When I was a kid, my dad tried to introduce me to classical music via the usual suspects, most notably Beethoven. The Beatles, Motown, the Stones, Who, Motown and Stax were the soundtrack to my youth – for which I remain eternally grateful – and it was clear after a couple of barely-feigned attempts that I wasn’t budging. Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and all that sounded like sugary wedding cake – airy and bland – to a 10-year-old in 1968 vis-a-vis “Get Off My Cloud.”
It was not until, maybe 8 years later, I picked up a copy of Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (the same Christoph von Dohnányi/Cleveland Orchestra version heard in the mixtape) at the used record store I haunted in my late teens that I heard “classical” music that actually engaged me – classical music that I wanted to hear again as soon as it was over. What I heard, I learned a long time later, were oblique melodies that came from Bartók’s decades of devotion to the folk music of Eastern Europe and northern Africa (the Concerto was written near the end of his life), music he’d internalized and reconfigured into something the world had never heard before. It packed a dramatic wallop, it was catchy, and it opened my mind. Not so different, in those ways, from “Get Off My Cloud” (or, for a timelier reference, “Anarchy in the U.K.”)
Like those of so many transformative artists, Bartók’s career was marked by a stroke of luck, a chance encounter, without which I wouldn’t be here. He was most definitely not, after all, a peasant from the remote mountains of the eastern Slav regions, anymore than Mick Jagger was a black housepainter from Chicago. Bartók, while Hungarian by birth, was raised in a (then-Roumanian) city far closer to Vienna – in every way – than the sticks of Transylvania. Until his mid-20s, Bartók’s familiarity with indigenous folk music did not extend past the incorporation of a few blanched themes in works by Brahms and Liszt. Bartok, in fact, had been composing politely-received music in that same polite Austro-German vein for years.
But upon meeting the charismatic redbeard Zoltán Kodály in 1906, everything changed. Kodály, who was to be a lifelong friend and whom Bartók considered a mentor despite the fact Kodály was a year younger, invited him along on a folk music-hunting expedition. (While Kodály instigated the expedition, he was following in the footsteps of Béla Vikár.) Armed with Edison wax-cylinder phonographs, the duo – and, later, Bartók solo – pursued this fieldwork with hardcore fervor.
They went deep. The melodies they encountered in the mountains of Roumania and Transylvania – and that Bartók fastidiously translated (or attempted to translate) into a Western notation system – were grounded in entirely distinct systems, of pentatonic scales and microtonalities, that originated in the steppes of Asia. The line between Eastern Europe and Western Asia, we Americans tend to forget or never learn, is a blurry one at best. (I have included some of Bartok’s earliest wax cylinder recordings at the start of the attached mixtape…) While composers around Europe had been getting below the surface of their regions’ folk musics in the late 19th Century – Edvard Grieg in Norway and Antonin Dvorák in the Czech region come immediately to mind – Kodály and Bartók took it to a whole new level once they started working their revelations into their own compositions.
It can not be emphasized too strongly, then: Bartók’s meeting up with Kodály was SUPER lucky, for both Bartók and for the world of 20th Century art music.* Kodály, while an excellent composer in his own right, probably could not have triggered the seismic shift that Bartók did. With no disrespect to Kodály, Bartók was a giant in terms of his art, a Picasso to Kodály’s Juan Gris, a Charlie Parker to Kodály’s Dexter Gordon. I’m not shooting from the hip here: the writers for the classical record review journals I pour over (the bimonthly American Record Guide is my favorite…) tend to regard Bartók as one of the three foundational pillars of modernist art music, along with Schöenberg and Stravinsky. While those two altered art music formally in important ways (much as Cubist and Expressionist painters did visual art in the same time frame), Bartók was not interested in “the shock of the new.” He was interested, rather, in unlocking what was already there, deep down in the DNA, and with that he produced a flowing, organic music that was freed of any doctrines, including modernist ones.
This playlist is the first of two. I tried to come up with a single 2-hour episode of absolute favorites from Bartók’s extensive repertoire, but I could not whittle it down to under 3 hours. I will put volume 2 up in a week or two. This mixtape is not preoccupied with chronology so much as flow. To that end, I included the first movement from the Concerto for Orchestra as the first example of his mature writing for orchestra, about ten minutes in. That said, many of his later and best-known works will be referenced in volume 2.
As with the mix of Bartók’s “Night Music” a few weeks ago, I generally opted for Hungarian performers for this set. E.g., while there are lots of great versions of Concerto for Orchestra I used the Cleveland Orchestra’s version owing to the facts that A) Dohnányi had Hungarian roots (though born in Berlin) and B) Cleveland was one of two American cities with a Hungarian-language newspaper at the time of its premiere. There are exceptions, nevertheless: Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, Lika Biblishvili, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Emerson Quartet aren’t Hungarian (obviously) but their versions of the works included here are, to my mind, the best versions I own. Beauty before geography, in other words.
I have once again used the Hungarian frog sounds where interludes seemed appropriate because I love frog sounds generally, and I have stuck with the Szöllösy index system (of the four indexes that track Bartók’s vast catalogue) for the playlist below. (I have acquired a lot of Szöllösy’s music lately and consider myself at this point a major fan; expect a Szöllösy show soon.)
One final note: I have included two “doors” from 1912 opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in this mix. Some Bartók scholars consider that opera, his lone foray into the genre, his first mature work for orchestra – one where he synthesizes the parallel universe folk music he was fieldrecording as well as the liberating innovations of Debussy within the conventions of Austro-German orchestration. But I just wanted to recommend Bluebeard’s Castle to those out there who (like me) really struggle with opera. It is just an hour long, has only two characters, and tells a twisted tale that resonates – haunts, really – on multiple levels. Mostly, it’s just brilliant music. It and Shostakovich’s Lady MacBeth of the Mtesnk District are two operas worth owning…
I digress; with no further ado, then:
0:00
CC Theme Song
0:01:28
Various: Roumanian & Hungarian Folk Songs
Field recordings by Bartók, 1906-1907
0:04:19
Bartók: Roumanian Folk Dances, SZ 56 (1915) – 1. Stick Dance
Zoltán Kocsis (Philips)
0:05:27
Bartók: Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Piano, Sz. 86 (1928) –
I. Lassú; Moderato
Piotr (v) & Monika Wilinska (p) Tarcholik (CD Accord, Poland)
0:09:43
Bartók: Concerto For Orchestra, SZ 116 (1942, rev. 1945) –
I. Introduzione
Christoph Von Dohnányi: Cleveland Orchestra (London)
0:20:23
Bartók: Piano Concerto No.1, SZ 83 (1926) – 2. Adagio
Zoltán Kocsis w/ Iván Fischer: Budapest Festival Orchestra (Philips)
0:27:28
Bartók: String Quartet #2 In A Minor, SZ 67 (1915-7) –
2. Allegro Molto Capriccioso
Emerson Quartet (Deutsche Grammophon)
0:34:45
Bartók: Etudes, Sz. 72, Nr. 3 (1918)
Lika Bibileishvili
0:36:59
Bartok – Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112 (1938) – I. Allegro non troppo
Patricia Kopatchinskaja w/ Peter Eötvos: Frankfurt Radio SO (Naive)
0:54:00
Bartók: Bluebeard’s Castle, SZ 48 (1912, rev. 1917) –
Door 4: Oh! Virágok! Oh! Ilatoskert!
& Door 5: Ah!; Lásdez Az Én Birodalmam
Olga Szönyi & Muhaly Székely; Antal Doráti: London SO (London)
0:59:53
Bartók: String Quartet No. 3, SZ 85 (1927) – 2. Seconda Parte
Takács Quartet (London)
1:09:47
Bartók: Music For Strings, Percussion & Celesta, SZ 106 (1936) – 3. Adagio
Zoltán Kocsis w/ Iván Fischer: Budapest Festival Orchestra (Philips)
1:17:27
Bartók: Rhapsody #2, SZ 90 (1928, rev. 1944) – 1. Lassú
Isaac Stern w/ Leonard Bernstein: New York PO (Sony)
1:22:08
Bartók: Dance Suite (Táncszvit), Sz. 77 (1923) – 4. Molto Tranquillo
Adám Fischer: Hungarian State SO (Nimbus)
1:26:08
Bartók: Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19, SZ 73 (1918, completed 1926) –
1. Allegro, Curtain
Antal Doráti: Detroit SO (Decca)
1:32:33
Bartók: Hungarian Pictures, Sz. 97 (1931) – 1. Evening In Transylvania
Adám Fischer: Hungarian State SO (Philips)
____________________________
* To get an idea of what Bartók’s career might have been like had this transformative relationship never happened, you can listen to pieces like his Piano Quintet in C major from 1903. Or, perhaps more instructive still, you could look at the career and legacy of the Hungarian composer Bartók emulated growing up, Ernö Dohnányi. Dohnányi (Christoph’s father) was not averse to working some folk-lite melodies into his compositions, many of which have stood the test of time despite their wallpaper-paste texture and flavor. Dohnányi – who altered his name to “Ernst von” to make it sound German – made no waves whatsoever…
Concentration Camp 