THE WAR AND PEACE OF THE WORLDS

BARTÓK AND STRAVINSKY THROUGH EACH OTHER’S EYES

There are truths we accept without a second thought. Among lovers of 20th century classical music, the appearance of the names of Bartók and Stravinsky side by side on a concert programme or recording is no cause for uproar. But what would the two giants themselves have made of it? B

y Tamás Jászay

The question is of course rhetorical, and many perhaps know the answer only too well, for while Béla Bartók was long a devoted follower of Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary music, the Russian-born composer spoke of his Hungarian contemporary with cold detachment at best. (We should regard his remark on hearing of Bartók’s death that he never really liked his music as one that was hastily and somewhat unfortunately expressed.)

For his part, Bartók wrote in the daily Brassói Lapok in 1924: ‘In my view, among composers living abroad today, only two are geniuses, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. I am closer to Stravinsky, if we think of The Rite of Spring, which I believe to be the most colossal musical opus of the last thirty years.’ At the time they had already met in person, though in Parisian music circles Stravinsky initially took Bartók for a violinist. The Hungarian composer told his wife of their acquaintance matter-of-factly: ‘Not exactly modest – but an interesting person who I think cuts and belittles with his words just as he does with his music…’

A Meeting Of Titans

The emerging parallel between the two men nevertheless holds its own in a historical context. A critic in the periodical Pester Lloyd in 1917 identified Bartók’s place for readers with the following: ‘His music, comprehensible even to the lay listener, could best be charac terised by kinship to the music of Igor Stravinsky, whose works have already been performed here on several occasions. This kinship lies partly in the fertilisation of both men’s art by the new French [composers], and partly in their deep roots in folk song.’

And this is where the problems begin, as while Bartók proudly claimed folk song and music as a great source of inspiration throughout his life, Stravinsky – having left Russia – viewed any enthusiasm for the genre with incomprehension. In a series of conversations with Robert Craft, he said of Bartók: ‘I never could share his lifelong gusto for his native folklore. This devotion was certainly real and touching, but I couldn’t help regretting it in the great musician.’

Naturally, while it is not our intention to declare a winner between two rival equals, one must perceive behind this summary judgement from 1959 the backdrop of the Cold War, at the time already a decade and a half in progress. As a Russian émigré living in America, Stravinsky put his faith not in national values, but in the universality of twelve-tone technique, which did not lend itself to any political interpretation.

Folk Music On The Ballet Stage

From the very beginning, however, Stravinsky was greatly indebted to Russian folklore: we need only think of the wonderful music he wrote for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. His method of blending folk motifs with modernism served as a model for many, Bartók among them. We know the Hungarian composer closely followed the music of many nations and thus would have been certain that Stravinsky drew on folk sources in his music and that this was precisely what lent authenticity to the Russian composer’s modernism.

This notion recurs across decades in Bartók’s letters and interviews, of which we cite only a few here. In 1920, he writes of Stravinsky and Zoltán Kodály: ‘[T]he work of both springs so much from the pure folk music of their homeland that it is almost its apotheosis.’ In 1931, writing of Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla, he notes that although neither collected peasant music, they most likely studied it live as its imprint can be heard so vividly in their works.

In 1943 – four years after a similar commission for Stravinsky – Bartók gave a series of lectures at Harvard where he highlighted the folk motifs in ballet music, particularly in The Rite of Spring. And though Stravinsky denied it until his death, today it is widely acknowledged that certain elements of this work truly derive from collections of Russian folk music.

repulsive. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, it gave him defining impulses and some believe that only Kodály exerted a greater influence.

Thanks to Bartók’s first wife, Márta Ziegler, we know that in 1918 he constantly carried around the score for The Rite of Spring, attempting – unsuccessfully – to bring it to the intention of Miklós Bánffy, the intendant of the Hungarian Royal Opera House. In 1920, Bartók was still pronouncing enthusiastically on the few Stravinsky works known to him, although within a few months this had already given way to disappointment: ‘I had expected something of true grandness, of real development; and I am truly very sad for not finding at all what I imagined.’ By 1928, Bartók was characterising Stravinsky as one who had suddenly turned his back on tradition, while Kodály’s method of summarising previous knowledge was far more to his liking.

Together And Apart

A key event in this contradictory, multifaceted relationship was a concert in Budapest on 15 March 1926 that featured not only performances of Stravinsky’s works, but the master himself as piano soloist – as if provoking Bartók on his home turf. The latter still gave a positive assessment of the concert, observing that the coldness felt on first reading evaporated in the concert hall. A letter from his second wife, Ditta Pásztory to her mother gives an explanation, however, when she writes that if Bartók had produced such ‘machine music’ they could have nothing more to do with each other.

In the arts just as in science, many hesitate to ask the question ‘what if’. In closing, however, let us indulge in speculation. In 1945, Nathaniel Shilkret invited the leading composers of the day to collaborate on a seven-movement work based on the biblical Book of Genesis. Apart from Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Milhaud, the original roster featured Bartók, but the request came too late. Could the two geniuses have reconciled their differences in the Genesis Suite?

31 March | 7.30pm

Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

Semyon Bychkov And The Czech Philharmonic

The opening concert of the Bartók Spring

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin – suite

Attraction And Repulsion

In an extensive study, Bartók scholar David Schneider analyses in detail the Hungarian composer’s highly complex relationship with Stravinsky. In his view, throughout his career as a whole Bartók found the Russian composer’s music at once irresistible and

Thierry Escaich: Études symphoniques –Hungarian premiere

Stravinsky: Petrushka (1946 revised version)

Featuring: Seong-Jin Cho – piano, Czech Philharmonic

Conductor: Semyon Bychkov