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Music of Bela Bartok this Sunday night – Concerto For Orchestra, performed by the Southwest German Radio Symphony of Baden-Baden under the direction of Ernest Bour in this radio studio recording from SWF in Germany on May 5, 1962.
Bela Bartók’s earliest mature compositions include the Expressionist one-act opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle – his only opera, whose fluid setting of the text owes much to the composer’s experience of folk music – and The Miraculous Mandarin, a ballet (labelled a ‘pantomime’ by the composer) in which Bartók’s mastery of orchestration is on full show.
Continuing to be heavily influenced by traditional folk music, in 1915, Bartók composed his Romanian Folk Dances a suite of six pieces based on folk music that would originally have been played on the fiddle. Béla wrote the set for solo piano, however they were re-worked for orchestra two years later.
The impact of the First World War that followed this period meant that Bela Bartók had to re-establish his international reputation once the war was over and at the age of 41, Bartók embarked on a series of international concert tours, though he always had a diffident platform manner.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he penned many of his finest pieces, including: his String Quartets Nos. 3–6, the Cantata Profana (1930), the Sonata for Two Pianos and percussion (1937), the Violin Concerto No. 2 (1938), the Piano Concertos No.1 and No.2, and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). His prowess as a pianist was to serve him well throughout his life, and he appeared in recitals and concerts across Europe and later in the United States, often playing his own works, and formed a duo-partnership with his second wife, Ditta Pásztory, to whom he dedicated his Third Piano Concerto.
During these two creative decades, Bartók continued to teach at the Budapest Academy of Music until his resignation in 1934 after which he devoted much of his time to ethnomusicological research.
Expanding his studies beyond the traditional Hungarian folk music that he loved, Béla Bartok began to include other ethnic traditions from Transylvania, Romania and North Africa, leaving behind a legacy as one of the founders of ethnomusicology and study of comparative musical folklore in Hungary.
With the worsening European political situation in the 1930s and the rise of Fascism, Bartók sought refuge in the United States, settling in 1940 in New York where he taught at Columbia University. Despite diminishing financial resources and declining health – he was treated for polycythemia – he continued to compose, completing the celebrated Concerto for Orchestra (1943), the Piano Concerto No.3 (1945), a Sonata for Solo Violin (commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin in 1943), and a Viola Concerto (composed in 1945 and premiered posthumously).
Bela Bartók died in New York in 1945, at the age of 64, from complications of leukaemia, which had been diagnosed a year earlier. Only ten people attended his funeral, including his wife and two sons. Originally buried in Hartsdale, New York, his remains were exhumed and re-interred in 1988 at the request of his sons. The Hungarian government honoured Bartók with a state funeral and he was buried alongside his second wife, Ditta.
Enjoy.
