with detailed analyses of Bartok’s compositions, along with dozens of musical illustrations. Musical jargon peppers the discussion: for readers who do not know their arpeggios from their appoggiaturas, parts of the book will be difficult to understand.

But even for musical neophytes, the book has much to offer. Bartok was born in Nagyszentmiklos (now Sannicolau Mare in Romania), a relatively prosperous if unremarkable community. His hometown was a mix of cultures, including ethnic Romanians and Germans. Hungarians formed only a tenth of the population.

Mr Cooper does a good job of explaining the composer’s insatiable appetite for work. Bartok rarely took proper holidays. His musical output alone would be deemed sufficient by many successful composers. Yet on top of this he was also a teacher (though only for the money) and a concert pianist of some repute.

His real passion, however, was for folk music, which also had a big influence on his compositions. Bartok would spend weeks at a time travelling the world, dropping in on peasants and asking them to sing for him, at the time a European craze. He would then record and transcribe what he heard. Sometimes these jaunts proved difficult. In Algeria, for instance, which he visited in 1913, many of the women felt that on religious grounds it would be inappropriate for them to sing for him. (That was not the only time, Mr Cooper reveals elsewhere, that women turned him down.)

Happily, in Hungary he had more success. He visited a little village, where an elderly railway guard sang seven ballads for him. “I was notating for two-and-a-half hours,” a thrilled Bartok recalled in a letter. “I could hardly keep up.” By the 1930s a project at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in which Bartok was involved, had collected 10,000 Hungarian melodies. Volumes devoted to his ethnomusicology are still being published.

Mr Cooper’s description of Bartok’s folk-music collecting is fascinating, but other parts of the book fall a little short. After Hungary became a Soviet republic in 1919, Bartok was chosen to be part of the country’s “Musical Directorate”, with special responsibility for organising concerts. How did such a radical and demanding composer cope with the task of providing music that had to be accessible to a mass proletarian audience? The issue is not really explored. The book also sometimes gets bogged down in issues of questionable historical interest, such as whether or not Bartok may have had Asperger’s syndrome.

The second world war threw European musical life into turmoil. Many of Bartok’s contemporaries, such as Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, had their works paraded by the Nazis in the “Degenerate Music” exhibition, held in Düsseldorf in mid-1938. (To his irritation Bartok was spared, possibly because of Hungary’s pro-Nazi government.) Nonetheless, by 1940 he had decamped to New York, where he was deluged by offers from universities for lectures and visiting professorships. He lived to a surprisingly ripe age, given the health problems that had plagued him since birth. As he lay dying he rued the many projects that he was going to leave uncompleted. It was a very Bartokian ending.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A sonata in two movements"

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