The concept of “The Three Bs” in classical music has been with us since 1854, when the writer Peter Cornelius coined the phrase while suggesting that Hector Berlioz should join Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven in the highest realm of composers. Berlioz fell from this pinnacle later in the century, however, when conductor Hans von Bülow proposed a different set of Bs, a musical Trinity consisting of Bach, the Father; Beethoven, the Son; and Brahms, the Holy Ghost. This sacred triumvirate stuck, as every student of classical music knows, despite the fact that Wagner, disturbed by the veneration of his conservative archrival Brahms, proposed replacing him with Anton Bruckner—a suggestion that no one other than brass players has ever taken seriously.
(For the record, one should also note that a set of three Bs was put forth in the mid-18th century for German organ playing: Bach, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann “Bachelbel”—the last meaning Pachelbel, but spelled with a B instead of a P, a slip caused by the similarity of pronunciation in Saxon dialect.)
All of this came to mind several years ago when the music critic Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times proposed a fourth B. Tommasini asked readers to help him create a list of “The Greatest,” the top ten composers of all time. The discussion was carried forth in a democratic way through two weeks of articles, online videos, and blog posts. More than 1,500 readers weighed in with comments. To no one’s surprise, Bach won the top prize. And the next eight spots went to the “usual suspects” of Western music: Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, Stravinsky, Verdi, Wagner, and, of course, the other two Bs, Beethoven and Brahms. But with apologies to Haydn, Mahler, Puccini, and Monteverdi, Tommasini rounded out the group with an unanticipated newcomer to the pantheon of greats: Béla Bartók (1881-1945), “an ethnomusicologist whose work has empowered generations of subsequent composers to incorporate folk music and classical traditions from whatever culture into their works.”
That Bartók should achieve this recognition is long overdue. A Hungarian pianist, composer, and scholar of folk music, Bartók appeared at the height of the music crisis precipitated by Wagner and successfully forged a new path for fellow composers to follow. Wagner’s music had pushed tonality to its limits, with deeply expressive, chromatic passages that filled in the cracks of the keyboard and willfully disrupted the normal harmonic stabilities that had characterized Western music since its earliest polyphonic days. The decisive piece was the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde (1865), which portrayed desire and unfulfilled love by a seemingly endless chain of unresolved melodies and harmonic progressions. The conservative Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick likened the Prelude to “the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.” Where could composers go after Wagner’s “evisceration” of traditional harmony?
They set out in different directions, taking roads that often turned out to be musical cul de sacs. One route was pseudo-chromaticism, pursued by Max Reger, César Franck, and Richard Strauss, who continued the Wagnerian tradition but in a derivative way. Another avenue was impressionism, advocated by Claude Debussy, which introduced Eastern scales and shimmering, understated atmospheric backgrounds. Though short-lived, neoclassicism represented an attractive alternative for Igor Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud, who created jazzy pieces using polytonalities and Baroque-like chamber forces. Still another approach was atonality, the full abandonment of traditional harmonic schemes in favor of abstract organizational principles developed by the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern. And finally there was nationalism, the use of native tunes and traditions, espoused by Edward Elgar, Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, and here in the United States, Charles Ives.
One of the prime reasons for Bartók’s admission into Tommasini’s Top Ten was his achievement of finding yet another path, creating a unique international musical language that was “an amalgam of tonality, unorthodox scales, and atonal wanderings.”
Just how Bartók managed to accomplish this is the topic of this new biography, which traces in fine detail the composer’s life and musical development. David Cooper tracks Bartók’s life against the political and cultural currents in Hungary and Central Europe at the time, analyzes his principal works in considerable depth, and follows his seminal studies as one of the world’s first systematic ethnomusicologists, collecting, transcribing, and publishing vast amounts of traditional music that was soon to be lost to the industrial and technological onslaught of the 20th century. Dean of the faculty of performance, visual arts, and communications at the University of Leeds, Cooper is well equipped to carry out this task, having authored a notable volume on Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra as well as numerous book chapters and articles on the composer.
Bartók began his life in music in a rather conventional manner. Born in 1881 in the small town of Nagyszentmiklós in Hungary to middle-class parents—his father was a school headmaster, his mother a competent pianist—he showed musical talent early, studying piano first with his mother and presenting his first public concert at age 11. He then studied with László Erkel, son of the famous Hungarian opera composer Ferenc Erkel, and eventually with Istvan Thomán at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, graduating in 1903. While at the academy he also studied composition with Hans Koessler, writing pieces that displayed the strong influence of Liszt, Brahms, and Richard Strauss. All this pointed to a traditional career as a pianist-composer solidly trained in the German-Austrian manner.
But soon Bartók began to pursue Hungarian causes and stopped speaking German, the language of his mother. In 1904, the first performance of Kossuth, his symphonic poem tracing the life and death of the Hungarian hero Lajos Kossuth and containing a satirical distortion of the Austrian national anthem, thrust Bartók to the fore as a patriotic Hungarian composer. As Cooper points out, at the immensely successful premiere, Bartók took his bow not in Western dress but in a traditional Hungarian Attila jacket. He soon professed to his mother that he had but one life goal: “The good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation.”
The pursuit of this goal led to periods of intense folksong research that took him beyond the stereotypical gypsy music of the Magyar people to unknown native music of the rural peasantry. This Bartók considered to be the true music of the people, and the source of inspiration for his own evolving compositional style. His encounter with his fellow Hungarian Zoltan Kodály in the winter of 1904-05 was a life-changing experience: Kodály introduced him to the art of collecting native music, and in 1906, the two published Twenty Hungarian Folksongs for Voice and Piano, a seminal collection of folksong arrangements, 10 by Bartók, 10 by Kodály. This was the prelude to a lifetime of recording, transcribing, and classifying folk music, chiefly of Hungary, Romania, and the Slovak nations, but also of North Africa and the United States. During World War I, Bartók recorded folksongs of the soldiers; during a trip to the northwestern United States, he studied the music of American Indians. The grand collection Magyar Népdal of 1924 (later published in English as Hungarian Folk Music) contained 7,814 tunes collected by Bartók, Kodály, and five others.
This research—indeed, this total immersion—provided the raw material for Bartók’s compositional style, which remained tonal but with a greatly expanded idiom that embraced the modal scales and unorthodox harmonies derived from folk music. Although his rich melodic lines flirt with atonality, sometimes using all 12 tones of the scale, and the harmonies contain spicy dissonant chords, Bartók retained the use of tonal centers as a stabilizing element, commonly balancing them in symmetrical ways. In an effort to expand traditional idioms, Bartók introduced novel sounds derived from folk practices. In the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) he used the xylophone as the soprano voice and the timpani as the bass voice in a duo pitted against two pianos. In the Allegretto Pizzicato of the Fourth String Quartet (1928) Bartók required the players to set aside their bows for the entire movement, plucking the strings like native citera players and snapping the strings against the fingerboard at climactic moments. In Out of Doors, written during the “piano year” of 1926, he used tone clusters to simulate the pitchless drumbeats of folk music.
These bold innovations did not please everyone. One American critic described Bartók’s percussive piano idiom as “unmeaning bunches of notes, apparently representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots.” But in early works, such as the symbolist opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) and the pantomime ballet The Wooden Prince (1914-16), and in late pieces such as the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1943, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra), he found a perfect balance of old and new by combining readily perceivable classical forms and Brahms-like continuing variation with shimmering impressionistic textures and unique modal and pentatonic scales and harmonies. This synthesis had nothing to do with Wagner; it was a new way.
One suspects that, for Bartók, Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovakian folk music was the equivalent of the Lutheran chorale for Bach: a catalyst for composition, a pedagogical resource, and a means of “refreshing the spirit”—a phrase used in Bach’s printed works. It formed the foundation of his melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic vocabulary and served as a stimulus for piano, instrumental, and vocal works. But it also provided material for his teaching, in collections such as the Ten Easy Pieces (1908) and the Mikrokosmos (1926-39), a set of 153 progressive études, many written in a folk-derived idiom.
More fundamentally, folk song sustained him in times of tribulation. In ill health during the last two years of his life, he turned to the completion of Serbo-Croatian Folk Music as well as the introduction to a volume of Romanian song texts. Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovakian folksong was unsullied music, in his view, an artistic source untainted by the corruption of modern city life: “Peasant music of this kind actually is nothing but the outcome of changes wrought by a natural force whose operation is unconscious in men who are not influenced by urban culture.”
In moments of depression and anxiety, even the thought of folk music had restorative powers. Cooper reports Diana Brodie saying of her fatigued houseguest in Glasgow in 1933:
He told us something of his experience in searching for and collecting the folk songs of his country. Normally his face looked rather stern and taut, but his whole face lit up and his eyes became pools of liquid fire when recounting what was obviously the most vital facet of his life.
Despite his success as a composer, Bartók remained dependent on income from teaching, lecturing, and piano-playing throughout his life. He appeared in solo recitals and as soloist with orchestras in almost all the major cities in Europe, and he played extensively in the United States during a three-month tour in the 1927-28 season. He returned to America in 1940 as a Hungarian refugee, remaining until his death in 1945 from leukemia. At the end he was working on the Third Piano Concerto, finished except for the scoring of the final 17 measures, and the Viola Concerto, handed down in sketch form only.
“What I most regret,” he said to a friend, “is having to leave with a full trunk.”
Socially Bartók often appeared to be cold and aloof, and Cooper discusses the recent speculation that the composer may have had Asperger’s syndrome. This might help to explain his impaired social skills as a child. There is no doubt that Bartók never felt fully comfortable in front of large groups, but he was also a great communicator, explaining his music and folksong research in pre-concert talks as well as lectures and published essays. How many artists are socially awkward? The creative process itself seems to call for intense concentration, and part of the requisite skill set for a composer appears to be the ability to step out of the present when communing with the musical muse. That Bartók had little problem summoning the muse is evident from his large output. If he had Asperger’s, he certainly used it to great advantage.
Cooper presents a highly nuanced reading of Bartók’s life. Yes, he touches on the odd aspects of the composer’s personality: his infatuation with pubescent girls (the age of consent in some areas of Eastern Europe was 14), his flirtations with female students, and his stay at the Lichtluftheim nudist camp, where he composed substantial portions of Bluebeard’s Castle wearing nothing but dark glasses. But he appropriately focuses most strongly on the works, the collecting expeditions, and the concert tours.
The principal compositions are analyzed in an intense manner that will exceed the understanding and endurance of many readers, and the titles that accompany the 12 chapters (“Sweet was my mother’s milk,” “Stars, stars, brightly shine,” “I see the beautiful sky”) seem to trivialize rather than encapsulate the contents, even if they are drawn from Bartók’s writings or song texts (the origin is not explained). Also, while this volume presents more than 50 music examples, it contains no photographs, leaving unfulfilled any reader’s desire to see what Bartók’s first great love, the violinist Stefi Geyer, his young wives Márta Ziegler and Ditta Pásztory, and his Hungarian colleagues looked like. But these are peccadilloes in an otherwise thorough and thoughtfully considered biography. Cooper is to be applauded for balancing the many facets of Bartók’s life to give us a well-rounded account.
In the end, one must ask why Béla Bartók’s Hungarian-oriented music has prevailed over that of Elgar, Sibelius, Nielsen, and other nationalists. One suspects that its universality stems not just from its folksong-inspired idiom, or its use of comprehensible forms, or its earthy, forceful rhythms. Its broad appeal seems rooted, rather, in Bartók’s belief that “every true art is produced through the influence of impressions we gather within ourselves from the outer world of ‘experiences.’ ” That is, his conviction that music must reflect life itself. His use of uncontaminated raw material mined from Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak folksong, and his ability to write accessibly when necessary, provide a strong antidote to the disillusionment of the industrial era, two world wars, and ongoing global turmoil.
Much like the compositions of his fellow B, Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók’s works stand as life-affirming markers in an age of anxiety.
George B. Stauffer is dean of the Mason Gross School of the Arts, and distinguished professor of music history, at Rutgers.
