Under the microscope

Musical Times, Autumn 2001 by Drakeford, Richard

RICHARD DRAKEFORD pays close attention to two new anthologies of Bartok studies

The Cambridge companion to Bartok Edited by Amanda Bayley Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 2001); xv, 271pp; L45 / L15.95 pbk. ISBN 0 521 66010 6 / 0 521 66958 8.

Bartok perspectives: man, composer and ethnomusicologist Edited by Elliott Antokoletz, Victoria Fischer & Benjamin Suchoff Oxford UP (New York dt Oford); xvi, 316pp; L46.50. ISBN 0 19 512562 2.

I feel forced to declare that all my music [...] is a question of instinct and of sensibility. One should not ask me why I wrote this or that, in this fashion rather than another. I have only one explanation: This is how I felt it, this is how I have written it down. Let the music tell it to you; it is clear enough to do that and strong enough to defend itself.

(Bela Bartok, 1937)

AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME as the editor sent me these volumes for review I was lucky enough to hear, in the Wigmore Hall, a truly magnificent performance of Bartok's 'difficult' Second Sonata for Violin and Piano given by Christian Tetzlaff and Leif Ove Andsnes. Tetzlaff's playing was immaculate in both intonation and phrasing, while Andsnes found marvellous ways to illuminate Bartok's textures without drawing undue attention to himself. Such a performance, presented wholly at the service of the music, must, I thought, provide one with a far better understanding of Bartok and his work than any verbal explanations can hope to do. And yet verbal explanations, amounting to a positive academic industry, seem to be on the increase in these early years of this twenty-first century. Might it not be better for seekers after musical wisdom to employ their time listening attentively to performances and recordings? Bartok, I believe, would have thought so, and it is good that some of the contributors to these two anthologies have the grace to admit as much. As a quid pro quo the reviewer can concede a degree of value to volumes such as these, always provided that the music itself remains paramount - performances first, explanations later.

Of the two books, the Cambridge companion is the more conventionally ordered. There is an introductory section labelled `Contexts: political, social and cultural', while the central part of the book is a series of chapters by different writers on the various genres explored by the composer (piano music, string quartets, concertos, etc.): these are entitled `Profiles of the music'. By way of coda, part three, 'Reception', deals with how Bart6k's works were received first in his lifetime and then in the years that followed. Finally Vera Lampert adds a useful account of the composer's various recordings, assessing their impact and function today as historical documents, providing useful extra guidelines beyond the printed notes for such pianists as Stephen Bishop-- Kovacevich and Zoltan Kocsis.

Given my particular viewpoint it is, I suppose, unsurprising that the chapter of this book I found really enthralling was the first, in which Lynn Hooker gives a brilliantly lucid account of the historical and cultural background to life in Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. Though a latter-day convert to the novels of Joseph Roth, I found this whole area of knowledge new. It was instructive to learn that some of the ethnic complexities of the region were reflected in Bartok's own family his mother was German, his father, though considering himself Hungarian, was actually Serbian. In the light of this it is interesting to observe the composer's attitudes. An almost rabid Hungarian nationalism at the time of his symphonic poem Kossuth (perhaps the most striking of the works composed in his twenties) turned, after he had explored a whole variety of different ethnic folk musics, to an attitude much more liberal, tolerant and inclusive. Stephen Erdely writes less engagingly than Ms Hooker, but his chapter on `Bartok and folk music' is extremely thorough, a characteristic of Bartok's own labours in this sphere. (Dislike of the analysis of his own compositions did not prevent him from pioneering a 'scientific' approach here.) Readers with an interest in the tittle-tattle of biography however, will have to turn to the Oxford University Press for details of some extra-marital activities that apparently spiced the folk-song collecting (mentioned in an interesting essay by Dorothy Lamb Crawford entitled `Love and anguish: Bartok's expressionism'). The difficulties of Bartok's first marriage have no place in the Cambridge volume, unless by indirect association with Bluebeard and his castle.

In his chapter on the stage works Carl Leafstedt is at pains to relate what he takes to be their central theme - loneliness - to salient personality traits of the composer's, for instance an unsociable shyness and consciousness of essential solitude. In so doing he seems at one point to regard these characteristics as uniquely Bartokian, while yet discovering very similar traits in other artistic luminaries of the period. How 'similar' do these have to be before Bartok's uniqueness melts away, I wonder? The word is a treacherous one but with a precise and singular meaning. Leafstedt treads on thin ice here. Otherwise the chapter is interesting, especially about Bluebeard, whose librettist Bela Balazs used `the language of old Szeckely folk ballads', and in so doing supplied the composer with an ideal text, apt both for his folkloric inflections and for a parlando inspired by Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande. Leafstedt evidently admires the ballet The wooden prince more than I do, though we agree in finding The miraculous mandarin 'a work that, by all measures, represents one of his finest compositions'.