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    Bartók and His World
    Bartók and His World
    Bartók and His World
    Ebook547 pages11 hours

    Bartók and His World

    By Peter Laki

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    Béla Bartók, who died in New York fifty years ago this September, is one of the most frequently performed twentieth-century composers. He is also the subject of a rapidly growing critical and analytical literature. Bartók was born in Hungary and made his home there for all but his last five years, when he resided in the United States. As a result, many aspects of his life and work have been accessible only to readers of Hungarian. The main goal of this volume is to provide English-speaking audiences with new insights into the life and reception of this musician, especially in Hungary.


    Part I begins with an essay by Leon Botstein that places Bartók in a large historical and cultural context. László Somfai reports on the catalog of Bartók's works that is currently in progress. Peter Laki shows the extremes of the composer's reception in Hungary, while Tibor Tallián surveys the often mixed reviews from the American years. The essays of Carl Leafstedt and Vera Lampert deal with his librettists Béla Balázs and Melchior Lengyel respectively. David Schneider addresses the artistic relationship between Bartók and Stravinsky.


    Most of the letters and interviews in Part II concern Bartók's travels and emigration as they reflected on his personal life and artistic evolution. Part III presents early critical assessments of Bartók's work as well as literary and poetic responses to his music and personality.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 6, 2020
    ISBN9780691219424
    Bartók and His World

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      Bartók and His World - Peter Laki

      PART I

      ESSAYS

      Out of Hungary: Bartók, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music

      LEON BOTSTEIN

      In those circumstances where the evolutionary direction of Western music failed to be realized fully, as in some of the rural regions of southeastern Europe, tonal material could be used, until quite recently, without shame. One thinks of the magnificent art of Janacek: all its folkloristic tendencies clearly must be counted part of the most progressive dimension of European art music. The legitimation of such music from the periphery is based ultimately on the fact that a coherent and selective technical canon emerges. In opposition to a Blut und Boden [blood and soil] ideology, true extraterritorial music … possesses a power of alienation that makes it compatible with the avant-garde.

      —Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophic der neuen Musik

      There is great activity on the part of American composers, la Boulanger’s pupils, the imitators of Stravinsky, Hindemith and now Bartók as well.

      —Letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Rudolf Kolisch, 12 April 1949

      This Leverkiihn shares certain characteristics not only with Schoenberg but with Stravinsky and Bartók. Thomas Mann, in a grand manner, understood how to characterize all the maladies and difficulties of modern music and musical life … and put them on two feet in the person of Leverkiihn.

      —Hanns Eisler, Materialien zu einer Dialektik der Musik¹

      Bartók is a composer … whose style cannot be described … by means of standard generally accepted terms or isms. He propounded no systems as did Schoenberg and Hindemith, established no clear cut direction as did Stravinsky…. The direct influence of his music on younger composers … has been correspondingly small…. The evolution of his style, never so radical as Schoenberg’s, was accomplished … with no revolutionary breaks such as we find in the works of Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

      —Everett Helm, The Music of Béla Bartók

      Bartók and the Politics of Modernism

      Of all the leading figures in twentieth-century music—those whom Pierre Boulez in 1961 termed the Great Five of contemporary music, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Bartók—only Bartók, from the start of his career to this day, has remained closely identified with a single national group.² Despite revisionist research on the link between Stravinsky’s music and Russian folk sources, within the canon of twentieth-century music Stravinsky’s oeuvre retains its cosmopolitan aura, in part owing to the duration and significance of his career in France and America.³ Bartók as a Hungarian is the only one of the five to experience continued reception as being, in terms of his music and politics, from the periphery, as Adorno put it in 1949.

      Questions about the meaning of notions such as periphery and, by inference, the center in the context of aesthetic judgments— particularly for the twentieth century—have taken on singular importance during the last several decades. The claims of modernism—the progressive art and music of the first half of the century—have been under siege (especially as contemporary music has become ever more eclectic since the mid-1970s). Likewise, the critical and historical assessment exemplified by the four epigraphs at the head of this essay has been subjected to skeptical reflection.

      Terry Eagleton’s 1990 tract The Ideology of the Aesthetic is an example of the trends in current analysis. It seeks to strip the modern Western tradition of critical theorizing about art of its claims to authenticity and universality. The conceits of the philosophical and historical defense of modernism, including those of Adorno, are put forward as part of an ambitious project, dating from the eighteenth century, to create an ideology, at once insidious and subtle, designed to justify the hegemony of one class and group. A specious form of uni-versalism drawn from evidently exhausted discourses of reason, truth, freedom, and subjectivity was propounded, which helped to sustain a form of cultural domination.⁴

      In this revisionist context, long after the heyday of modernism when Schoenberg’s vision of the modern held sway, how might our understanding of Bartók and his music change? In our postmodern era, in the face of a powerful movement that celebrates the art from what otherwise might have been regarded the periphery (e.g., women, disadvantaged racial ethnic and national groups, and homosexuals), what is the significance of Bartók’s example, of his way of resolving the competing pressures to be decisively Hungarian and yet European and cosmopolitan?

      The fashions of aesthetic and cultural theory notwithstanding, a reconsideration of Bartók seems timely, if for no other reason than the reemergence of a pervasive cultural and political nationalism throughout Eastern Europe, including Hungary, in the postcommu-nist world of the 1990s. This essay argues that Bartók offers an important alternative model. Throughout his career, in his music he engaged the politics of national identity and attempted a novel representation of a distinctive ethnicity, which he connected to the great European tradition of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Bartók, in part because of the special character of Hungarian cultural politics at the fin de siècle, forged an alternative route for cultural nationalism and modernism and challenged the dominant ideological premises of music history in ways that were prescient.⁵

      If this view is right, then a rethinking of the standard critical assessment of Bartók’s music, particularly the early work, might be in order. Writing in 1992, the distinguished Bartók scholar Malcolm Gillies noted, "I personally do not hear in his output a truly great work—at least not one that brings him close to Schoenberg’s and Stravinsky’s achievement—until his pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, written in 1918–19, when he was in his late thirties."⁶ In a similar vein, the very late music from the 1940s still suffers from critical condescension, despite its popularity with audiences. With the exception of a few often-played works, Bartók’s music is less well known outside Hungary than is implied by his reputation. Two extremes in the Bartók catalog have been favored by non-Hungarian audiences and critics: those that seem most accessibly and charmingly Hungarian, and the least ethnic and most modernist-sounding works.

      The central dilemma within Eisler’s maladies and difficulties of modern music and musical life faced by Bartók’s generation was the clash between the apparently logical consequences of the historical evolution in musical styles and the tastes of the public. The progressive directions taken by composers in the name of modernism— those original aesthetic and technical innovations seemingly adequate to modern life—unleashed a sustained negative response on the part of the audience. Listeners remained attached to the vocabulary of late romanticism and turned instead to the aural blandishments of modern popular vocal and dance music, ranging from the operetta to jazz. The music that turned out to be most compatible with modern life and mass society as exemplified by the film, the radio, modern sports, commerce, and technology was composed, in terms of the ideology of progressive modernism, in a regressive manner. By the mid-twentieth century, art music was experiencing an extreme isolation from the public that set it apart not only from modernism in painting and literature but from the pattern of musical life in the nineteenth century.⁷

      Bartók’s strategy and ambition as a composer, teacher, and scholar were influenced decisively by the politics, society, and culture of fin-de-siècle Hungary. Conversely, Bartók never lost his desire to influence the course of politics and culture in his native land. The sources of his unique contribution to modernism lie in the special circumstances of the early twentieth-century Hungarian context.

      A comparable claim of contextual cultural influence can be adduced for Schoenberg (and, for that matter, Berg and Webern). The key reference point within the same large political unit, the Habsburg Empire, was quite different. Vienna was a center of German language and culture. In contrast to the case of Budapest, the international appropriation of the modernist achievements dating from the first half of the century emanating from Vienna (and also for Paris) in music and the visual arts was achieved with a significant loss of identification with any local national historical context of origin.

      Outside of music and painting the work of many of Bartók’s Hungarian contemporaries, particularly that of Gyórgy Lukács, Karl Mannheim, Arnold Hauser, and even Menyhért Lengyel, the Miraculous Mandarin librettist who went on to a successful career in Hollywood, also has ceased to betray its origins.⁸ But Bartók has remained steadfastly a Hungarian figure. The absence of any pretense to having transcended a local identity is partly responsible for the more limited acceptance of Bartók’s music and influence, vis-á-vis Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The illusion of universalism and nonparticularity put forward by Schoenberg about his own music remains with us.

      Of Boulez’s five twentieth-century masters, Bartók alone has continued to play, posthumously, a significant role as a symbol of politics and culture within his native country. When Bartók’s remains, which had been in New York since 1945, were reburied in Hungary in the summer of 1988, the then-disintegrating communist regime exploited the occasion. As Susan Gál has observed, the crass official and commercial celebration only proved to reproduce the many contradictory meanings that have been associated with Bartók within twentieth-century Hungarian politics. He was the nation’s greatest nationalist scholar and artist. Yet he was a true European, who had transcended any remnant of Hungarian provincialism. A Budapest newspaper, Magyar Nemzet, proclaimed in its headline on 8 July 1988 that Bartók showed the way that Hungarians can truly become Europeans.⁹ At the same time, Bartók represented a viable patriotism distinct from rabid reactionary nationalism. He had been an advocate of multinational harmony, particularly with respect to Romania (as a result of his researches into Romanian folk music). Even though the chauvinism inherent in the reburial celebration was unmistakable, Bartók was hailed as an antifascist, as a victim of Stalinism, and, last, as the uncompromising pure, universalist humanitarian.¹⁰

      The history of the posthumous Bartók reception suggests the extent to which modernist aesthetics in this century has continuously displayed a political subtext. The categorization and censorship of musical modernism by the Nazis in the 1930s as degenerate (and part of the presumed decadence of democratic Weimar Germany) lent the aesthetic claims of Schoenberg and his followers an unmistakable aura and moral edge lasting well into the 1950s. Radical modernists became at once crusaders and victims in the struggle against the central political evil of modern times.

      The cold war after the end of World War II secured the link between musical modernism and progressive politics. After 1945 Hitler and National Socialism were recast as part of a larger phenomenon in modern politics defined as totalitarianism.¹¹ From the perspective of the theory of totalitarianism, which experienced its heyday in the early 1950s, Stalinism and National Socialism were parallel historical phenomena. A pre—World War II left-right model could not be applied easily to the politics of musical aesthetics.

      The antimodernist agitation in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and the Zhdanov decrees of 1948 therefore enhanced the idea that the radical musical modernism of the Second Viennese School was the legitimate aesthetic strategy by which to challenge twentieth-century terror, oppression, and exploitation. Musical modernism could unmask false consciousness and express genuine freedom and individuality. Dmitry Shostakovich’s music, particularly the Seventh Symphony, caricatured by Bartók in the Concerto for Orchestra, had been popular in the 1940s in America as emblematic of the Soviet-American alliance against Hitler. But by the 1950s Helm could write that Bar-tók’s satirical use "may, in fact, constitute the only reason for remembering the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony in the future."¹²

      Adornos 1949 tract, Philosophy of New Music, offered the most sophisticated justification of a progressive theory of music history constructed around the work of Schoenberg. Tonality and neoroman-ticism were outdated and seductive falsifications of the realities of modernity. They were the logical tools of economic and political domination. A narcotic illusionism and an aesthetic inducement to collaboration with real evil in the world were fostered by Richard Strauss (and other comparable composers, such as Hans Pfitzner, Friedrich Klose, Siegmund von Hausegger, and Max von Schillings) and by the continued use of the rhetoric and clichés of late romanticism in the popular and commercial music favored by capitalist societies. Equally important and possibly more dangerous, owing to its deceptively progressive surface, was the false modernism and corrupt neoclassicism of Stravinsky and his followers.

      The overt hostility to the music of the Second Viennese School on the part of the bourgeois audience was taken as a partial validation. It was evidence of how the urban cosmopolitan audience maintained a misleading sense of art and culture. The educated middle-class audience of modern industrial capitalist societies resisted the liberating potential of true modern art.¹³ Negation (i.e., Adornos alienation) in audience response was a necessary stage in the process of restoring the ethical power of music.

      At the core of Adorno’s view was a reformulation of Schoenberg’s neo-Wagnerian conceits concerning his own place in history. Schoenberg’s compositional achievement was the logical and true twentieth-century response to the nineteenth century. Thomas Mann, with Adorno’s help, recognized in Schoenberg the perfect model for the modern artist in Dr. Faustus. Schoenberg had realized, in a normative manner, the motto inscribed on Joseph Maria Olbrich’s 1897 Secession building in Vienna: To each age its art; to art, its freedom.

      In this view, the arts were part of an objective evolutionary historical process. New dominant paradigms displaced obsolete predecessors. To write music in 1945 in a style that came of age in 1880 (e.g., as in the case of emulators of Richard Strauss) was clearly regressive. The use of tonality, as Adorno argued in 1949, was shameful. Historical logic legitimated the twelve-tone system and lent it its ethical as well as aesthetic prestige.

      Given the corruptions of modern life, art adequate to history could function as an instrument of critique. Modernism realized the immanent metaphysical power of art to sustain freedom against contemporary civilization. As Schoenberg wrote in 1951, he wished that he might serve as a counterblast to this world that is in so many respects giving itself up to amoral, success-ridden materialism; to a materialism in the face of which all the ethical preconditions of our art are steadily disappearing. Musicians in the modern world needed to be priests of art, approaching art in the same spirit of consecration as the priest approaches God’s altar.¹⁴ For Schoenberg the task of radical modernism was to help ensure that musicians of the old kind will exist so that music can make our souls function again as they must if mankind is to evolve any higher.¹⁵

      In Schoenberg’s view as well as Adorno’s the history of high art in music was, without contradiction, at once universal and a continuation of a Western European—but mostly German—tradition dating from the seventeenth century in which Beethoven was the pivotal figure. Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Hungary, and America were extraterritorial and peripheral. They suffered, as cultures, from what mid-twentieth-century students of the history of economic modernization termed backwardness.¹⁶ The ideology of twentieth-century musical modernism—for all its vocabulary of objectivity and universalism—was ultimately nationalist. The claims to legitimacy of the avant-garde associated with Schoenberg were extensions of late nineteenth-century German conceits regarding cultural readiness, the proper cultural context for the musical genius, and the German nation’s superiority.¹⁷

      In his effort to chart the future of music in the wake of the collapse of Nazism, Adorno was careful to identify Stravinsky and not Bartók as representing the false path. The reason was that Stravinsky, through the popularity of his works and the successful proselytizing by Nadia Boulanger among young composers, was the central rival of Schoenberg. Bartók, as Adorno had observed in 1925, was poorer and more sheltered. He revealed a self-limitation. He avoided an open struggle with problematic forms. Bartók had integrity but retreated into himself. Yet he belonged to the same generation as Schoenberg and Stravinsky and grew out of the same musical conditions. The central question facing that generation was how music could grope its way home to the core of the full truth on the fragile terrain of a romanticism detached from human existence.¹⁸

      To Adorno, the progressive element in Bartók seemed remarkable, despite shortcomings. Bartók’s limitations, of course, derived from his folkloristic tendencies, his sustained identification with folk music, particularly Eastern European materials. Provincialism both insulated Bartók and rendered him marginal. In his 1929 review of Bartók’s Third Quartet—which in Adorno’s view was the best of Bartók’s works to date—Adorno noted that Bartók does not move forward, like Schoenberg, with dialectical steadiness, does not advance by leaps around the unconstructable middle, like Stravinsky. Rather, Bartók’s music moves as a spiral in faithful repetition of the tasks of its origin … the only danger that threatens it is aberration. In Bartók the still glowing embers of Hungarian folklore were ignited by the blast of European musical consciousness.¹⁹ In 1965 Adorno explicitly distanced himself from too severe a criticism of Bartók. Indeed, in Adorno’s reviews from the 1920s, even when he was less taken with a single work, as with the Dance Suite, his admiration and enthusiasm for Bartók’s talent (consistently marked by condescension regarding the idea of using the exotic to achieve parity with European art) remain evident.²⁰

      Postwar Bartók critics who shared Adorno’s basic outlook avoided the embarrassingly Germanocentric notions of periphery and extraterritoriality. René Leibowitz set the non-German terms of the debate in 1947. Bartók’s failure was understood in terms of a compromise, which limited his importance in music history. In his last works Bartók failed to realize the immanent, objective, formalist possibilities evident in his own most progressive works.²¹ Independent of Schoen-berg, Bartók ventured close to realizing a valid modernist solution but then retreated.

      The notion of a compromise seemed plausible, given a normative account of the history of music, which chronicled the dissolution of tonality at the end of the nineteenth century, the subsequent emancipation of the dissonance, the abandonment of tonality, and the creation of new modes of pitch organization and forms deriving from novel pitch usages. When Leibowitz first used the term compromise with respect to Bartók in the immediate postwar years, the political overtones associated with his formalist argument were not far from the surface. Bartók’s retreat was in a regressive direction reminiscent of fascism.²²

      Bartók, Leibowitz argued, had reached his most progressive moment in the Fourth Quartet. But then, inexplicably—perhaps as a result of his final years in America—he faltered. The last works display, as Pierre Boulez, following Leibowitz’s lead, wrote in 1961, a smoothing down. Boulez regarded the Concerto for Orchestra as far from being good. He wrote, Often the pieces most applauded are the least good. Bartók failed to surmount the contradictions of an older world. In general his works were pathetic and lacking in unity, novelty, rigor, complexity, acuity, and dynamism when compared to the other great twentieth-century figures.²³ Adorno, like Leibowitz, described the late Bartók as exhibiting compromised structures in the purely musical sense.²⁴

      In the 1950s, therefore, the Bartók works that received the greatest critical attention were the supposedly most modern—the Third and Fourth Quartets, and the piano music from the 1920s. The early Bartók was ignored entirely. The alleged superficiality of the Concerto for Orchestra proved the authenticity and dialectical necessity of a post-tonal modernism. During the late 1950s the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies, supported by the Fromm Foundation, represented the avant-garde in America. Among its contributions was Allen Forte’s seminal essay on the Bartók Fourth Quartet entitled Bartók’s ‘Serial’ Composition. Forte concluded that the refined techniques demonstrated by every measure of the work testify to Bartók’s perspicacity. Independent of Schoenberg, Bartók found the valid solution to the aesthetic challenge of modernity.²⁵ As in the history of science, two men reached the same conclusion at the same moment of history. If Schoenberg was cast as Newton, Bartók, judging from the Fourth Quartet, might have earned to right to play Leibniz.²⁶

      Yet, to most postwar critics in the West, Bartók seemed to have, as Everett Helm put it, no system.²⁷ Contrary to Schoenberg’s assertion to his brother-in-law, Rudolf Kolisch (whose quartet premiered the Bartók Fifth Quartet in 1935 in Washington, D.C.), Bartók had few imitators in postwar America. In his Norton Lectures from 1951 entitled Music and the Imagination, Aaron Copland barely mentioned Bartók. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Webern dominated as models. Paul Hindemith was also a force, perhaps owing to his teaching at Yale. A few Bartók works, particularly the mature quartets, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), Contrasts (1938), and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), seemed significant.²⁸

      Bartók’s reception behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s took a somewhat different direction.²⁹ Using Thomas Mann’s fictional character Leverkiihn, Eisler argued that Bartók merited close inspection. For political reasons, Eisler had his doubts about the conceits of modernist composers in the 1940s and 1950s. It was not sufficient to use the audience rejection of modernist works, in a manner reminiscent of psychoanalysis, as evidence of discomfort with the truth. Bartók achieved, as Eisler put it, a synthesis between rigorous aesthetic criteria—including originality, modern musical means, and refined techniques—and the necessity to communicate with humanity—the audience—in one’s own time. Bartók, Eisler argued, overcame and transcended the influence of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Bartók’s works, precisely because they consistently derived their modernity and originality from folk-musical sources, became a central model for the future.³⁰

      Within socialist countries an alternative to Schoenberg’s austere modernism was sought. Likewise, the reactionary aspects of American commercial film music and popular music needed to be avoided. The official socialist music of the sort advocated in the Soviet Union offered limited possibilities. Bartók came to represent a distinct alternative, not only in stylistic terms, to the seemingly inflexible and restrictive logic of modern music history. In Bartók, populism and modernism merged effectively.

      Using the very same metaphor as Eisler—Thomas Mann’s Leverkühn—Bartók’s contemporary György Lukács, in his Aesthetik from the early 1960s, challenged Adorno and his imitators. Bartók’s music uniquely integrated the demands of modern aesthetic formalism with progressive politics. Citing the Cantata prof ana, Lukács wrote, The battle of the humane against the overwhelming powers of the antihumane, which—in the era of the evolution and rise of power of fascism—is the basic content of his objectivity … the antipower living in Bartók is exactly his connection with the people.³¹ For Lukács, Bartók’s modernism was not abstract (as Schoenberg’s might be viewed) but an appeal to the people and to nature. Precisely Bartók’s peripheral quality, his tie to folk music, rendered him the central model of musical modernism: adequate to its time, consistent with the inherent demands of music as an art, and communicative to its audience. He resisted the capitulation of the avant-garde in the twentieth century in the face of the spiritual and religious need of human beings—the ways in which people functioned in everyday life.³²

      Bartók overcame the paradox of the clash between the legitimate claims of modernist aesthetics and the audience. As if to anticipate the rage for musical minimalism nearly half a century later, in his 1943 Harvard Lectures Bartók himself noted, You will probably agree that a material reduced … to almost nothing represents a rather scanty approach in the creation of a musical work of value … it is not very interesting to have a theme played over and over again twelve times without change … reduction of means seems to be a rather poor device for satisfactory artistic communication. Not monotonous oversimplification or abstract theorizing (as in the case of Alois Haba) but rather the transformation of overlooked historical materials was the source of originality and modernity.³³ Because artistic communication as a critical and not merely affirmative exchange was essential, Bartók’s strategy was to reinterpret history, to bypass the nineteenth century and assert a premodern populist source for contemporary musical communication: rural folk music. The reinterpretation of history, the reformulation of national identity, and the critique of modernity (defined not in terms of industrial capitalism but rather as the domination of cosmopolitan urbanism) were roots of a new aesthetic.

      The ironic dimension of Bartók’s achievement was that the instrument on which his ethnomusicological work was dependent—the phonograph—was entirely novel and the product of the urban industrial culture he rejected. Bartók appreciated the phonograph as an essential part of modern musical culture. Part of his ability to understand, distill, reconfigure, and transform the folk materials he collected was dependent on the capacity to hear mechanically the same musical event over and over again.

      Bartók’s enthusiasm for the phonograph is metaphorical for the dualism to which he clung throughout his career. He placed an idealized preindustrial notion of nature against a conception of modernity understood as artificial, inauthentic, and urban. Bartók sought a synthesis between the self-consciously radical aspirations of aesthetic modernism and a sentimental preindustrial construct of the world and the humane, embodied by the simple Hungarian peasant, untainted by the ravages of modern history.³⁴

      From his earliest years Bartók, by virtue of his membership in a peripheral nation—not unlike his contemporary Karol Szymanowski —was forced to confront the assumption that German and French civilizations were superior in art precisely because they were more advanced economically and technologically. What lent the Western European artistic movements particular prestige in turn-of-the-century Hungary and Poland was that they came from more modern societies, measured in terms of literacy rates and quality of diet, transportation, lighting, sanitation, medical care, and commerce. Preference for Western art and culture among the educated classes of Budapest and Warsaw mirrored a contempt for the local residues of backwardness and an admiration for a foreign but more civilized way of life.

      The artistic models of Bartók’s youth were German—primarily Brahms and Wagner—as communicated by their regional disciples, Hans Koessler and Odon von Mihalovich. Bartók’s first independent object of enthusiasm was Richard Strauss. Later Kodaly and Bartók found in Debussy a route to an emancipation from German cultural hegemony, an objective as compelling in terms of politics as it was in music. Ultimately Bartók and Kodaly sought ways around German and French examples and the ideological baggage of objective merit that came with musical models from the West.

      Likewise, Szymanowski—who came from Poland, a distinctly Francophile culture when compared to Hungary—realized that exchanging one Western European model, even if it was French, for another was not sufficient. For Bartók, Strauss and Debussy became way stations with dual musical and political significance. Both Bartók and Szymanowski sought to develop a musical construct of national identity that displayed a serious resistance to the Western European monopoly on cultural superiority.

      In the 1920s these two composers, independently, became interested in Eastern, so-called oriental sources. They flirted with distancing themselves from their well-educated fellow countrymen who saw in the culture of the West the clearest path to parity with France and Germany. The representation of one’s own culture as not only indebted to the West but partly Eastern and therefore distinctive and original appeared historically plausible. In terms of Western European critical discourse, assertion of an autonomous oriental dimension in local and national folk culture helped to circumvent the trivialization of the Polish and Hungarian as merely exotic or alluringly primitive.³⁵

      It is easy to underestimate the legacy of the camouflage of bias evident in the criteria applied in the historical and critical judgment of modernism and twentieth-century music. Adolf Weissmann, the distinguished Berlin critic, writing in 1928 defined Bartók’s place in modern music as tragic. A great talent (who stands between Stravinsky and Schoenberg), Bartók had drifted away—as evidenced by the works written after the Dance Suite—from idealism, purity, and the spiritual in music. The effort to elevate the folkloric to a higher humanism had led Bartók to embrace the modern as mechanistic; to exploit the exotic, to deny the piano’s human qualities, and to empty music of its soul.³⁶

      Malcolm Gillies’s 1992 analysis of Bartók’s borrowings from other composers—his shifting models of influence, from Strauss in the early years to Reger, Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Szymanowski— sustains this deceptively normative tradition of analysis. Gillies’s discussion of originality and stylistic security (like Weissmann’s account of purity and spirituality in music) does not take into account the historically contingent differences between the ambitions of Bartók (and, curiously, Szymanowski) on the one hand and contemporary composers in France and Germany on the other.³⁷ The task facing composers in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century involved the seemingly contradictory challenge of writing music that was on a par with the dominant cultures and yet representative, in a novel and not subordinate manner, of national identity. National representation vis-á-vis a dominant neighboring foreign culture and the task of redefinition, through musical culture, of collective identity within a nation— given the near-monopoly on the rhetoric of historical centrality and aesthetic objectivity by the German tradition—did not trouble Strauss, Schoenberg, or Reger. In the cases of Debussy and Stravinsky the issue of German music as seen against French and Russian was, for obvious historical and political reasons, more a matter of rivalry than one of subordination.

      From the start, Bartók undertook a synthetic approach. Stylistic appropriation facilitated national assertion through a modern style that could be respected by dominant foreign cultures. The search for an adequate stylistic medium and language in the wake of the late romanticism of the fin de siècle became more than the quest for individual artistic originality. The seemingly neutral terminology about stylistic integrity, influence, and insecurity and its attendant lan-guage of critical condescension and disapproval ([Bartók] was ever looking over his shoulder, always susceptible to the latest trends and to the influence of novel ideas he observed in the work of others, whether alive or dead³⁸) demands reconsideration.

      At stake for Bartók was not merely greatness in some amorphous universalist aestheticized context. The metaphor of looking over one’s shoulder is indeed apt for the Hungarian nationalist in search of a leading place in European culture as a Hungarian. Looking over one’s shoulder, historically considered, may reveal genius and not insecurity or weakness. As Bartók observed relatively early in his career, in 1911, should a new generation of Hungarian composers achieve a synthesis between individuality and a common style under the influence of genuine Hungarian folk music, that style will show also the influence of twentieth-century music. Success, using the distinctly Hungarian, in the work of art, would carry with it a fundamental assertion—from the periphery of Europe against its center—of cultural parity. Ironically, the root of this parity stemmed from the backwardness of the periphery in terms of modernization.

      With uncanny prescience, Bartók anticipated the prejudices inherent in the critical vocabulary of Western European observers: Those who have a faulty ear will call such influence as being the Strauss, Reger, or Debussy type, for they will not be able to sense the subtle nuances.³⁹ About the rural Hungarian music to which he turned after 1905, Bartók wrote that it attains an unsurpassable degree of perfection and beauty to be found nowhere else except in the great works of the classics.⁴⁰ His ambition was to use the folk primitive to create great modernist works that, by rivaling the classics of the West, delivered a blow to the belief that the cities, industries, and culture of the West were superior to the unique source of modern Hungarian culture: the endangered way of life of rural Hungary.

      The Roots of Bartók’s Modernism: Politics and Literature in Budapest, 1899-1911

      All Bartók’s biographers agree that the young Bartók did not take well to Budapest when he arrived there to study at the Conservatory in 1899. From the start, he felt repelled by the culture of the city, particularly its elite, which was made up of the cosmopolitan and Magyarized Jewish population, the German community, and the urbanized Hungarian gentry and middle class. Fin-de-siecle Budapest was dramatically different from the smaller environments of Bartók’s childhood. The composer’s fragile and retiring personality was ill-suited to city life. Judit Frigyesi has brought to light evidence of extensive prejudice on the part of the young Bartók toward the Jewish community of Budapest.⁴¹ Her explanation of his anti-Semitism rests in part on a contrast between the role of the Jews in Pozsony (Press-burg) and in Budapest. Bartók presumably never encountered the sort of Magyarized assimilated Jew that predominated in Budapest and played a decisive role in the city’s cultural and therefore musical life. Pozsony’s Jews were, by comparison, more segregated and traditional.

      The level and extent of Jewish assimilation and influence in Budapest at the turn of the century would have been shocking to any Hungarian for whom the Jewish question was already an issue, which was the case for most Hungarians of Bartók’s generation. Bartók’s prejudice—even its virulence—was unexceptional and had little to do with the contrast between Pozsony and Budapest. Pozsony (with a population in 1900 of approximately 70,000, half of whom were German-speaking and 7,000 of whom were Jews) had a much more influential middle-class Jewish population than Frigyesi suggests.⁴²

      The key difference was that in Budapest (with a population of approximately 750,000 in 1900, of whom slightly more than 100,000 spoke German, and 170,000 were Jews) the Jewish population had grown dramatically since 1870, when Jews accounted for 17 percent of the population. By 1920 they constituted nearly one-quarter of the population and most likely, judging from social class distributions, around half the active urban intelligentsia.⁴³ In contrast to Budapest Jews, the assimilated Jews of Pozsony retained more of an allegiance to German culture and were not as Magyarized. Pozsony (i.e., Bratislava), which was also one-third Slovak, was linked to Vienna rather than to Budapest, as Bartók’s mother realized when she was searching for a conservatory for Bela.⁴⁴

      In Budapest the concert audience and the patrons of art and literature could be seen as dominated by Jews. Insofar as Budapest gained in influence in Hungarian politics, questions about the role of the Jews were not far behind.⁴⁵ Many of Bartók’s friends, patrons, and teachers—including Emma Gruber, Istvan Thornan, and David Popper—were Jewish by birth. But as Frigyesi has pointed out, the key factor for Bartók was that the Budapest Jews considered themselves legitimate bearers of modern Hungarian nationalism. However, from the point of view of the Hungarian countryside, the assimilation of Jews and their acceptance within late nineteenth-century Hungarian urban culture represented a dangerous corruption of national identity by foreign cosmopolitan elements. A distortion of the true Hungarian character, carrying with it the ills of modernization and urbanization, could be ascribed to the undue influence of Jews.⁴⁶ Not only were Jews, no matter how Magyarized, not real Hungarians; they represented a falsification of cultural identity.

      The focus of the young Bartók’s resentment in his first years in Budapest was not by any means limited to the Jews. Bartók held the Hungarian gentry responsible for the sorry state of Hungarian affairs. His political critique dating from the fin de siècle had a psychological as well as an ideological dimension. He harbored—as did Beethoven—a mix of ambivalence, resentment, and illusion regarding his own status with respect to the aristocracy.⁴⁷ At the same time, he recognized the pitfalls and futility of maintaining any pretense of membership in the gentry class. Rather, his position was that gentry had betrayed the Hungarian nation by exploiting and abandoning its people: the peasants.⁴⁸ The true roots of Hungary were to be found in the rural life. The enemies of the true Hungarian spirit seemed to have taken refuge in the cities and urban culture.

      The rapid development of Budapest and Hungarian nobles’ support of its growth were linked to the political accommodation with the Habsburg Empire after the Compromise of 1867. The gentry’s economic alliance with Jews and its tolerance of them as Hungarians ran parallel with a self-interested acceptance of Hungary’s subordinate status relative to Vienna and, ironically, the too-limited place assigned to the Hungarian language in the affairs of the Empire.⁴⁹

      Bartók’s idealized view of the peasant and rural Hungarian culture was in part motivated by a need to compensate for the feelings of insecurity he felt when he arrived in Budapest. As part of a Hungarian

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