CHAPTER III: BARTÓK

FIRST LAYER: RELEVANT BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION FOR BÉLA BARTÖK

References

Early years

Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945) was born on the 25^th of March in the Torontál district of Hungary (now called Romania). His father, Béla Bartók, was the director of an agriculture school and his Mother, Paula Voit, was a pianist and piano teacher. Bartók Jr. had one elder sister, Erszebet. Already in his early years Bartók showed attentive listening to his mother's piano playing. On his third birthday, Bartók would play his first instrument, the drum, and it became clear that he had a good sense of rhythm. He was able to distinguish the different dance rhythms that she played on the piano already before he learned to speak in whole sentences."[1] At the age of five, Bartók received his first piano lessons from his mother. After the death of the older Bartók in 1888, the young Bartók would move frequently through different parts of Hungary with his mother and sister as his mother was seeking a job and a good piano teacher for her son.[2] In 1899 Bartók moved to Budapest to study piano and composition. 

Marriages, love affairs

Around 1905 Bartók fell in love with Stefi Geyer, for whom he wrote the violin concerto. On the very day Bartók finished the violin concerto, Stefi wrote him a letter stating that despite his intense passion for her, she would never consider marrying him.[3] Although Bartók was heartbroken, soon he married Márta Ziegler in 1909.[4] She was 16 years old. One year after their wedding, they had a son, Béla Bartók III. Their marriage lasted for 14 years. In 1923 Bartók and Marta divorced and not long after, Bartók married DItta Pásztory. She was aged 19, he 42. Their son, Péter, was born in 1924.[5]

Traveling/folk music

Apart from music, Bartók found great joy and interest in travelling. Bartók was fascinated by the provocative harmonies and asymmetrical dance rhythms of Eastern-European folk music. After his graduation at the conservatoire in Budapest in 1907, he and Zoltán Kodály (to whom he would refer as his only friend) travelled to the countryside. They started to collect and explore folk melodies by making field recordings. Bartók travelled to Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Ruthenia, Slovakia, and Yugoslavia)), North-Africa, The Soviet Union, Turkey, Spain and so on. He incorporated elements of peasant music from the countries he visited into his compositions.[6] Many of Bartók's works therefore contain a great variety of folk music, which he combined with the Western musical languages. His travelling through Europe however came to an end when he was forced by the fascist movement to emigrate with his wife Ditta and his son Peer Bartók to the United States of America in 1940.

Mental/physical health

During his early childhood, Bartók was plagued with recurrent skin rashes and in order to protect him from social embarrassment he was kept away from playing with other children. At the age of five, the skin rashes disappeared, however Bartók fell repeatedly ill with pneumonias and other bronchial inflammations. Therefore, he was subjected to radical treatments and special diets resulting in a continuation of his social quarantine.[7] As a consequence, Bartók did not experience social interaction with other children, including spontaneity, joy, small conflicts or frustration and reconcilement. Instead, Bartók became shy towards strangers. Also, he had a tendency for abstract thinking which meant that he did not understand subtle turns and jokes in conversations. 

In a brief article, psychologist Michael Fitzgerald claims that some of Bartók’s behavior and character traits can interpreted as symptoms of a pervasive developmental disorder such as high functioning autism or Asperger according to the DSM-IV.[8] This developmental disorder is characterized by a broad palette of symptoms that concern social interactions and behavior patterns. [9]  

Descriptions of Bartók in his later years, provide an image of a serious and hardworking man. In a personal memoire, Mrs. Gyarfas (who knew Bartók from 1910), tells about Bartók’s rigorousness towards his time use. Bartók would not waste his time in cafés playing cards or drinking, and almost never went to concerts. He could not find amusement in daily mundane activities. A "time-beggar" is how Bartók would describe himself. [10] In addition, Bartók maintained the highest standards regarding his work. He always strived for perfection and mediocrity was something intolerable to him.[11] These high requirements were also applied in his piano teaching: "He had unlimited patience to explain details of phrasing, rhythm, touch, pedaling. He was most meticulous about rhythmical proportion, accent and the variety of touch."[12] It has also been said that "he was just and fair, but he could not conceal his annoyance with his less gifted students."[13]

Another typical character trait of Bartók was his interest for ‘‘collecting, ordering and cataloguing objects.’’[14] His almost obsessive interest in ethnomusicology resulted in large collections of melodies from field recordings. His love for nature was reflected in his collection of plants, butterflies, insects, stones and more. Furthermore, Bartók has been described as a man with a high sense of duty and strict morals[15] but also with a tendency for pessimistic thinking that affected his trust in people. His pessimistic attitude increased after his emigration to the United States in 1940 where he felt like an outcast. In New York, Bartók was unhappy. He could not settle in the bustle of the city. He wrote to a friend: “we were piano-played and radio-blasted from right and left; a lot of noise came in from the street night and day; every 5 minutes we heard the rumble of the subway which made the walls shake.”[16] Bartók even created a sound system that emitted noise in order to drown out the distracting sounds of the city.[17] Despite his failure to become accustomed to the chaotic city, Bartók would never return to Hungary. He was diagnosed with leukemia in 1943. Because Bartók was afraid that a treatment of his disease would increase the delicacy of his situation and cause extreme difficulties, he refused most of the medical treatment that was offered.[18] In September 1945, he died in a NYC hospital.

At the time of the Viola Concerto

At the end of 1944, inspired by the 2^nd violin concerto of Bartók, it was the Scottish violist William Primrose who approached Bartók to write a Viola Concerto. At first, Bartók refused to take on this task: he felt he did not know enough about the viola as a solo instrument. However, after listening to William Walton’s Viola Concerto - recommended by Primrose – he immediately accepted the commission. Bartók started to familiarize himself with the treatment of the viola as a solo instrument by reading the scores of Harold in Italy. In a letter to Primrose (dated 8th Sept. 1945), he writes that he would use a rather more transparent orchestration in comparison to his violin concerto. He also writes that the ‘‘sombre, more masculine’’ character of the viola influenced the general character of the piece.[19] Bartók composed the concerto during the summer of 1945 at Saranac Lake (New York) where he stayed in a small cottage with his wife Ditta. Although Bartók found some peace and quietness at Saranac to work on his composition(s) (he was writing the 3^rd piano concerto simultaneously), he was disturbed by recurrent fevers. There are suggestions that the 6^th page of the manuscript contains the measurements of his temperature.[20] Around the same time, he was concerned about the Second World War, which was affecting his beloved home country Hungary. In August 1945, Bartók's physical condition worsened and Bartók and Ditta were forced to return to New York City where he died the next month. The manuscript of the viola concerto then consisted of 13 pages mainly containing the lines of the solo instrument. However, Bartók could not finish the concerto. In a letter to Primrose, however, Bartók had written that the concerto was almost finished and that the working out of the orchestral part was mainly a mechanical task. Tibor Serly was the first to reconstruct the concerto, followed by Peter Bartók (Bartók’s son) and othersi.