Bartok, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality / Edition 1

by David E. Schneider

Overview

It is well known that Béla Bartók had an extraordinary ability to synthesize Western art music with the folk music of Eastern Europe. What this rich and beautifully written study makes clear is that, contrary to much prevailing thought about the great twentieth-century Hungarian composer, Bartók was also strongly influenced by the art-music traditions of his native country. Drawing from a wide array of material including contemporary reviews and little known Hungarian documents, David Schneider presents a new approach to Bartók that acknowledges the composer’s debt to a variety of Hungarian music traditions as well as to influential contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky. Putting representative works from each decade beginning with Bartók’s graduation from the Music Academy in 1903 until his departure for the United States in 1940 under critical lens, Schneider reads the composer’s artistic output as both a continuation and a profound transformation of the very national tradition he repeatedly rejected in public. By clarifying why Bartók felt compelled to obscure his ties to the past and by illuminating what that past actually was, Schneider dispels myths about Bartók’s relationship to nineteenth-century traditions and at the same time provides a new perspective on the relationship between nationalism and modernism in early-twentieth century music.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520245037
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/06/2006
Series:	California Studies in 20th-Century Music , #5
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	319
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

David E. Schneider is Associate Professor and Chair of Music at Amherst College.

Read an Excerpt

Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition

Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality

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By David E. Schneider

University of California Press

Copyright © 2006

The Regents of the University of California

All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-520-24503-2

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Chapter One

Tradition Rejected

Bartók's Polemics and the Nineteenth-Century
Hungarian Musical Inheritance

Naturally a composer will be most influenced by the music he
hears the most-the music of his home.
BARTÓK, 1921

Attempting to answer the question "What is Hungarian?" has been a preoccupation
of educated Hungarians since the rise of national consciousness
in the early nineteenth century. The question "What is Hungarian in
music?" that lies behind so many of Bartók's essays is itself part of a
national debate that had been going on for decades before his compositions
and folk-music research redefined and intensified it. Despite the rigidity of
some who have striven to define it, Hungarianness (magyarság) has never
been a static concept. On one level Bartók, like all Hungarian composers,
redefined it with every piece he wrote. Certain generalizations can be made,
however, in relation to various historical contexts. In the decade before the
First World War, magyarság was most often defined in opposition to
Austria, the dominant partner in theAustro-Hungarian monarchy. After
1918, when Hungary gained its independence but lost two-thirds of its territory
to its neighbors, magyarság was often associated with a desire to
regain the "glories" of Hungary's imperial past. Another, interrelated set of
meanings emerged in the 1930s in connection with the rising influence of
National Socialist Germany.

In this third phase, historian Gyula Szekfú (1883-1955) brought the
question of Hungarian identity to the front lines of scholarly debate by
asking a group of Hungary's leading intellectuals to address it for each of
their respective fields. The result was a collection of essays published in
1939 as Mi a magyar? (What Is Hungarian?). The collection contained an
extensive article entitled "Magyarság a zenében" (Hungarianness in Music)
by Bartók's closest friend and colleague, the composer and folklorist Zoltán
Kodály (1882-1967). His inclusion in Szekfú's volume is testimony to the
centrality of music in the discourse about Hungarian identity. Kodály's
essay, like so many of his and Bartók's writings, detached musical magyarság
from the set of musical topics that had come to symbolize the nation
with the rise of nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Because Hungarian folk music, like the Finno-Ugric Hungarian language,
was distinct from the music of its Indo-European neighbors, Kodály argued
that it should replace the nineteenth-century Hungarian style as the building
block of a national musical culture. Folk music, Kodály believed, could
reinforce an image of the nation proud to set itself apart from the rest of
Europe because of its Asiatic roots. Emphasizing Hungary's unique position
between East and West, he brought his essay to a close with a pair of leading
questions: "One of our hands holds the hand of the Nogay-Tartars, the
Votyaks and Cheremiss, the other that of Bach and Palestrina. Can we bring
these two distant worlds together? Can we be not only a ferryboat shuttling
between the cultures of Europe and Asia, but a bridge-perhaps even dry
ground that is an integral part of both?" The image of Hungary as a synthesizer
of Eastern traditions and Western high culture bespeaks an inclusive,
liberal vision of the nation. In this formulation, Hungarian music is
defined by its openness to both the "primitivism" of its own past and the
"refinement" of European high culture. But because what Kodály accepted
as Hungary's past was confined to the country's folk music, his version of
magyarság in music also represented a modernist, neonationalist stance
that secured its authenticity by authenticating its national sources.

The idea of synthesizing foreign and native traditions into a national
style was hardly Bartók's or Kodály's invention. It was the usual presumption
of nationalist composers. To mention only one example, in the midnineteenth
century Glinka expressed a Russian national ideal by mixing and
matching the best of two Western European traditions-Italian bel canto
melody and German contrapuntal technique-with Russian folk music.
Bartók and Kodály's approach, like Glinka's, stemmed in part from a sense
of cultural inferiority, but turned the relative lack of a distinctively native
high culture into a source of opportunity and pride. In some respects their
technique was not new in Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Mixing of foreign and native musical styles was just what nationally
minded Hungarian composers had practiced throughout the nineteenth century.
Bartók and Kodály's image of synthesis, however, implied more. In
Hungary, East and West were not just international destinations, but ciphers
for the two disparate worlds within Hungary's own borders: the Hungarian
village and the Hungarian city.

The suggestion of a Hungarian musical unification of the "East" (rural
culture) with the "West" (urban culture) touched a raw political nerve and
thereby engaged Bartók and Kodály in a domestic social debate. The combination
of the culture of peasants and that of the bourgeoisie was, at least
through the first several decades of the twentieth century, anathema to the
majority of educated Hungarians. In Hungarian the word "peasant"
(paraszt, from the Slavic prost, i.e., simpleton) was no mere neutral descriptive
term. It was an insult, in historian Andrew Janos's words, "a term of disparagement
conveying a sense of callous simplicity that made [it] nearly
unfit for use in polite society."

Another layer of rural society, the landowners known as the gentry or
petty nobility, even more stridently opposed the idea that the peasantry
held something of cultural value in their music. Their opposition derived
from their specific social status. Throughout the nineteenth century, increasing
numbers of the gentry had fallen victim to the dual blows dealt by
the inefficient, out-of-date means of agricultural production on their small
estates and their own sense that they were above the lowly work of capitalist
enterprise. They found some material recompense for the steady decline
in their economic status by entering the civil service. More significantly for
music history, they tended to compensate for their loss of political power by
claiming themselves as the sole proprietors of the ancient Hungarian
national spirit. Their favored music was the fare typically played in cafés and
country inns by so-called Gypsy ensembles. To suggest to members of this
class that the music of the peasants-the people over whom the gentry
wielded their bureaucratic power most vindictively-held the key to
authentic Hungarian identity was at least as unsettling for its social as for
its artistic implications.

And yet that was precisely what Bartók and Kodály claimed in the spirit
of their modernist aesthetics. It was the gentry's popular musical culture,
which was part of both men's backgrounds, that these composers tried to
write out of their musical heritage. For in their judgment, that music was at
once more artificial than the traditional music of the peasants, and less artful
than art music.

Discovery and Mission

A crucial catalyst for Bartók's rejection of the musical style long regarded as
representative of the spirit of the nation was his discovery of what he would
come to call "old-style" Hungarian folk songs during his first folk-song collecting
expedition to Transylvania in summer 1907. The "old-style"
melodies bore little resemblance to the Hungarian style as it had been previously
conceived, and the strangeness of these songs would become one of
the strongest inspirations for Bartók's modernist style. Precisely because
these were not tunes with which he had grown up, they triggered his musical
imagination. Integrating the characteristics of these "old-style" melodies
and of other folk repertoires-"new-style" songs, instrumental music, the
peasant music of non-Hungarians-into a modern musical style was the
artistic project that sustained Bartók for the rest of his life.

A parallel lifelong mission was winning for peasant music due recognition
as a Hungarian national treasure. It bore fruit in articles, lectures, and
longer studies-some aimed at specialists, some at the general public-in
which Bartók sought to articulate the differences between Hungarian peasant
music, especially the "old-style" pentatonic folk songs that he believed
to have been brought to the Carpathian Basin a thousand years before by
the Asiatic Magyar tribes, and the newer elements that had come to define
the Hungarian style in the popular and concert music of the late-eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.

In his writings intended for the general public, Bartók often exaggerated
the difference between peasant music (not all of which was ancient)
and more popular Hungarian musical traditions. Although he made more
nuanced analyses of the interrelationships between various types of peasant
music and Hungarian popular music in several of his scholarly writings,
the stark distinctions Bartók drew in his more popular essays have
rarely been questioned. The sources of his own music have been interpreted
along similarly simplified lines. Despite Bartók's professed rejection
of Hungarian music that was based on the popular notions of the
Hungarian style, the composer's own synthesis of folk music and contemporary
art music was not as different from earlier attempts to create a
national style as he implied. The most characteristic categories of the nineteenth-
century Hungarian music-the instrumental dance music known
as verbunkos and the sentimental popular song called magyar nóta, both
disseminated by Gypsy bands and hence called "Gypsy music"-were not
unrelated to folk traditions. Their incorporation into national art music
stemmed initially from the same aspirations as Bartók's. Nor was the composer's
own music completely devoid of traditionally accepted elements of
the Hungarian style. To assess Bartók's position in the history of the creation
of a specifically Hungarian art music we need first to investigate the
roots of the nineteenth-century Hungarian style and his reasons for
rejecting it.

The Polemics of a Convert

Typical of Bartók's polemical writings for nonspecialists was a 1911 essay
entitled "A magyar zenéról" (On Hungarian Music). Written some seven
years after he had made his first notation of a Hungarian peasant song, but
only four years since he had recognized pentatonicism as a crucial structural
element of "old-style" melodies, Bartók's essay included a scathing assessment
of all previous attempts to create a Hungarian style in music. Writing
with a convert's zeal, he effectively removed himself from the traditional
lineage of Hungarian music. This view was quickly accepted as an accurate
description of Bartók's unique place in Hungarian music history and has
only recently come under scholarly scrutiny. As a prelude to an overdue
critique, his words are worth quoting at some length:

According to the natural order of things, practice comes before theory. We see
the opposite with Hungarian national music: scientific works were already
published years ago dealing with the characteristic features of Hungarian
music, an attempt to define something nonexistent at the time.

[Until a few years ago] there was no valuable, distinctive, and characteristically
Hungarian art music. The music of Bihari, Lavotta, and a few foreigners-Csermák,
Rózsavölgyi, Pecsenyánszki, etc.-that is to say, nothing but
more or less dilettante musicians all under the influence of Gypsy music and
unworthy of the admiration of people of good taste, cannot be taken as a basis
[for Hungarian art music]. Only dilettante musicologists can discuss these
dilettante works in a serious tone of voice. Moreover, all of this is not even
national music, because it is surely not Hungarian but Gypsy. That is, its
characteristics are the melodic distortions of a foreign people, of the Gypsies.

On the other hand, the endeavors of our serious-minded musicians were
also sterile, because, while several of them servilely imitated foreign styles,
others, for instance, Ferenc Erkel, tried to solve the task by wedging one or
two Gypsy-style tunes or csárdás between musical items of Italian character.
The mixture of such heterogeneous elements does not produce a Hungarian
style, merely a conglomerate lacking any style.

The haughty, at times xenophobic tone of Bartók's essay is reminiscent of
his letters around the time of his symphonic poem Kossuth (1903). Such
nationalist zeal was not, however, typical of Auróra (Dawn), the journal of
progressive art and literature in which "On Hungarian Music" appeared.
Auróra, which ceased publication in 1912 after seventeen slim issues, had
caught the notice of Budapest's intelligentsia for its high-brow modern literary
offerings and coverage of contemporary art. The magazine covered
subjects ranging from Hungarian folk art to the latest artistic trends in
Western Europe, including the Paris seasons of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,
and the redesigning of Budapest's public spaces on the model of other great
European cities. As its title implies, the goal of the magazine seems to have
been to herald the dawn of a new age in Hungarian art and culture. The
scope of its coverage suggested that the renovation of Hungarian high art
depended both on staying up to date with the latest European trends and on
awareness of Hungarian peasant culture. Thus, despite the unusual stridency
of Bartók's tone, his call for the renewal of Hungarian music through
folk music well fit Auróra's implicit mission. Reprinted thirteen times in
seven languages, Bartók's essay, or rather its rhetoric, has encouraged the
understanding of Hungarian music in terms of categorical oppositions:
Gypsies versus Hungarians (read: peasants); nineteenth- versus twentieth-century
music (i.e., Bartók's and Kodály's compositions); amateur versus
professional musicians; and original composers versus epigones. Yet as soon
as one confronts the messy world of actual musical practice, Bartók's categories
begin to unravel.

Distinctively Hungarian music has existed in a continuous tradition since
the end of the eighteenth century. Although in "On Hungarian Music" he
dismissed all claims to authenticity in Hungarian art music previous to his
own, in fact the very nationalism that inspired Bartók to reject his predecessors
was a continuation of the fervor of nineteenth-century Hungarian
nationalism. Even the music that represented this earlier Romantic nationalism,
although not based on the same self-conscious and scientifically rigorous
relationship to folk music that he began advocating around 1906, nevertheless
relied on a set of conventions that had roots in folk music. This
common heritage of folk music explains why a number of melodic and
accompanimental patterns typical of the Hungarian style can be found both
in Bartók's music and in that of his Hungarian predecessors, who were
unaware of peasant music. Bartók's assertion of the superiority of his and
Kodály's approach to Hungarian national music was based on an unprecedented
knowledge of Hungarian folk music, but the categorical distinctions
he made in his article "On Hungarian Music" are not scientific. Rather,
they seem to be the fruit of frustration, likely fueled by criticism Bartók had
received both for his modernist style and for his radical assertion that only
music informed by first-hand experience with folk culture deserved to be
accepted as representative of the Hungarian nation. An effective piece of
journalism given the atmosphere of jingoistic nationalism in Hungary at
the time, "On Hungarian Music" was a polemic undeserving of credence on
a par with Bartók's more scholarly work.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition
by David E. Schneider
Copyright © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California.
Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Tradition Rejected: Bartók’s Polemics and the Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Musical Inheritance
2. Tradition Maintained: Nationalism, Verbunkos, Kossuth, and the Rhapsody, Op. 1
3. Tradition Transformed: “The Night’s Music” and the Pastoral Roots of a Modern Style
4. Tradition Challenged: Confronting Stravinsky
5. Tradition Transcribed: The Rhapsody for Violin No. 1, the Politics of Folk-Music Research, and the Artifice of Authenticity
6. Tradition Restored: The Violin Concerto, Verbunkos, and Hungary on the Eve of World War II

Notes
Bibliography
Index