At the Center of the World Piano Music by Bartók, Ustvolskaya, Schumann, and Schubert
Wo l f g a n g S t ä h r
Under an Open Sky: Béla Bartók Béla Bartók taught his piano students at the Budapest Music Academy to play Bach, but he certainly also taught them fear: with his strictness, his relentless perfectionism, and the rituals of disapproval reserved for the ill-prepared or less talented students (which included offended silence or leaving the classroom without comment or salutation). “So we in the class were assigned to Bartók to our terrible fright, because I cannot explain what it was like to go on the Monday afternoon—and he came in. He had unforgettable big eyes which looked at one in a most piercing way,” the conductor Georg Solti, who experienced Bartók’s piano lessons at the age of 14, remembered. “Of course I worshipped him together with the whole of the younger generation; we knew that one of the living geniuses of the 20th century was in that classroom. We knew that very well; but this was not a well-known fact either in Hungary or the outside world at that point.” Despite all his academic discipline, Bartók preferred to compose in the summer, in the open air, in the garden, surrounded by fresh air and an open sky: a “plein-air” music with an infinitely sharpened sensorium for the voices, sounds, tones, and noises of nature, of leaves, insects, birds, and frogs. He had an instinctive connection with “peasant music”—which Bartók had heard, recorded, and researched in Hungary, South-Eastern Europe, and North Africa—as well as a love for an elementary musicianship, imbued with the powerful sounds of drums, fifes, hurdy-gurdies, and bagpipes. How raw and wild, barbarian, even shockingly “uncultured” must contemporary listeners have found his piano pieces when they assaulted their cultivated ears! Especially the grotesque Scherzo or the percussively 13
