Bart

Worldwide festivals celebrate a century after his birth

Bela BartOk was an orphan of the 20th century. NagyszentmiklOs, the Hungarian town in which he was born a century ago, was ceded to Rumania in 1920. Nagyszoelloes, where he wrote his first compositions at the age of nine, is now part of the Soviet Union. Pozsony, where he spent his teen-age years, has become Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. He died of leukemia in New York City in 1945, a refugee from the war, living at the end in a cramped apartment on West 57th Street.

Today, the music of this small, frail man with the burning eyes of a visionary has found a home in the world's concert halls. If it has proved less popular than Igor Stravinsky's and less influential than Arnold Schoenberg's, it is no less important. BartOk wrote music of irresistible power and drive, music that in its uncompromising frankness and depth of expression discomfited audiences used to the prettifications of romanticism. Like other great musical figures -- Beethoven and Wagner come immediately to mind -- BartOk was a destroyer as well as a creator. Emerging from the 19th century Western European tradition, he changed it irrevocably.

Unlike Schoenberg, whose twelve-tone system dominated the postwar period, BartOk founded no school and left behind only a handful of disciples. But his effect on the music of this century has been significant. It was BartOk, for example, who brought the percussion section to prominence in works such as the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, liberating drums, cymbals and gongs from their traditional role as accompanists and inspiring his successors to use percussion instruments in bolder and more imaginative ways. In his six String Quartets, generally acknowledged as the most important works in the genre since Beethoven's, the dense, intricate writing challenged the minds, ears and fingers of string players and set a new standard of formal complexity that opened the way for such works as the quartets of Elliott Carter. The Mikrokosmos, 153 short piano studies of increasing difficulty, is an indispensable introduction to 20th century compositional and pianistic techniques.

In honor of his 100th birthday, which fell last week, New York has become a yearlong BartOk festival, with many major works--including his only opera, the troubling, allegorical Bluebeard's Castle, in a concert version--being done several times over. The Boston Symphony performed the Concerto for Orchestra, the piece it premiered in 1944. The biggest American celebration, though, was in Detroit, where 52 guest artists recently joined Conductor Antal Dorati, 74, a BartOk pupil, for a twelve-day marathon.

Things are no less active in Europe. The Budapest Spring Festival in March was primarily devoted to BartOk. Many of the masterpieces will be heard in Vienna this summer, while West Germany this year is staging what is billed as the largest festival ever devoted to a modern composer--146 concerts in such cities as Duisburg, Cologne and Essen. In Italy, thanks to the efforts of a national committee, BartOk will resound from Sicily to the Swiss border.

A composer who has been popular in his lifetime often goes into eclipse after his death and never regains popularity. The history of music is full of examples: Joachim Raff, considered a great symphonist 100 years ago; Giacomo Meyerbeer, king of grand opera in the mid-19th century. The once esteemed Jean Sibelius, whose music fell into disfavor more than a decade before his death in 1957, is only now beginning to be reassessed.

BartOk's reputation, however, has grown steadily. The reason is not hard to find. Despite a sometimes highly dissonant and rhythmically spiky style, his music has a strong, direct appeal. As Musicologist Mosco Garner has observed: "Of the three musicians who dominated the musical scene during the first half of the 20th century--Stravinsky, Schoenberg and BartOk--it is the Hungarian master who, despite his intellectual control, remained the nearest to the instinctual, the irrational in music, and thus to the Dionysian spirit in art."

A 1927 caricature by Aline Fruhauf shows BartOk calmly playing the piano and producing a cacophony. The caption reads: "Bela BartOk, the mild-mannered revolutionist." Shy and reserved, he knew that his compositions were difficult, and was not hopeful about their appeal. "He never expected the public to like them and play them," recalled Publisher Ralph Hawkes of Boosey & Hawkes. "Apathy and even aversion to his music was to be found everywhere." Dorati told TIME Correspondent Christopher Redman last week: "Even in Hungary, I was sometimes whistled off the podium."

What made BartOk's music so unusual, so unsettling? Other composers--Stravinsky, Prokofiev --were rhythmically tricky; still others--Schoenberg, Webern--were even less conventionally melodic. With BartOk the difference lay in his rejection of the German musical models that had long been dominant. Visiting the dying composer in New York one day, Dorati recalls finding him engrossed in a copy of Edward Grieg's Piano Concerto. Asked why he was studying such a romantic score, BartOk said that Grieg was important because he had "cast off the German yoke."

Instead, BartOk looked to his own Eastern Europe for inspiration and found it in folk music. In 1905 he and fellow Composer Zoltan Kodaly began their pioneering work in ethnomusicology, traveling the back roads of Hungary armed only with an Edison phonograph and insatiable curiosity. They discovered the authentic tunes of the Magyars, largely based on modal orpentatonic (five-note) scales and sung to jagged, irregular rhythms, rather than the gypsy melodies used by Liszt, Brahms and even BartOk in such early works as the Op. 1 Rhapsody that had previously passed for Hungarian folk music. On later journeys, BartOk studied the music of the Rumanians, Bulgars, Slovaks and a group of Arabs in North Africa.

To BartOk, it was a revelation. Folk tunes, he wrote, are "the ideal starting point for a musical renaissance, and a composer in search of new ways cannot be led by a better master." BartOk did not adopt Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, which produced music without a basic key. "Folk tunes are always tonal," he noted. "Folk music of atonality is completely inconceivable. Consequently, music on twelve tones cannot be based on folk music." Unlike Schoenberg's more zealous disciples, BartOk was not dogmatic about his method of composing. "Far be it from me to maintain that to base his music on folk music is the only way to salvation for a composer in our days," he wrote. "But I wish that our opponents had an equally liberal opinion of the significance of folk music."

It is possible to make too much of neglected-genius aspects of Bartok's life. His music was not always unappreciated. True, Buebeard's Castle had been rejected by the jury in a Hungarian national opera competition in 1911, but the success of his ballet, The Wooden Prince, in 1917, awakened interest in the opera and his other works. By 1918 he was under contract to the prestigious Viennese publishing house of Universal Edition. (He left it in 1937 in protest against Nazism.) As early as 1924, English Critic Cecil Gray hailed BartOk as "one of the very few figures of the present time from whom much can still reasonably be expected." By the time he came to live in America in 1940, he had a substantial reputation.

But that recognition did not bring him wealth. In 1945, BartOk was living on about $1,400 in royalties and a $1,400 advance from Boosey & Hawkes, which had commissioned a seventh string quartet. "It has been said, doubtless in ignorance, that BartOk was penniless at the time of his death and that he never received support from his publishers," wrote Ralph Hawkes a few years after Bartok's death. "This I must deny emphatically. The war produced a financial crisis for all Europeans with international business and royalty interests." In any event, recalled Hawkes, the proud, aloof BartOk "was not a man to consider charity in any way as applicable in his case." When Boston Symphony Conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra, he had to bluff the composer into accepting some money right away, telling him it was legally necessary to pay half the commission in advance. Recalls Dorati: "There was nothing more difficult in this world than trying to help BartOk."

With the prescience of a genius, the composer knew his path would not be easy. But he did not doubt his eventual triumph. "We must attain to a height from where we can view things with sober calmness, with complete indifference," he wrote to his mother from Paris in 1905 when he was 24. "Sometimes for a while I feel I have reached the height. Then comes a terrible fall, then the struggle, the move upward starts again. And so it goes on incessantly. Still, there will be a time when I shall succeed in remaining on the top." That time has come."

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