Grove Music Online

Bartók, Béla
Malcolm Gillies

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40686
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

(b Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary [now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania],

March 25, 1881; d New York, Sept 26, 1945). Hungarian composer,
ethnomusicologist and pianist. Although he earned his living mainly
from teaching and playing the piano and was a relentless collector
and analyst of folk music, Bartók is recognized today principally as a
composer. His mature works were, however, highly influenced by his
ethnomusicological studies, particularly those of Hungarian,
Romanian and Slovak peasant musics. Throughout his life he was
also receptive to a wide variety of Western musical influences, both
contemporary (notably Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg) and
historic; he acknowledged a change from a more Beethovenian to a
more Bachian aesthetic stance in his works from 1926 onwards. He
is now considered, along with Liszt, to be his country’s greatest
composer, and, with Kodály and Dohnányi, a founding figure of 20th-
century Hungarian musical culture.

Page 1 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Béla Bartók portrait

Budapest Bartók Achives

1. 1881–1903.

At the time of Bartók’s birth, Nagyszentmiklós was part of the

northern end of the ethnically diverse southern Hungarian province
of Torontál. There, his father, also Béla Bartók (1855–88), was
headmaster of an agricultural school; his mother, Paula Voit (1857–
1939), was a teacher. Both parents were keen amateur musicians,
and early encouraged the young Béla’s musical development with

Page 2 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 dance pieces, and then with drumming. By the age of four he was
able to play some 40 songs on the piano, and at five he started piano
lessons with his mother. Impressions of a summer visit to Radegund,
Austria, in 1887 led to one of his first compositions, Radegundi
visszhang (‘Echo of Radegund’, 1891). At the age of seven Bartók
was tested as having perfect pitch.

The earlier years of Bartók’s schooling were unsettled. Not only was
he very shy, the supposed result of confinement because of a
persistent rash during his first five years, but the premature death of
his father in 1888 also caused the family to move frequently in the
following six years. Paula Bartók sought teaching positions in
provincial towns which were suitably equipped for the broader
education of her son and daughter, Elza (1885–1955). A move to
Nagyszöllős (now Vinogradov, Ukraine) in 1889 was followed by time
in Nagyvárad (now Oradea, Romania) during 1891–2, and in the
larger city of Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) during 1892–3.
Finally, after eight months in Beszterce (now Bistriţa, Romania),
where Bartók attended a German-language grammar school, the
family was in April 1894 able to settle in Pozsony.

Despite these many moves and the periodic disruptions to Bartók’s

general education, his musical talents were rapidly developing. His
first compositions, from the early 1890s, were frequently dance
pieces – waltzes, ländlers, mazurkas, and, especially, polkas which
he often named after friends or family members. Also among his first
band of 31 piano compositions (1890–94) were occasional
programmatic works, such as the ten-part A Duna folyása (‘The
Course of the Danube’, 1890–94) or A budapesti tornaverseny
(‘Gymnastic Contest in Budapest’, 1890), and some early attempts in
sonatina and theme-and-variation forms. Bartók’s pianistic dexterity
rapidly increased during the early 1890s, and on 1 May 1892 he
made his first public appearance, in Nagyszöllős, presenting a
programme of works by Grünfeld, Raff and Beethoven, and his own
The Course of the Danube.

At the Catholic Gymnasium in Pozsony, Bartók was soon appointed

chapel organist, as successor to Ernő Dohnányi, and gained more
specialized musical tuition from László Erkel and later Anton Hyrtl.
During the school’s celebrations of the Hungarian millennium in
1896 Bartók provided the piano accompaniment to Kornél Ábrányi’s
melodrama Rákóczi, and also played the piano in the school
orchestra’s rendition of the ‘Rákóczi’ March. In Pozsony he became
increasingly involved in the playing and composing of chamber
music, with a first attempt, in 1895, at a sonata for violin and piano,
in C minor (BB6); a string quartet (now lost) in C minor in 1896; and
a piano quintet in C (also lost) in 1897. During these years, as he
experienced the city’s concerts and occasional operas, his
compositional style and harmonic vocabulary broadened from
Classical to early Romantic models. By 1898, with two remarkably
mature chamber works, the Piano Quartet in C minor BB13 and
String Quartet in F major BB17, the imprints of Brahms and
Schumann are strongly felt.

Page 3 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Bartók’s health was never robust; a long list of childhood diseases
culminated in February 1899 with the start of serious lung problems,
which caused him to devote many months to recuperation over the
coming two years. During December 1898 and January 1899,
nonetheless, he undertook auditions at the Vienna Conservatory and
the Budapest Academy of Music, both of which were keen to admit
him. Despite his fragile condition, Bartók also managed to
matriculate in June 1899 with three excellent results (probably in
mathematics, physics, scripture) and four good ones (Hungarian,
Latin, Greek, German).

Since the ‘Compromise’ of 1867, which had established the Austro-

Hungarian monarchy, Budapest had grown rapidly. By the turn of the
century it had become a vibrant centre of Hungarian culture, and,
with a population of three-quarters of a million, the sixth largest city
in Europe. In 1875 an Academy of Music had been established there,
with Liszt as its first president. Notwithstanding Vienna’s illustrious
musical reputation, an offered scholarship and Pozsony’s proximity
to the Austrian capital, Bartók decided to study in Budapest with the
same professors who had taught Dohnányi: Thomán, a pupil of Liszt,
for piano; Koessler, a pupil of Rheinberger, for composition. On
entering the Academy in September 1899, he was granted advanced
standing in both subjects.

In Budapest Bartók keenly attended the Opera and the Philharmonic,

and started to look beyond chamber music models in his
compositions. Earlier in 1899, while still living in Pozsony, he had
composed a song for soprano and orchestra, Tiefblaue Veilchen
BB18. Now, along with his Academy studies in harmony and
counterpoint, he engaged in orchestration exercises and wrote short
pieces for orchestra. During 1900–1 these included a Valcer (BB19/3)
and a Scherzo in B♭ (BB19/4). From 1899 until early 1902, however,
Bartók’s compositional zeal ebbed. He found Koessler a thorough
and traditional if uninspiring teacher, who only raised a
compositional block in him. Bartók’s composition exercises of this
time were dutiful but unremarkable, with little suggestion of his
later genius. His growing knowledge of the works of Wagner and
Liszt did not yet provide a strong stimulus for his own writing.

‘From this stagnation I was roused as by a lightning stroke by the

first performance in Budapest of Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902’,
Bartók wrote in his autobiography of 1921. Richard Strauss’s music
offered to Bartók some interim compositional solutions. In 1902 he
drafted in piano short score a four-movement Symphony in E♭
(BB25), which merged a Straussian thematic and motivic technique
with stylistic gestures of Liszt and popular nationalist rhythmic and
melodic turns. He was still dissatisfied with this new amalgam of
elements, and only fully orchestrated the third movement, a Scherzo.
His only other substantial work of 1902, the Four Songs BB24, set
texts of folk-like poetry by Lajos Pósa in a style drawn substantially
from the clichés of popular art-song.

Page 4 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 While Bartók’s compositional development had been sluggish, he
had been attracting attention as a pianist. At his first public
Academy concert, on 21 October 1901, he performed Liszt’s Piano
Sonata in B minor. A critic from the Budapesti Napló reported that
Bartók ‘thunders around on the piano like a little Jupiter. In fact, no
piano student at the Academy today has a greater chance of
following in Dohnányi’s tracks than he’. That was, indeed, Bartók’s
aim. He remained close to his elder townsman through his later
years at the Academy, and during the summer of 1903 took
masterclasses with Dohnányi in Gmunden. Bartók gained further
pianistic notice in late 1902, with private performances of his own
piano transcription of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, followed by its
successful performance at a Tonkünstlerverein concert in Vienna
during January 1903. This encouraged Hanslick to comment: ‘So, he
must be a genius of a musician at any rate, but it is a pity that he
goes in for Strauss’, a sentiment echoed by Koessler. Bartók’s
reputation as a pianist was further enhanced by a brilliant final
Academy examination performance of Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole
on 25 May 1903.

2. 1903–8.

Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben provided Bartók with both the style and
the structure for his next composition, Kossuth BB31, a ten-section
symphonic poem which glorified Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the
abortive Hungarian War of Independence from Austria in 1848–9.
Bartók wrote Kossuth between April and August 1903, another
period of nationalistic fervour concerned with the degree of
independence of the Hungarian army. An irony, not lost on Bartók
himself, was that this intensely patriotic work relied so heavily upon
Strauss’s Germanic idiom.

Page 5 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 2. Béla Bartók, aged 22

Budapest Bartók Achives

Kossuth and Bartók’s rendition of Ein Heldenleben were central to

the launching of his career as a pianist-composer. Hans Richter, an
early promoter also of Dohnányi, scheduled the work with his Hallé
Orchestra in Manchester during February 1904, and provided
opportunities for Bartók as a pianist. Meanwhile, during 1903 Bartók
had been invited back to Vienna as soloist in Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’
Concerto, while the sizeable audience at Bartók’s Berlin début on 14

Page 6 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 December 1903, including Busoni and, at rehearsal, Nikisch, owed
much to Godowsky’s reports of Bartók’s performing and
compositional feats that year.

From 1903 until 1906 Bartók pursued an itinerant life, following

performing or compositional opportunities as they presented
themselves. There were substantial residencies in Vienna, Berlin and
Pozsony, as well as Budapest, and he spent August and September
1905 in Paris, where he participated unsuccessfully in the
Rubinstein competition both as composer (where no award was
made) and pianist (where Backhaus gained the prize). However,
despite a two-month tour of Spain and Portugal in 1906 with the
Hungarian violinist Ferenc Vecsey, Bartók’s international performing
career had effectively stalled by this point, and it was fortuitous that
he was invited to replace Thomán on the piano staff of the Budapest
Academy late the same year. He became tenured in 1909 and
remained at the Academy (which in 1925 was renamed the Liszt
Academy) until 1934. During 1907–9 Bartók all but gave up
performing, although he played very occasionally in Academy
concerts. One exception was his only appearance as a conductor,
with the Berlin PO on 2 January 1909, when he directed a movement
of his Second Suite.

Meanwhile, Bartók had begun to develop an enduring interest in

peasant music. He realized that his compositional style still lacked
originality and unity. His first two opus-numbered works, the
Rhapsody for piano and Scherzo for piano and orchestra, for
example, are ungainly stylistic and structural amalgams of Brahms,
Strauss and Liszt, together with Hungarian identifiers, drawn either
from patriotic compositions of Liszt, Mihály Mosonyi and Ferenc
Erkel, or from stylized verbunkos and csárdás dances, popular art-
songs or gypsy embellishing figures. Bartók was, however, yearning
for a style which was autochthonously Hungarian – to its core, not
just in its accoutrements. During May to November 1904 (except for
some weeks at Bayreuth) he had stayed at the northern Hungarian
resort of Gerlice Puszta (now Ratkó, Slovakia), where he split his
time between piano practice and composition, finishing his Piano
Quintet BB33, and writing the Rhapsody and Scherzo (originally
titled Burlesque), both intended as showpieces for his forthcoming
concerts. There he heard a Transylvanian-born maid, Lidi Dósa,
singing in an adjacent room, and he noted down her songs. He did
not yet appreciate the exact boundary between folksong and popular
art-song, nor the different classes of Hungarian peasant music, but
Dósa’s songs had inspired a new direction in Bartók’s thinking, as he
wrote to his sister in December 1904: ‘Now I have a new plan: to
collect the finest Hungarian folksongs and to raise them, adding the
best possible piano accompaniments, to the level of art-song.’ The
first, tentative fruits of this intention were his publication in
February 1905 of his setting of a Székely (Transylvanian) song, Piros
alma (‘Red Apple’) BB34, and a collection of settings of four
folksongs (BB37), the second of which Bartók performed as a piano
solo in the Rubinstein competition. In these earliest settings Bartók’s
piano accompaniments still retain many Romantic flourishes, but

Page 7 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 already show a tendency towards writing in simple block chords and
a use of rhythm which shadows rather than complements the
melody. Yet Bartók was still some way from appreciating the full
potential of folk music for creating a new home-grown style in his
compositions. His Suite no.1 op.3 for orchestra (1905), despite his
claim regarding its ‘Hungarianness’, self-consciously uses four-
square ‘international’ thematic material within a five-movement
cyclic structure, with frequent resort to Strauss in its orchestration.
The Second Suite op.4 for small orchestra (originally Serenade),
starts to show a way forward. While its first three movements,
written in 1905, cling to national Romantic tenets, with a strong
Lisztian influence in the second movement, its fourth and final
movement, composed in 1907, commences with a short, pentatonic
tune, and unveils a stark, spare texture, which he would develop in
succeeding compositions.

On 18 March 1905 Bartók met Kodály, one year his junior, at the
Budapest home of Emma Gruber (later Kodály’s wife). Like Bartók,
Kodály had studied composition under Koessler; he was also taking a
teaching diploma, and a year later completed a doctoral dissertation
on the stanzaic structure of Hungarian folksong. So began an
enduring artistic, scholarly and personal relationship, which
sometimes rivalled that of the Schoenberg–Webern–Berg school in
intensity but lacked its master-student characteristics. Kodály held
the ethnological knowledge, which Bartók for all his enthusiasm then
lacked. Bartók had more practical musical skills and phenomenal
aural capacities. They soon found themselves teaching colleagues at
the Academy of Music, collaborators in many ethnomusicological
projects, and the frankest critics of each other’s compositions.

In March 1906 Bartók and Kodály issued a joint ‘appeal to the

Hungarian people’ to support ‘a complete collection of folksongs,
gathered with scholarly exactitude’, so setting a goal which
remained far from realized even at Kodály’s death in 1967. Their
appeal warned that the influx of ‘light music’ and many ‘imitation
folksongs’ would render Hungarian traditional music extinct within a
few decades. They called for subscribers to a collection of simple
settings for voice and piano of 20 songs (BB42), collected by Béla
Vikár and themselves, with the first ten arranged by Bartók and the
remainder by Kodály. This collection appeared in December 1906,
but drew a scant response from the Hungarian public. Bartók,
already feeling alienated from the ‘rootless’ Germans and Jews so
prominent in Budapest’s musical life, also now strongly resented the
apeing of Western popular culture by the ethnic Hungarian
aristocracy and middle class, as well as the undying urban popularity
of the gypsy bands. The rural peasants, however, he came to idealize
as the conveyors of the pure musical instincts of the nation. Their
song was an unauthored ‘natural phenomenon’, with the potential of
reforming the nation’s musical life, and also of reforming his own
musical approach. While Kodály allowed his attention to encompass
broader literary and historical aspects of Hungarian musical
folklore, Bartók’s interests tended to be more strictly musical and
class-related. Hence, he soon found himself becoming interested in

Page 8 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 the characteristics of the peasant music of the many ethnic
minorities living within the Hungarian section of the Empire. As
early as 1906 he started to collect Slovak folk music, followed in
1908 by Romanian, and he later collected much smaller numbers of
Ruthenian, Serbian and Bulgarian tunes. His interest in the origins
of the Hungarians even led him to plan trips further east, to the
Csángó people in Moldavia and to the Chuvash and Tartar peoples
living along the Volga River, although World War I banished all hope
of such trips. He became fascinated not just with the transcription,
analysis and classification of the many tunes he collected, but also
with the comparisons between these different peasant musics and
their dialects.

Ever since hearing Lidi Dósa’s singing in 1904 Bartók had wanted to
travel to her homeland, Transylvania, the heartland of the Székely
people in the far east of the Empire. His collecting trip to the
Transylvanian province of Csík during July and August 1907, with a
local assistant and two phonographs, proved a revelation. There,
among the older people, he found many examples of anhemitonic
(lacking semitones) pentatonic tunes and came to realize the
pentatonic basis of much of the oldest stratum of Hungarian folk
music. As Bartók collected and analyzed more Hungarian tunes he
started to distinguish old-style and new-style melodies: the old most
characterized by a parlando, poco rubato performance style, in
ecclesiastical (commonly Aeolian or Dorian) or pentatonic modes,
and tending to non-architectonic forms (ABCD, ABBC, for instance);
the new performed tempo giusto, favouring Aeolian or major modes,
and generally with architectonic forms (ABBA, AABA, for instance).
Finally, he came to recognize a large class of ‘heterogeneous’ songs,
showing some degree of foreign influence. In a dictionary article on
Hungarian music of 1935 (Révai nagy lexicona) Bartók determined
the percentages of these three classes of Hungarian peasant music
as 9% old, 30% new and 61% heterogeneous.

Bartók’s Transylvanian tour of 1907 provided him with final proof

that the renewal of his own style could be based on folk music. Folk
music was not just a fertile field for arrangements, but also
introduced a wealth of melodic, rhythmic, textural and formal
models which might creatively be transformed, or transcended, in
original composition. While still travelling in Transylvania he worked
on the fourth movement of his Second Suite, with its pentatonic
melody. Before the year was out he completed settings of three Csík
folksongs, Gyergyóból (‘From Gyergyó’) BB45a for recorder and
piano, and the first five of his Nyolc magyar népdal (‘Eight
Hungarian Folksongs’) BB47 for voice and piano. Of these latter,
three are parlando rubato with tales of sadness – the betrayed lover,
the unhappily married woman, farewell – while the two tempo giusto
songs are humorous.

When in Transylvania Bartók had also been working upon his own
work of love, the Violin Concerto BB48a, written for and about his
new infatuation, the violinist Stefi Geyer. Between passionate
outpourings to her in a series of intimate letters about the meaning
of life, religion and love, he was drafting a work of three movements,

Page 9 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 with the first depicting the ‘idealized Stefi Geyer, celestial and
inward’, the second as ‘cheerful, witty, amusing’, and the third as
‘indifferent, cool and silent’. One ascending line of 3rds, D–F♯–A–C♯,
the so-called ‘Geyer’ (or ‘Stefi’) motif, dominates the first movement,
while a jagged permutation of descending direction characterizes
the second. Bartók decided not to develop the ‘hateful’ third
movement, leaving an unconventional two-movement fantasy-like
composition, completed on 5 February 1908, just one week before
Geyer terminated the relationship. When she chose not to play it,
and other violinists showed little interest, Bartók combined the first
movement with an orchestrated version of the last of his Fourteen
Bagatelles, also based on the ‘Geyer’ motif, to create the Két portré
(‘Two Portraits’) op.5. The two movements were titled ‘one ideal’ and
‘one grotesque’.

3. 1908–14.

The many piano pieces of 1908–11 show Bartók’s increasing

confidence in using folk materials, as well as a growing emphasis
upon grotesquerie, often in association with the ‘Geyer’ motif.
Indeed, after this early Violin Concerto none of his works escapes a
strong folk influence. In his later lecture ‘The Relation between
Contemporary Hungarian Art Music and Folk Music’ (1941, in Béla
Bartók Essays, 348–53), Bartók exemplified three types of
arrangement: where the folk melody is mounted like a jewel (ex.1),
where melody and accompaniment are almost equal in importance,
and where the folk melody is a kind of inspirational ‘motto’ to be
creatively developed (ex.2). In original compositions folk elements
can be found either in the general spirit of the style, or in specific
imitational features; Bartók gave Este a székelyeknél (‘Evening in
Transylvania’) from his Ten Easy Pieces as an example which uses
such imitation (ex.3).

Ex.1 Romanian Folk Dances (1915), movt 3, 1–8

Page 10 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Ex.2 Improvisations op.20 (1920), movt 7, 29–33

Ex.3 Ten Easy Pieces (1908), ‘Evening in Transylvania’, 30–1

The Fourteen Bagatelles op.6 (1908) drew from Busoni the comment
‘at last something truly new’. In these short pieces, of varying
programmatic and abstract qualities, Bartók pioneered his new style
of piano writing, devoid of the unessential embellishments and
rippling excesses of late-Romantic piano figuration. The interval of
the 7th, first found as a consonance in Bartók’s music at the
conclusion of the Second Suite’s third movement, now assumed a
role more equal to the 3rd and 5th, akin to its significance in
pentatonic structures. Any sense of functional harmony is
persistently undermined by the use of ostinato figures (nos.2, 3, 5,
10, 13), quasi-bitonal writing (nos.1, 13), streams of parallel 5ths
and 7ths (no.4), of 4ths (no.11), of tritones (no.8), or of piled-up 3rds
(nos.7, 9, 10). In pieces where dominant–tonic relations are invoked,
they are soon subverted by dissonance (no.10) or mocked, as in the
final Valse ‘Ma mie qui danse’ (no.14). Two of the pieces directly
quote folksongs, an old Hungarian tune (no.4) and a Slovak song (no.
5). ‘Elle est morte’ (no.13), written on the day Bartók received
Geyer’s letter ending their relationship, mercilessly distorts features
of her motif, until near the close it emerges in ‘pure’ form, at which
point Bartók has written in the score ‘meghalt’ (‘she is dead’). The
influence of Debussy, about whose works Bartók had recently learnt
from Kodály, also lies behind several of the pieces, notably in the use
of parallel chords, and in no.3, with its unchanging semitonal
ostinato. Some other features, such as the use of 4th chords, could
have been spurred either by Bartók’s recent folk-music experiences
or by his knowledge of the latest trends of his Western

Page 11 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 contemporaries. As a whole the Fourteen Bagatelles laid down a
blueprint both for Bartók’s new musical language and his new,
leaner approach to keyboard writing.

Although Breitkopf & Härtel rejected Busoni’s recommendation of

Bartók’s op.6 for publication, on the grounds that they were ‘too
difficult and too modern for the public’, the pieces were soon
accepted by the Budapest firm Károly Rozsnyai, which had already
in March 1908 contracted Bartók to provide an educational edition
of J.S. Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier – the first of many historic
editions which Bartók produced – and agreed to publish his next
composition, the Ten Easy Pieces BB51 (1908). Rozsnyai also
published Bartók’s first large collection of folksong arrangements,
Gyermekeknek (‘For Children’) BB53 (1908–10), which comprised 42
Slovak and 43 Hungarian tunes. (Two of the Hungarian settings
were actually by Emma Gruber, and were omitted, along with four
other settings, in Bartók’s revision of 1943.) Bartók’s aim in the
series was to acquaint young pianists with ‘the simple and non-
Romantic beauties of folk music’. In other piano works of the 1908–
11 period, such as the Két elégia (‘Two Elegies’) op.8b, he did
sometimes return to the elaboration and stylized emotion of his
earlier music. The Három burleszk (‘Three Burlesques’) op.8c unite
both old and new aspects of Bartók’s piano writing with that
capricious programmaticism seen in earlier compositions dedicated
to his female friends. For the first Burlesque, dedicated to his
student and soon-to-be wife Márta Ziegler, he explained in one of its
drafts: ‘Please choose one of the titles: “Anger because of an
interrupted visit” or “Rondoletto à capriccio” or “Vengeance is
sweet” or “Play it if you can” or “November 27 [1908]”’. Another
work dedicated to her, the first of the Vázlatok (‘Seven Sketches’) op.
9b, is entitled ‘Leányi arckép’ (‘Portrait of a Girl’) and calls again on
the ‘Geyer’ motif. In November 1909 Bartók married Márta Ziegler,
and a son, Béla, was born in August 1910. Over the following 15
years she proved his worthy assistant as a copyist, translator and
occasional folksong-collecting companion.

The First String Quartet op.7 (1908–9) is an exceptional work of

stylistic transition. Although it betrays many disparate influences it
is remarkably coherent. The Lento first movement, conceived as a
funeral dirge, takes as its main theme the boisterous, jagged
transformation of the ‘Geyer’ motif yet within a contrapuntal,
Tristanesque mood of yearning; other late-Romantic influences are
evident – those of Reger, about whose works Bartók and Geyer had
been enthusiastic, and of Strauss. Yet Bartók’s quartet unfolds, in
Kodály’s words, a ‘return to life’, with increasingly fast second and
finale movements, which are more in keeping with his new, sparer
style. The finale establishes the brusque, folk-like style used in the
concluding movements of many later chamber works. It twice calls
upon pentatonic phrases and in its introduction the cello parodies
the opening of a popular Hungarian song, Csak egy szép lány (‘Just a
Fair Girl’) by Elemér Szentirmai. The quartet was first performed on

Page 12 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 19 March 1910, at one of the earliest concerts of the youthful
Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, which would also provide the premières
of his Second and Fourth Quartets

5. Bartók with Kodály (front right) and the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet

(from left to right): Jenő Kerpely, Imre Waldbauer, Antal Molnár, János
Temesváry

Budapest Bartók Achives

In the first half of 1910 Bartók’s recognition as a composer appeared

to be growing, and with it requests for him to perform. At a
‘Hungarian festival’ concert in Paris on 12 March 1910 he played
several of his own works, as well as pieces by Szendy and Kodály. A
press comment about these ‘young barbarians’ from Hungary
probably prompted Bartók to write one of his most popular piano
pieces, the Allegro barbaro BB63, in the following year. In other
works of 1910–12 French influences are at their most apparent, with
Debussy’s mark perhaps being too readily identified, notably in the
orchestral Két kép (‘Two Pictures’) op.10 and the Four Orchestral
Pieces op.12. The intervening op.11, the one-act opera A Kékszakállú
herceg vára (‘Bluebeard’s Castle’) (1911) is, however, a masterful
Hungarian emulation of the realism of Debussy’s Pelléas et
Mélisande. Written to an expressionistic libretto by Béla Balázs
about the ‘mystery of the soul’, the action of Bluebeard’s Castle is
negligible, involving just two singing protagonists, Bluebeard and his
new wife Judith, who progress through the opening of the
eponymous castle’s seven doors, drawn by the woman’s curiosity.
The opera’s climactic turning-point comes at the fifth door, to
Bluebeard’s kingdom, after which Judith’s jealousy becomes

Page 13 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 obsessive, leading to her eventual entombment, along with all
Bluebeard’s previous wives, and eternal darkness. Bartók’s work
changed the course of Hungarian opera by successfully developing a
fluid form of Hungarian declamation of Balázs’s ballad-like text,
based largely upon the inflections of parlando rubato folksong. He
also managed to characterize the protagonists modally: Bluebeard
through smooth, pentatonic lines; Judith through more chromatic
and angular writing. Bartók’s operatic conception owed much to
Wagner, particularly in his use of a recurring minor-2nd ‘blood’
motif, while the orchestration is still indebted to Strauss, whose
influence in other compositional respects had waned. The
adjudicators of two Budapest opera competitions of 1911–12
nonetheless found little merit in this ‘unperformable’ work, and it
was assigned to Bartók’s drawer.

The year 1912 signalled Bartók’s withdrawal from public musical

life. He was increasingly seen as a radical, out of sympathy with the
ruling musical clique led by such figures as the violinist Jenő Hubay.
His efforts in 1911 to assist the formation of a New Hungarian
Musical Society had, he felt, been futile, and he resigned from it in
February 1912. He did not engage in serious composition in 1913,
and saw no point in orchestrating his four op.12 pieces until there
was some chance of their performance, which only occurred after
the war. As a teacher, he was not generating a distinctive ‘school’, as
did Hubay, Szendy or, later, Kodály, for he was fundamentally
disinterested in questions of piano technique or didactic method. He
did, however, in 1913 contribute nearly 50 easy pieces to the
Zongoraiskola (‘Piano Method’) BB66, co-authored with Sándor
Reschofsky, from which 18 were later selected for Kezdők
zongoramuzsikája (‘The First Term at the Piano’, 1929). In one field,
folk music, Bartók’s enthusiasms remained undiminished, and he
was making reasonable professional progress. These
ethnomusicological studies became his life’s mainstay during the
following six years of isolation.

Since 1906 Bartók had engaged in many folk-music collecting tours,

some in collaboration with Kodály, but many undertaken
independently. As well as informing his composition – the first Slovak
folksong settings (BB46) date from 1907, and the first Romanian-
influenced work, Ket román tánc (‘Two Romanian Dances’) BB56
from 1909–10 – these tours had led to Bartók’s first
ethnomusicological articles in 1908 and 1909. These were simple
collections of transcriptions of melodies and texts of Transylvanian
(Székely) and Transdanubian ballads. By the immediately pre-war
years Bartók had developed more theoretical and speculative
interests. His first essay on ‘Comparative Musical Folklore’ dates
from 1912, and his first published book, about Romanian folksongs
from the Hungarian county of Bihor (Bihár) which he had collected
in 1909–10, appeared from the Romanian Academy in Bucharest in
1913. As a principle of grouping Bartók early came to adopt the
system of the Finnish musicologist Ilmari Krohn, which had been
endorsed in 1902–3 after a competition of the International Music
Society. In Krohn’s system all songs were transposed so that their

Page 14 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 final note was G. Songs were then ordered according to the cadence
patterns of each verse. Further differentiation was possible
according to cadence types and song ranges. With a growing
number of modifications, this strongly structural scheme remained
the model for Bartók’s many later folk-music editions.

The richness of Romanian folk traditions, which in Bartók’s opinion

surpassed the Hungarian because of the greater primitivism and
isolation of the Romanian population within the Empire, led him in
1913 to collect folk music of the Romanians of the Hungarian
province of Máramaros (Maramureş). Bartók’s excitement about this
Máramaros material rivalled that surrounding his pentatonic
discovery of 1907. It concerned his identification of an ancient
cântec lung, or horă lungă. This ‘long melody’, or ‘long dance’, which
he later identified in Arabic, Ukrainian and Persian musics, was
strongly instrumental in character, improvisational, highly
ornamented, and of indeterminate structure. Until 1913 virtually all
of Bartók’s collecting had taken place within Hungary. During June
1913, however, his comparative ethnomusicological interests drew
him to north Africa, where among the Berber people around the
oasis town of Biskra (now in Algeria) he experienced a folk music
strikingly different from that of eastern Europe, in the narrower
range and changeability of its scales and the almost constant
drumming which accompanied most strict-time melodies. Both his
Máramaros and north-African collections were prepared by 1914,
but were, because of the war, delayed in publication.

4. 1914–26.

Holidaying in France during July 1914, Bartók was almost caught

unawares by the rush into World War I. For several months, as the
Russians made incursions into the eastern provinces of Hungary,
there were fears that even Budapest would be attacked; folk-music
collecting became impossible. Bartók himself fearfully undertook
several medical examinations, which however confirmed that he was
unfit for service. Later, in lieu of military service, Kodály and Bartók
were entrusted with the collection of folksongs from soldiers, which
in January 1918 resulted in a patriotic concert in Vienna attended by
Empress Zita. From Easter 1915, with the military situation
stabilized, Bartók again resumed song collecting, mainly in Slovak
regions fairly close to the capital, although in 1916 he ventured out
into Transylvania on his task with the military. Romania’s sudden
attack on Transylvania in August 1916 ensured, however, that his
further collecting did not venture too far from the Hungarian plain.

Although Bartók hardly performed at all during the war, its years
were bounteous in folk-music arrangements. While 1914 had seen
the start of work on two Hungarian piano sets – Tizenöt magyar
parasztdal (‘15 Hungarian Peasant Songs’) BB79 and Three
Hungarian Folk Tunes BB80b – both of which were completed in
1918, 1915 was a ‘Romanian’ year: piano settings of Romanian
Christmas Songs (Colinde) BB67, the Sonatina BB69 (in 1931

Page 15 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 transcribed for orchestra as Erdélyi táncok, ‘Transylvanian Dances’);
and one of Bartók’s most popular works, the Román nepi táncok
(‘Romanian Folk Dances’) BB68. The period 1916–17, by turn, was
fruitful with three sets of Slovak folksongs for a variety of vocal
resources (BB73, 77, 78).

Bartók’s rate of composing original works was not impaired by his

wartime conditions. Indeed, his isolation led to a more unified and
concentrated compositional approach. With his three-movement
Second String Quartet op.17 (1914–17) he maintained something of
the nervous introspection of the First Quartet’s opening in the outer
movements, but for the central Allegro molto capriccioso movement
(with which he experienced the most difficulty in composition) he
drew on inspiration from north Africa, in the limited range of its
harsh tune, in the drumming accompaniment and in the exaggerated
embellishments. The Piano Suite op.14 (1916) similarly shows in its
third movement a north-African influence, with its urgent ostinato
and limited scalar patterns. This suite, originally in five movements
with the symmetrical pattern of movement tonalities B♭–F♯–B♭–D–B♭,
was later reduced to four movements with the removal of the
second-movement Andante, yet still retains a strong interest in pitch
symmetries, above all in its Scherzo. In a radio interview of 1944
Bartók described his intention in this work of refining piano
technique to achieve ‘a style more of bone and muscle’.

Also in 1916 Bartók deviated from his established pattern of vocal

settings of folksongs to compose his only mature Lieder: two sets of
Öt dal (‘Five Songs’), opp.15 and 16. The quality of the poetry differs
greatly between the works. Op.15 is a setting in parlando
declamatory style of four love poems by a young woman, Klára
Gombossy, with whom Bartók was involved during his 1915–16
collecting tours in Slovakia, with an extra poem by another
adolescent friend. Bartók soon realized the folly of his musical (and
personal) ways, and ensured that these songs were neither
published nor performed during his lifetime. The op.16 songs are
settings of poems by Hungary’s leading progressive poet, Endre Ady.
They exhibit a characteristic melancholy, with autumnal themes of
isolation, loss and despair. Bartók’s style of setting is less folk-
influenced in these songs, but rather reflects a continuation of
German Lieder traditions, especially in the complementary rhythmic
relationships between voice and piano. This work also pays stylistic
homage to the composer Béla Reinitz, well known for his Ady
settings, to whom Bartók dedicated the set in 1920.

Most significant professionally among Bartók’s wartime

compositions was his one-act ballet A fából faragott királyfi (‘The
Wooden Prince’) op.13, written to a scenario again by Balázs. The
idea of this ballet had grown out of the visit of the Ballets Russes to
Budapest in 1912. By March 1913 the Budapest Opera had
requested a work from Bartók, but its composition and following
orchestration had taken him until early 1917. In the journal Magyar
színpad at the time of the ballet’s production Balázs described how
the work reflects ‘that very common and profound tragedy when the

Page 16 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 creation becomes the rival of the creator, and of the pain and glory
of the situation in which a woman prefers the poem to the poet, the
picture to the painter’. Bartók crafted the work as a symmetrical
tripartite symphonic poem, with the final part recalling materials
from the first part in reverse order. Its music, as its plot, portrays
the constant tension between the ideal prince and the grotesque
puppet, who share the same thematic material.

Given Bartók’s fatalistic attitude towards his own compositions, he

was surprised by the ballet’s highly successful première on 12 May
1917 under Egisto Tango (to whom he later dedicated the work). Not
only did this success lead to many repeat performances of the work,
but it also encouraged the Opera in Budapest to arrange for the
première of Bluebeard’s Castle, which took place on 24 May 1918.
Importantly for the future, the enterprising Viennese publisher
Universal Edition now contracted to publish Bartók’s compositions,
an event which he considered his ‘greatest success as a composer, so
far’ and a sure road to greater international exposure. Universal
worked hard to clear the backlog of the composer’s many
unpublished pieces, and, despite Bartók’s frequent criticisms,
remained his main publisher for the next two decades.

The last years of the 1910s witnessed widespread political and social
dislocation in Hungary. Bartók and his family, living at
Rákoskeresztúr, some kilometres east of Budapest, found
transportation to the city increasingly difficult; food and fuel
supplies became scarce; they had no electricity or running water.
Medical help had to be brought from Budapest when in October
1918 Bartók succumbed to Spanish influenza during the pandemic.
Finally in 1920 he was obliged to move to Budapest, where for two
years his family took rooms in the apartment of the banker József
Lukács. Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed.
The new national boundaries, based on principles of majority ethnic
self-determination and ratified by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, saw
Hungary stripped of those very areas of Transylvania and the
northern, Slovak territories which Bartók had found ethnologically
most interesting. For some years national tensions in the region
ensured the unviability of collecting expeditions. Apart from a brief
expedition to Turkey in November 1936 Bartók never again engaged
in fieldwork, even within post-Trianon Hungary (as Kodály, for
instance, continued to do). The remainder of his life was largely
devoted to analyzing and categorizing his existing collection, which
by 1918 numbered about 10,000 melodies (including 3,404
Romanian, 3,223 Slovak and 2,771 Hungarian), or to comparative
studies involving knowledge of a large number of mainly eastern
European collections.

With the succession of Hungarian governments during 1918–19

Bartók found himself courted for many positions, including director
of the Opera, and head of a planned music department at the
National Museum, although neither came to pass. In late October
1918 he was appointed by the liberal Károlyi government to be a
member of the National Council, and under the short-lived

Page 17 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 communist government of Béla Kun in 1919 served on its music
directorate, along with Kodály, Dohnányi and Reinitz. Bartók bore
these rapidly changing events with apparent nonchalance, as he did
the establishment of the right-wing rule of Miklós Horthy in the
autumn of 1919. Yet he did think of settling abroad, with a first
preference for Transylvania (by then part of Romania), followed by
Austria or Germany. Of greater day-to-day significance to him was
the continuation of sabbatical leave from the Academy of Music and
of his attachment to the ethnographic department of the National
Museum, both of which ceased in mid-1920. In 1920 he also had to
fend off the first of several challenges in the press from the
Hungarian right wing that, through his recent folk-music work, he
was a supporter of the Romanian national cause and a traitor to
Hungary. (This did not stop him in later years being accused by the
Romanian authorities of being a Hungarian revisionist.)

Amid this turbulence Bartók succeeded in writing his iconoclastic

pantomime A csodálatos mandarin (‘The Miraculous Mandarin’) op.
19. He drafted the work in short score to a scenario by Menyhért
(Melchior) Lengyel between October 1918 and May 1919, but only
orchestrated it in 1924. Lengyel’s is a superficially sordid plot about
a prostitute, her ‘minders’ and clients, with a deeper message,
conveyed by her last client, the Mandarin, about the powers of
human love. The unsavoury aspect of the work caused it to be
withdrawn immediately after its November 1926 première in
Cologne, and contributed to the continual postponement of its
Budapest première until December 1945, after the composer’s
death. Bartók approached the narrative in a mosaic-like way, using
brief intervallically-determined ‘tone patches’ of variable tonal
clarity and density of texture, which parallel the fluctuating sense of
tension. The Miraculous Mandarin is, however, much more than
graphic ‘mime music’. Through various revisions up until 1931
Bartók refined a truly symphonic concept based upon his musical
symbols of desire and love. It was a continual frustration to him,
then, that this work, which he considered one of his finest
compositions, so languished, while The Wooden Prince, a work he
soon came to dislike, was staged more frequently.

With Mandarin and its immediate predecessor, the Three Studies op.
18 for piano, Bartók launched into his most radical, Expressionist
phase (1918–22), during which he believed he was approaching
some kind of atonal goal. In his essay ‘Das Problem der neuen
Musik’ (Melos, i/5, 1920, pp.107–10) he referred four times to
Schoenberg, and recognized the need ‘for the equality of rights of
the individual 12 tones’; he drew examples of the ‘previously
undreamt-of wealth of transitory nuances [now] at our disposal’ from
his own opp.18 and 19. The following Improvizációk magyar
parasztdalokra (‘Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs’) op.20
(his last work to receive an opus number) also showed a bold linking
of innovative techniques of folksong arrangement and atonal
direction. In ‘The Relation of Folk-Song to the Development of the
Art Music of Our Time’ (The Sackbut, ii/1, 1921, pp.5–11) Bartók
explained that ‘the opposition of the two tendencies reveals all the

Page 18 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 more clearly the individual properties of each, while the effect of the
whole becomes all the more powerful’; he further wrote of the
peasant tunes saving such works as op.20 from a ‘wearying or
surfeiting extreme’. Yet towards the end of the 1920s Bartók
claimed, in apparent contradiction to such statements, that atonality
was incompatible with a style based on (necessarily tonal) folk
music. In an interview in 1929 he even suggested that tonality in his
early postwar works was not lacking ‘but at times is more-or-less
veiled either by idiosyncrasies of the harmonic texture or by
temporary deviations in the melodic curves’; the Violin Sonatas nos.1
and 2 (BB84 and 85) for example, are, he maintained, in C♯ minor
and C respectively. However, though these works of 1921–2 show
further merging of folk-derived ideas and atonality, it is difficult to
consider them in a key. Moreover, despite their titles, they only pay
lip-service to traditional sonata principles. The first movement of the
three-movement First Sonata adopts such a strongly variational
approach to thematic materials that the point of recapitulation loses
its traditional force. The two-movement Second Sonata, with its
slower-faster progression is indebted to a rhapsodic model, while in
long-term function the tritonal relationship F♯–C is of primary
importance.

During the first half of the 1920s Bartók’s compositional output

slackened, not least because of his intense ethnomusicological work.
Already in an essay of January 1918 he had articulated his old–new
stylistic distinction in Hungarian folk music; by 1921 Kodály and
Bartók had finalized a modest collection of Hungarian folksongs
from Transylvania, published two years later; in 1924 Bartók’s
transcription and analysis of over 320 Hungarian songs was unveiled
in his A magyar népdal. It appeared in German the following year,
and in 1931 in English with the title Hungarian Folk Music. Bartók
was also engaged during 1921–3 in compiling a two-volume study of
some 1,800 Slovak peasant melodies, which he sent for publication
in Czechoslovakia. (A third Slovak volume was completed in 1928,
although all three remained unpublished during Bartók’s lifetime.)
He then immediately moved to prepare a volume of Romanian
Christmas songs, which occupied much of his time from late 1923
until April 1926. (After many trials, only the musical part of this
study appeared in a self-funded edition in 1935.)

The other draw on Bartók’s time in the postwar years was his
revitalized performing career. Amid the revolutionary atmosphere of
1918–19 he had unexpectedly re-emerged onto the concert platform,
after seven years of virtual absence, with a willingness to perform in
chamber, orchestral soloist and recitalist roles. One of his first
Budapest concerts, on 21 April 1919, introduced his wartime
compositions opp.14, 16 and 18 along with one of the earliest
performances of the Second Quartet op.17. With the war over and
Universal rapidly publishing his scores, Bartók was keen to grasp
every opportunity for promoting his works through his own playing.
Over the next 12 years he took part in over 300 concerts in 15
different countries. He also quickly took advantage of the
promotional, as well as much-needed monetary, opportunities in

Page 19 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 writing for the international press, for which during 1920–21 he
contributed over 20 scholarly or journalistic essays. Already by
February 1920 he had re-established a performing connection with
Berlin, where the conductor Hermann Scherchen and the theatrical
entrepreneur Max Reinhardt sought to aid his cause. Further
Hungarian performances and a concert tour of Romania
(Transylvania) in February 1922 preceded a series of major
performances during March to May of 1922 in Britain, France and
Germany, which culminated in the German premières of Bluebeard’s
Castle and The Wooden Prince on 13 May in Frankfurt. Bartók’s
frequent partner in these concerts and further western European
concerts in 1923 was the Hungarian-born violinist Jelly Arányi, to
whom he dedicated both violin sonatas. Bartók was impressed by
how seriously these sonatas were received, although his avowedly
percussive approach to the keyboard was deemed unfortunate by
many British critics, brought up on Matthay’s views about relaxation
and use of weight. The critics also had difficulties comprehending
the frequent thematic segregation which exists between the
instruments’ parts in these two sonatas. Bartók’s higher profile soon
led to his inclusion in an international chamber music festival in
Salzburg in August 1922, after which the International Society for
Contemporary Music (ISCM) was founded. He became a staunch
supporter of the ISCM; during the 1920s and 30s many of his pieces
were performed, some for the first time, at its annual festivals. He
served on its first festival jury in 1924, and was nominated to
convene the aborted 1940 Budapest Festival.

Despite Bartók’s growing opportunities for performing

internationally, which extended during 1923–5 to include
Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy, he did not
immediately start to compose new works for this audience. His only
composition of 1923, the orchestral Táncszvit (‘Dance Suite’) BB86a,
was commissioned as a companion to Kodály’s Psalmus hungaricus
and Dohnányi’s Ünnepi nyitány (‘Festival Overture’) for the
celebration of the 50th anniversary of the union of Budapest. The
style of the suite marked a retreat from his recent expressive
radicality, not least through Bartók’s re-acceptance of an
accommodating rather than oppositional relationship between tune
and accompaniment. It employs idealized peasant musics in its six
movements, which are played without a break and connected by a
ritornello theme in a serene Hungarian style. Its first movement, for
instance, recalls the chromatic ‘Arabic’ inflections, the second, a
brash, minor-3rd-based Hungarian idiom, while the third movement
introduces an imitation of Hungarian bagpipe music followed by a
section suggesting Romanian folk violins. The later movements
reflect a growing stylistic internationalism, culminating in the
colourful medley of the sixth movement. Bartók had also drafted a
Slovak-styled movement, but omitted this from the final version of
the piece. His next composition, Falun (Dedinské scény) (‘Village
Scenes’) BB87a was, however, a setting in five movements of old
Slovak ceremonial melodies. These mainly Lydian or Mixolydian
tunes were given inventive ‘motto’-like settings for female voice and

Page 20 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 piano; in 1926 the final three movements were arranged for female
voices and chamber orchestra (BB87b) to a commission from the
American League of Composers. The Village Scenes, with their
themes of love, marriage and babies, are dedicated to Ditta Pásztory,
whom Bartók had married in August 1923 following a sudden
divorce from Márta Ziegler. Pásztory bore Bartók a son, Péter, in July
1924.

Apart from Village Scenes Bartók did not compose between August
1923 and June 1926, and by February 1925, as earlier in 1913–14,
he was writing himself off as an ‘ex-composer’. Nevertheless, he did
devote much time in 1924 to orchestrating The Miraculous
Mandarin, when there were early hopes of a first performance in
Germany. His Dance Suite, however, gained a highly publicized
performance, under Václav Talich, at the Prague ISCM orchestral
festival in May 1925, which catapulted Bartók’s work onto the
international stage. Over the following two years it received over 60
performances in major European and American centres.

5. 1926–34.

Between March 1925 and March 1926 Bartók visited Italy at least
four times. There his long-standing interest in Baroque music,
previously centred upon Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, Rameau and
Couperin, was roused by the keyboard music of such Italian Baroque
composers as Benedetto Marcello, Michelangelo Rossi, Della Ciaia,
Frescobaldi and Zipoli. From October 1926 he started to perform his
own piano transcriptions of their works and those of their
contemporaries, 11 of which he later refined for publication. This
new Baroque passion, coupled with the stimuli of rhythmic
discoveries in Romanian Christmas songs, the additional
performance opportunities which radio now afforded, and the
hearing of Stravinsky’s latest piano works (notably the Concerto for
piano and wind), pushed Bartók into an almost frenzied phase of
composition of piano works for his own performance. With these
works of 1926 he initiated, in his own analysis, a fundamental
creative shift from a Beethovenian ideal of artistic profundity to one
more orientated towards the ultimate musical craftsman, Bach. In
compositional process, however, he remained still a composer of
essentially Romantic habit, a believer in inspired genius, whose
music was ‘determined by instinct and sensibility’ rather than by
theory, and who physically composed, as he explained in a 1925
interview, ‘between the desk and the piano’.

While Bartók’s international status had grown, his only available

work for piano and orchestra remained the 1905 arrangement of the
Rhapsody op.1 BB36b. By 1926, it was not only a stylistic
anachronism, but also – as with the early Piano Quintet and First
Suite – an occasional embarrassment for Bartók, when audiences
took a liking to these early works over his more recent and dissonant
compositions. From June to November 1926 he set about equipping
himself with a new piano repertory: a three-movement Sonata

Page 21 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 (BB88), two collections of piano pieces, Szabadban (‘Out of Doors’)
BB89 and Kilenc kis zongoradarab (‘Nine Little Piano Pieces’) BB90,
and for his orchestral engagements the First Piano Concerto BB91.
Three further short piano pieces later found a home within the
Mikrokosmos collection. In these works of Bartók’s ‘piano year’, he
provided a preview of so many of the qualities which were to come
to fullest maturity in the works of his ‘golden age’, 1934–40. ‘Az
éjszaka zenéje’ (‘The Night’s Music’) from Out of Doors, in depicting
the nocturnal sounds of the Hungarian plain, introduced a genre of
stylized representation of nature which would be repeatedly invoked
up to his Third Piano Concerto of 1945. The ‘Menuetto’ from BB90
presented a pioneering example of Bartók’s principle of expansion
and contraction of scalar intervals – in this case notably a major 2nd
into a perfect 4th (see ex.4) – which would come to its most
magisterial expression ten years later in the Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta. The finale of the Sonata revealed Bartók’s
skilful imitation of traditional styles in the service of his concept of
unity through variation. The movement’s ritornello theme also
provided the basis for the three intervening episodes, the first in
imitation of vigorous peasant chanting, the second, of the peasant
flute, and the third, of village fiddlers. Bartók drafted another longer
episode, in bagpipe style, which developed a separate life as
‘Musettes’ (in BB89).

Ex.4 Nine Little Piano Pieces, Menuetto, 3–4, 9–10

Straddling the borderline between Baroque and barbarism is the

hammering rhythmic impulse which underlies the First Piano
Concerto. From this impulse spring the main themes of all three
movements. In the commencement of the slow, middle movement
that impulse also provides the mechanism for the integration of
piano and percussion, which Bartók explored further a decade later
in the Sonata for two pianos and percussion. The sharp-edged
timbral world of Stravinsky’s Concerto for piano and wind is often
alluded to in Bartók’s, but it is especially evident in the middle
movement, from which the strings have been banished entirely.
Bartók’s concerto, played first under Furtwängler at the 1927 ISCM
Festival in Frankfurt, proved only moderately successful as a new
carte-de-visite. Its first edition was so studded with errors that it had

Page 22 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 to be replaced, and Bartók also confessed in 1939 that ‘its writing is
a bit difficult – one might even say very difficult! – as much for
orchestra as for audience’. Even he found its solo part taxing, and
with these experiences in mind he ensured that his Second Piano
Concerto was more tuneful and less bristling with difficulties.

Having updated his piano repertory Bartók turned his attention in

1927–8 to chamber music, starting with the Third String Quartet
(BB93), composed during the summer of 1927. In this quartet he
attained the ultimate compression of his formal, pitch and rhythmic
materials. Adorno (1929) wrote: ‘What is decisive is the formative
power of the work; the iron concentration, the wholly original
tectonics. The traditional four movements are here fused into a
single movement of about 17 minutes’ duration. A new colouristic
approach to string sonority is displayed, partly inspired by Berg’s
Lyrische Suite, which Bartók had recently heard. The score bristles
with ‘special effects’ – glissando, pizzicato, col legno, sul tasto,
ponticello, martellato, muted passages, the use of exaggerating
vibrato, strumming, and their combinations – all of which give the
piece its startling piquancy. In October 1928 it was awarded joint
first prize, with Casella’s Serenata, in a competition of the Musical
Fund Society of Philadelphia, where it was given its first
performance on 30 December of the same year.

Meanwhile, during the summer of 1928, Bartók had composed his

Fourth String Quartet BB95. While taking over the expanded palette
of string sonorities of no.3, the Fourth is formally very different.
Originally conceived in only four movements, Bartók then added
another (the published fourth movement) to provide a symmetrical
five-movement structure. The slow, third movement, in a style
reminiscent of ‘The Night’s Music’ from Out of Doors, is the work’s
kernel. The second movement’s tight thematic material is reflected,
in more open guise, in the fourth, entirely pizzicato movement. The
first movement’s themes are also loosely mirrored in the finale,
which ends with a coda that borrows liberally from the first
movement’s conclusion. Such symmetrical thinking about form had
been evident in Bartók’s works since the 1910s, but had never been
expressed by him as clearly, either in the music or in his own
analysis. The pitch relations of the quartet operate at a high level of
abstraction, with much interplay between contracted and expanded
expressions of short cells, yet in rhythm certain folk models are
more apparent. In the first movement, for instance, Bulgarian-type
irregular rhythms are used; the third movement involves rhythmic
elements of both ‘old’ Hungarian and Romanian horă lungă
precedent.

Two further chamber works, the Violin Rhapsodies (BB94, 96),

originate from 1928. They were intended for Bartók’s many
performances with Hungarian violinists, as milder alternatives or
adjuncts to his violin sonatas; but he also arranged them for violin
and orchestra, as well as the first for cello and piano, on a request
from Casals. Both pieces follow the traditional lassú–friss (slow–fast)
rhapsodic pattern which Bartók knew so well from his scholarly

Page 23 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 work during the 1910s on Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies for that
composer’s complete edition. Bartók’s Rhapsodies are cunningly
devised concatenations of predominantly Romanian melodies,
although Hungarian and Ruthenian tunes are represented. The First
Rhapsody was dedicated to Szigeti, who had recently made a violin
and piano arrangement of seven For Children pieces, and the Second
to Székely, who had similarly arranged Bartók’s Romanian Folk
Dances.

The concerts for which Bartók had intended his many compositions
of 1926–8 found willing entrepreneurs. The late 1920s were Bartók’s
heyday as a pianist, with good offerings of concert opportunities,
increasing radio work and, from 1928, contracts for producing
gramophone records. By this time he often had the chance to
specialize in playing his own works. When Bartók was granted a
sabbatical from the Budapest Academy for 1927–8 he was finally
able to realize a plan he had nurtured ever since graduating, of a
concert tour of the USA. Notwithstanding the débâcle of the first two
concerts on 22 and 23 December 1928, when the New York PO,
under Mengelberg, proved unable to perform the First Piano
Concerto and the Rhapsody op.1 had to be substituted at the last
minute, Bartók’s two-month coast-to-coast tour, with its mixture of
small lecture-recitals and large concert events, was a successful
musical and promotional undertaking as well as a personally eye-
opening experience. In America he performed especially with Szigeti
and his former student Reiner, under whose baton the First Piano
Concerto did eventually have its American première on 13 February
1928. By 1929 Bartók was starting to live the life of the itinerant
performer. During that year’s first four months he undertook a three-
week tour of the Soviet Union, followed by concerts in Switzerland,
Denmark, Britain, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Austria and
Hungary, where on 20 March he heard both his recent string
quartets in sympathetically received performances from the
Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet. Even the pessimistic Bartók had good
reason to be ‘relaxed and happy’, as his son reported of him on his
48th birthday.

Vocal music absorbed Bartók’s compositional energies during 1929–

30. Kodály’s increasing list of Hungarian folksong arrangements
jogged Bartók into contributing one last substantial set of voice and
piano arrangements: Húsz magyar népdal (‘Twenty Hungarian
Folksongs’) BB98. He grouped these songs thematically – four sad,
four dancing, seven diverse and five new-style – but with no
intention that they be performed in order. Bartók’s settings mostly
fall within his creative, ‘motto’ approach. In publication it was not
the music but the German song translations which caused the most
acute problems, as had often been the case with previous vocal
works, notably his settings of Ady in the Five Songs BB72. Unlike
Kodály, Bartók was insistent upon an idiomatic German translation
which faithfully maintained the east European musical rhythms but
also adhered as far as possible to natural German word
accentuation. With Twenty Hungarian Folksongs a publishing
compromise was finally reached, with both poetic and literal

Page 24 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 translations being provided for some songs. During early 1930
Bartók also arranged his four-movement Magyar népdalok
(‘Hungarian Folksongs’) BB99 for mixed chorus.

For the Cantata profana ‘A kilenc csodaszarvas’ (‘The Nine

Enchanted Stags’) BB100, written during the summer of 1930,
Bartók set his own poetic working of an ancient Romanian epic
ballad for tenor and baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra.
However, before making the score’s final copy, he replaced the text
with a skilful Hungarian translation, of which he was particularly
fond and later independently recorded. A three-movement work
running without a break and anchored firmly in D, the cantata
marked an important stage in Bartók’s long-term reversion to more
overtly tonal writing and longer thematic statements. His
strengthening interest in symmetries can be clearly illustrated by
comparing the mirrored nature of the modes with which the work
begins (D–E–F–G–A♭–B♭–C–D) and ends (D–E–F♯–G♯–A–B–C–D). This
latter, Slovak-influenced ‘acoustic’ form (so-called because of its
congruence with the lower degrees of the harmonic series), through
its association with the cantata’s closing words ‘From clear and
cooling mountain springs’, came to be recognized as Bartók’s symbol
for the purity of nature. Of all Bartók’s compositions, the Cantata
profana has elicited perhaps the greatest variety of interpretations
of its overall musical form – implied four-movement structure
(Ujfalussy), ‘large sonata form’ (Somfai), five-act classical dramatic
form (Szabolcsi), to list but three – as well as of its textual message,
with its components of initiation–transformation–purification,
naturalistic freedom and pantheistic integration. Particularly in its
aspects of generational conflict, the cantata has been seen as
emblematic of Bartók’s response to the rising fascism of its time.

As Bartók approached his 50th birthday he attracted the accolades

of international fame, and became more overtly committed to
internationalist goals. In late 1930 he received news of awards,
namely the French Légion d’Honneur and the Hungarian Corvin
wreath. He was honoured again in 1932 with a Romanian cultural
award. While his interests in national folk musics remained intense,
he was tending to write more generally and more comparatively
about folk music, culminating in his study Népzenénk és a szomszéd
népek népzenéje (‘Our [Hungarian] Folk Music and the Folk Music of
Neighbouring Peoples’) which first appeared in 1934. As a composer
Bartók harboured, even into the early 1940s, the aim of adding two
or three further ‘national’ parts to his Cantata profana, as a musical
tribute to the increasingly tenuous brotherhood of Danube-basin
peoples. As a performer, too, he more sought international than
national acclaim, having decided in 1930 no longer to perform his
own works in unresponsive Budapest. He maintained this ban until
late 1936, although he still sometimes played his own works in other
Hungarian towns and occasionally other composers’ music in the
capital. None of Bartók’s major works of the 1930s or 1940s
received its première in Budapest.

Page 25 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 On 13 January 1931 Bartók’s internationalism took more concrete
form in his acceptance of an invitation to join the Permanent
Committee for Literature and the Arts of the League of Nations’
Commission for Intellectual Co-operation, where his colleagues
included Thomas Mann, Gilbert Murray and Karel Čapek. Over the
next five years he occasionally introduced proposals about musical
issues requiring international collaboration – gramophone records,
Urtext and facsimile editions – but in 1934 also framed a proposal
about artistic and scientific freedom. His joining of the Permanent
Committee coincided with his much-quoted statement of
compositional internationalism, in a letter of 10 January 1931 to the
Romanian diplomat and music historian, Octavian Beu. While
recognizing the three sources of his creative work as Hungarian,
Romanian and Slovak, with the strongest influence being Hungarian,
Bartók expressed his belief in

the brotherhood of peoples, brotherhood in spite of all wars

and conflicts. I try – to the best of my ability – to serve this
idea in my music; therefore I don’t reject any influence, be
it Slovak, Romanian, Arabic, or from any other source. The
source must only be clean, fresh and healthy!

Bartók’s consolidation of a more thematic and less rhythmically

reiterative style continued in his next major work, the Second Piano
Concerto BB101, completed in October 1931. Symmetries abound at
many pitch and rhythmic levels, as also in its overall five-part
‘bridge’ (ABCBA) structure, with the third movement being a free
variation of the first, and the second movement of an Adagio–
Scherzo–Adagio construction. Stravinsky is again a decided
influence upon Bartók’s use of instruments – the strings are not used
until the second movement – and upon his thematic material, which
occasionally alludes to the early Parisian ballets, notably The
Firebird and Petrushka. Apart from this concerto Bartók composed
no substantial new works during 1931–4.

During these fallow years, coinciding with the worst years of the
Depression, Bartók was occupied with several arrangements of
existing compositions and series of miniature ‘educational’ pieces.
His publishers, anxious to counter falling sales by promoting his
more popular piano or vocal compositions in new quarters,
encouraged him to engage in four orchestral arrangements: of his
Sonatina (via Gertler’s violin and piano transcription) as Erdélyi
táncok (‘Transylvanian Dances’) BB102b in 1931; of five of his piano
pieces from 1908–11 in Magyar képek (‘Hungarian Sketches’) BB103
in 1931; of nine of his Tizenöt magyar parasztdal (‘Fifteen
Hungarian Peasant Songs’) BB79 as Magyar parasztdalok
(‘Hungarian Peasant Songs’) BB107 in 1933; and, in 1933, of five of
his Húsz magyar népdal (‘Twenty Hungarian Folksongs’) (1929) as
Magyar népdalok (‘Hungarian Folksongs’) BB108 for voice and
orchestra. Bartók did not manage to complete other planned

Page 26 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 orchestrations of selected pieces from Out of Doors and Nine Little
Piano Pieces; nor did he embark upon a planned ‘string symphony’
based on the Fourth String Quartet.

Apart from this relatively mechanical work of arrangement, Bartók

composed the Forty-four Duos BB104 for violins during 1931. These
pieces arose through a request from the German violin pedagogue
Erich Doflein for permission to set some of Bartók’s For Children
pieces in Doflein’s Geigenschulwerk. Bartók was excited by Doflein’s
project and offered to write new pieces which would introduce
simple folk music (or, in two numbers, imitations) from a much
greater range of cultures: Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Ukrainian
and ‘Arabic’, as well as Slovak and Hungarian. When in 1932 Bartók
saw many of these pieces within the context of Doflein’s five-volume
progressive ‘violin school’, he formed a broader plan of his own: a
series of piano pieces, graded from very easy to recital standard,
which he later called Mikrokosmos (BB105). During the summer of
1932 he composed some 35 pieces, ranging in difficulty from ‘In
Dorian Mode’ (no.32) to ‘Chromatic Invention III’ (no.145). When his
young son, Péter, began piano lessons with his father in 1933, Bartók
had an immediate incentive to compose many simple pieces; the
same year he composed a further 30 pieces, including seven which
eventually found their way into the first volume, comprising the
easiest pieces, and nearly half of the sixth volume, the most difficult.
Another 20 pieces were added to the collection in 1934, after which
Bartók produced only occasional items until a second phase of
intense activity in 1937–9.

6. 1934–40.

In the summer of 1934 Bartók achieved a professional goal he had

desired for over two decades: a full-time position as an
ethnomusicologist. Within weeks of Dohnányi being appointed
director of the Budapest Academy of Music Bartók received
permission to transfer to the Academy of Sciences, where for the
following six years, in conjunction with Kodály, he led a small team
of folk-music researchers in an omnibus Hungarian folk-music
project. Bartók was overjoyed at the release from institutional
teaching, although he still maintained a small number of private
piano pupils to supplement his income. The Academy of Sciences’
project was based upon a proposal which Bartók and Kodály had
originally made to the Kisfaludy Society in 1913 for a ‘complete,
rigorously critical and exact publication’ of Hungarian folk music.
The number of items, estimated at nearly 6,000 in 1913, had grown
to about 14,000 by the time Bartók closed the collection in 1938. Of
these about one fifth had been collected by Bartók himself. By 1940
he had succeeded in refining a complex, closed classification system
for the melodies, which paid particular attention to rhythmic
characteristics, and his team had transcribed or revised existing
transcriptions of the tunes, yet he had managed neither to draft a
justificatory introduction nor to address important editorial

Page 27 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 questions. More seriously, his classification system had diverged
considerably from that which Kodály had understood would be used.
(Over the years of their acquaintance Bartók and Kodály had come to
differ on many fundamental questions on music, for instance on the
relative melodic versus rhythmic importance in categorization, and
even on how differentiated or normalized the ideal transcription
should be.) Although both Bartók and Kodály are recognized as the
general editors of the Academy’s A magyar népzene tára series, the
first volume of which appeared in 1951, it was neither Bartók’s nor
Kodály’s ‘system’ of classification which would ultimately prevail,
but rather a principally genre-based one to which Pál Járdányi was a
principal contributor. The first volume of the re-assembled Bartók
system only appeared in 1991.

Bartók’s transfer to the Academy of Sciences gave him greater

flexibility in engaging his interests in other folk musics. He made
final revisions to his Slovak study in 1935–6 and continued to work
on his Romanian collections, leading to an expensive, failed attempt
at self-publication in 1940. The draft of another study, posthumously
published as Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor (Princeton, NJ,
1976), resulted from Bartók’s fieldwork in Anatolia during 1936, as
part of his assignment to advise the Turkish authorities on the
collecting of national folksong and other educational questions. He
also further indulged his passion for east European folk music, in
which he paid particular attention to south Slavic and Bulgarian
musics. The irregular Bulgarian rhythms and metres, awareness of
which had caused him considerably to revise his notations of
Romanian folk music in the early 1930s, came to exert an important
force upon his own compositions, and he developed but did not
follow through plans to visit Bulgaria in 1935 to pursue these
interests.

As a pianist Bartók started to claw back engagements from the

depressed levels of 1932–4, and during 1934–40 he performed
approximately equally at home and abroad. Engagements abroad
were often hard to secure, due to the widespread popularity of
‘home preference’ schemes to assist local artists, to increasing
tensions with Romania, and also to lack of opportunities for Bartók
in Nazi Germany. Since 1933 German radio stations had not offered
him engagements; after two years of negotiations to arrange an
orchestral performance in Berlin, he finally in mid-1937 decided no
longer to seek engagements in Germany. Accordingly, in the final
years of the 1930s he performed more in Hungary, although he also
developed some new touring circuits in Switzerland, the Low
Countries and Italy, where he gave his last European performances
abroad in December 1939. As a soloist during these years Bartók
highlighted his Piano Concerto no.2, which was gaining a
considerably better press than no.1. As a chamber player he forged
an important new partnership, with his wife, Ditta. Their concert
début took place on 16 January 1938, as the two pianists in the
première of Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. Over the
following five years she was his frequent stage companion.

Page 28 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 The years 1934–40 constituted, notwithstanding the slide towards
war, the pinnacle of Bartók the composer; he produced masterpieces
in each of his major genres: chamber, orchestral, vocal and piano
music. The few works of his final American years are, despite their
concert popularity, probably best seen as compositional addenda to
these powerfully integrated creative statements. Apart from an
arrangement for piano of several of the Forty-four Duos, entitled
Petite suite (BB113), all pieces of this period are original
compositions, nearly all written to commission. They exhibit a
greater distance from any models of Bartók’s contemporaries than
do the works of preceding or following periods, and are also less
immediately reflective of his recent folk-music findings than hitherto.
Their homogeneity of style is unparalleled in Bartók’s output, and
reflects the full flowering of that Bachian aesthetic to which he had
been gravitating since 1926. Technically, this achievement was
partly the result of the advanced state of evolution of Bartók’s
contrapuntal and chromatic writing, and also of his handling of
variation. In his later Harvard lectures (1943) Bartók identified
polymodal chromaticism as a main ingredient of his idiom. By this he
meant a kind of chromaticism which draws its elements from strands
of different modes based upon a single fundamental note; ex.5 shows
a typical, Lydian-Phrygian polymodal construction. From this Bartók
further developed a structural (that is, non-embellishing) type of
‘melodic new chromaticism’ in which earlier modal obligations are
dispensed with, even though allegiance to one focal note is retained.
The opening ‘Arabic’ melody in the Dance Suite was identified by
Bartók as his first ‘new chromatic’ melody, while he also referred, in
his lectures, to examples in a majority of the works of 1934–40, of
which the twisting A-based fugal theme in the first movement of the
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is perhaps the most
famous. The 12-note ‘row’ theme found in the outer movements of
the Violin Concerto (BB117) of 1937–8 (Bartók’s second concerto for
the instrument, though never numbered by the composer) is another
instance of such chromaticism, with which, as reported by Yehudi
Menuhin, Bartók ‘wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all
12 tones and still remain tonal’.

Ex.5 Lydian-Phrygian polymodal chromaticism

Bartók’s fascination with documenting the ever-changing variants of

folk music had by the mid-to-late 1930s also become an ingrained
aspect of his compositional strategy. In 1937 he declared to the
Belgian scholar Denijs Dille that ‘I do not like to repeat a musical
thought unchanged, and I never repeat a detail unchanged …. The
extreme variety that characterizes our folk music is, at the same

Page 29 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 time, a manifestation of my own nature’. That variational orientation
is seen in Bartók’s very occasional theme-and-variation movements,
such as the second movement of the Violin Concerto ‘no.2’; but much
more in his frequent writing of finales as variants of opening
movements, his incessant variation (often involving inversion) of
exposition material in recapitulations, and his bar-by-bar evolving
variation of thematic and motivic materials. It is not by chance that
in over 30 statements of Bartók’s 12-note theme in the opening
movement of the Violin Concerto no two statements are identical.

Most representative of the 1934–40 period, although each is of a

very different construction, are four chamber works. Bartók’s last
two string quartets, the Fifth (BB110) of 1934 and the Sixth (BB119)
of 1939, frame the period’s output. Written to a commission from
Elizabeth Sprague-Coolidge, the Fifth, like its predecessor, has five
movements arranged symmetrically around the central, third
movement, in this case a Scherzo and Trio in Bulgarian metres.
Bartók’s variational play is seen nowhere better than in a banal
‘barrel-organ’ interlude near the end of the finale, which turns out to
be an inverted, diatonic relative of that movement’s opening
chromatic theme. By contrast, the Sixth String Quartet is in four
movements, and stylistically retrospective, even nostalgic. Its mesto,
solo viola ritornello theme recalls the opening dirge of the First
Quartet, while the slow finale looks back to the grim ending of the
Quartet no.2. Bartók originally intended to have a fast, dance-like
finale, but the brooding ritornello came so to grow through the work
– in duration, complexity and instrumental involvement – that it
eventually consumed the entire role of finale.

Between these two quartets Bartók composed two chamber works

for very different ensembles; in 1937 the Sonata for two pianos and
percussion BB115, his only chamber work to involve percussion, and
in 1938 Contrasts BB116, the only one to involve a wind instrument.
The three orchestral works which Bartók had written since 1926
which used piano and percussion had convinced him that one piano
could not provide sufficient balance to the sharp sounds of the
percussion section – hence the Sonata’s instrumentation. Bartók
demanded intricate coordination from the two percussionists
(although six were used in one early Italian performance), not just in
the virtuoso playing of their seven instruments but also in achieving
subtle distinctions of sound quality through using different wooden
or metal beaters, and even the blade of a pocket-knife. The three-
movement structure, as with the immediately preceding Music for
Strings, Percussion and Celesta, moves from a ‘closed’, twisting
opening chromaticism to the open, ‘acoustic’ scale forms of the
finale. Moreover, the larger and smaller sections of these two works
were early identified to have an uncanny sense of proportion, which
the Hungarian analyst Ernő Lendvai from the late 1940s onwards
claimed as manifestations of golden section principles (See
Fibonacci series, and Golden number). Although Bartók appears not
to have known about such proportions, and many of Lendvai’s
calculations have since been discredited, it is undeniable that a fine
sense of proportion and of chromatic–diatonic balance was

Page 30 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 articulated in these two works. Altogether different in form and
intention was Bartók’s Contrasts, commissioned by Benny Goodman
as a light two-movement piece of about six minutes’ duration, with
each movement to fit on one record side. Bartók, however, exceeded
both duration and movement expectations by producing a three-
movement work which lasts some 15 minutes. Within the original
slow–fast rhapsodic frame, he inserted a ‘Relaxation’ movement in
which the slowly moving clarinet and violin simultaneously mirror
each other’s lines. In Contrasts Bartók formally acknowledged with
the first movement’s title ‘Verbunkos’ the resurrection of that kind of
stylized national dance which had characterized some of his earliest
works, had then been rejected under the sway of peasant music, but
had slowly been re-emerging since the violin rhapsodies of the late
1920s.

The most significant of his chamber-orchestral works of the period is

Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta BB114, written for Paul
Sacher and the Basle Chamber Orchestra during the summer of
1936. The piece shows great originality at all levels of its
construction and seamlessly integrates the broadest range of
Bartók’s folk-music and art-music sources. Formal and pitch
symmetries are plentiful, as in the A–C–F♯–A tonal pattern of the four
movements, the forward and reverse cycles of 5ths of the opening
fugue, and the ABCBA ‘bridge’ form of the third-movement Adagio.
Bartók’s variation of materials is constant, with a particularly
poignant example in the finale, where, following the model of his
Fifth Quartet, a calmo, rhythmically uniform version of the
movement’s snappy opening theme momentarily halts the
concluding rush. A sense of monothematicism is achieved through
the reintroduction of the opening movement’s chromatic fugue
theme in each succeeding movement: as a contour model for the
second’s main subject, as the cement between each block of the
third’s bridge form, and, using scalar expansion (ex.6), as a grand
‘acoustic’ transformation at the culmination of the finale. Less
technically demanding and profound, but even more in keeping with
Bartók’s Baroque aesthetic is the Divertimento BB118 of 1939, also
composed for Sacher, which Bartók described as a cross between a
concerto grosso and a concertino.

Ex.6 Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta: chromatic and

‘acoustic’ scalar bases, movt 1, 1–4 and movt 4, 203–8

Page 31 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 The only work for full orchestra during the latter 1930s is the three-
movement Violin Concerto ‘no.2’, written to a commission from
Zoltán Székely. Not having written a violin concerto in three decades
and never having heard a full performance of the earlier one, Bartók
was nervous about the balance between soloist and orchestra.
However, when he finally heard the work performed, in 1943, he was
delighted that ‘nothing had to be changed’. The concerto is probably
Bartók’s most diverse study in variation, not just in the theme and
variations of the second movement, which is a virtual catalogue of
his techniques, or in the ever-changing forms of his 12-note theme in
the outer movements, but also in the way in which the third
movement is derived entirely from first-movement material. To
Székely, who had requested a traditional concerto, he confided: ‘so I
managed to outwit you. I wrote variations after all’. Even within the
first movement, thematic interrelationships and textural
transformations are most ingenious: the placid solo violin melody in
the development section, for instance, reveals itself to be a literal
quotation of the movement’s opening pizzicato bass line. A
verbunkos character is again present in the concerto’s opening, with
its suggestion of Transylvanian fiddlers. As in several of Bartók’s
later compositions, the ending was reworked to give a more
expansive peroration in which the solo violin continues playing to
the end.

During 1935–6 Bartók composed his last choral pieces, the Twenty-
Seven Two- and Three-part Choruses BB111 for children’s and
women’s choruses, and Elmúlt időkből (‘From Olden Times’) BB112,
three songs for male chorus. Both works present Bartók’s own
fashionings of folk texts, the short choruses dealing with the
domestic world of childhood and adolescence, the longer male
chorus songs with the joys and sorrows of peasant life. Kodály, for
whose growing choral movement the Twenty-Seven Choruses were
written, later wrote that Bartók’s recent studies of Palestrina might
have been a source of inspiration for the heightened polyphonic
plasticity and imitational resourcefulness found in these pieces.
Despite the quality of Bartók’s writing these two works have not
gained the level of international attention accorded to Bartók’s late
instrumental works, partly because of their educational associations
and partly because of the intractably Hungarian nature of their
prosody.

At the same time as Bartók was writing this string of masterworks,

his collection of Mikrokosmos piano pieces continued to grow.
Already on 9 February 1937 he had given the public première of 27
of them at an ISCM concert in London, and he continued to unveil
such selections in following years. During 1937 he composed ten,
mainly more advanced pieces, including five of the ‘Six Dances in
Bulgarian Rhythm’; these brought what became the sixth volume
almost to completion. He added some 50 further pieces in the
following two years, including much of the first volume, and also the
33 exercises. In the preface which Bartók sent with the completed
collection of 153 pieces to his new publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, in
November 1939, he drew attention to the versatility of the series. He

Page 32 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 had included a second piano part in four pieces, to encourage early
ensemble playing, and another four pieces were songs (‘All
instrumental study or training should really commence with the
student singing’). Ten other pieces were recommended for playing
on the harpsichord. Bartók stressed that his collection did not
present a complete ‘progressive method’, but rather a base to which
works by other composers, such as Bach and Czerny, should be
added. In a letter to Boosey & Hawkes of 13 February 1940, he
explained that he saw Mikrokosmos as a bridge leading from his own
20th-century shore to an older one, either through ‘centuries-old folk
music’ or through such typical devices of older art music as canon
and imitation. With the completion of both Mikrokosmos and the
Sixth String Quartet in November 1939 Bartók entered his longest
compositionally unproductive period, which lasted until 1943.

From his vantage point as a committee member of the League of

Nations, Bartók was a direct witness to the deterioration in human
rights and growing nationalistic intolerance which swept so many
parts of Europe during the 1930s. His ethnomusicological work was
still occasionally attacked by nationalists in both Hungary and
Romania, and the publication of his Slovak collection was finally
ruled out in early 1939, the victim of other nationalist tensions.
Bartók was acutely distressed at Germany’s dismemberment of
Czechoslovakia in 1938–9, but it was Germany’s annexation of
Austria in March 1938 which had the most immediate effect upon
him. Bartók’s then publisher, Universal, was rapidly Nazified, and his
main royalty agencies, AKM and Austromechana, were merged with
the corresponding German organizations. Bartók quickly sought to
secure publication through Boosey & Hawkes, and to join the British
PRS. His worries about when Hungary, too, might succumb to Nazi
domination caused him in late 1937 to start thinking about a safe
haven for his more valuable manuscripts, and in April 1938 to start
their despatch, first to Switzerland, and then, via London, to the
United States, where they later became the basis of the New York
Bartók Archives. In 1988 they entered the private collection of Péter
Bartók in Homosassa, Florida. During the first half of 1939 Bartók
seriously investigated the possibility of emigrating to Turkey, before
deciding that the USA was the most desirable personal refuge.
However, on 13 April 1938 Bartók had written ‘I have my mother
here: shall I abandon her altogether in her last years? – No, I cannot
do that!’; and only on her death in December 1939 did he feel
morally free to leave. Despite the precarious times – with the period
of ‘phoney war’ drawing to a close – Bartók undertook a successful
concert tour of the USA during April–May 1940. Noteworthy were a
sonata recital with Szigeti at the Library of Congress in Washington
and a Columbia recording session of Contrasts in New York with
Szigeti and Goodman. His confidence in a move of indefinite
duration was immeasurably strengthened when he came to know of
a large collection of Serbo-Croat field recordings undertaken by a
Harvard professor, Milman Parry, and his associate, Albert B. Lord,
in 1933–5.

Page 33 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Back in Budapest by late May of 1940, Bartók started to plan for his
permanent return to the USA with his wife in October 1940.
Bureaucratic complications associated with indefinitely leaving
Hungary before the pensionable age of 60, when he would also
become exempt from military service, as well as visa, travel and
currency difficulties, were compounded by persistent pains in
Bartók’s right shoulder, which required daily hydrotherapy. These
pains were later interpreted as the first signs of his eventually fatal
blood disorders. A final orchestral concert for both husband and wife
was held at the Budapest Academy of Music on 8 October 1940,
before they travelled to New York, via Lisbon.

7. 1940–45.

Bartók, Béla 5. 1926–34. 7. 1940–45.: Ex.4 Nine Little Piano Pieces,

Menuetto, 3–4, 9–10

Bartók lived in the USA for the remainder of his life. After the trials
of the first few months, with the couple’s early two-piano concerts
gaining less than enthusiastic receptions and insecurities over
accommodation, finances, passports and their temporarily mislaid
Hungarian luggage, Bartók settled into the familiar routine of
regular ethnomusicological work and occasional concert tours.
During his American years he declined several offers of composition-
teaching positions, although he did privately teach a few students
piano or composition. In November 1940 Columbia University
awarded him an honorary doctorate, and during 1941–2 he held a
research appointment there, working on Parry’s Serbo-Croatian
collection, which was on loan from Harvard. That work eventually
resulted in the volume Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951),
of which Bartók completed the musical parts and Lord the textual.
Probably Bartók’s greatest discovery among this Serbo-Croat
material lay with Dalmatian chromatic folk tunes. There he came
upon a form of melodic chromaticism very similar to the ‘new
chromaticism’ found in his own compositions since the Dance Suite.
Moreover, he found that his compositional technique of melodic
transformation through expansion or contraction of scalar intervals
(exx.4 and 6) occurred naturally among the Dalmatians. Their

Page 34 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 chromatic melodies were none other than compressed diatonic
melodies of surrounding areas. Another Dalmatian effect, which
Bartók later compositionally imitated, involved the playing or singing
of chromatic tunes in two parallel parts, separated by intervals such
as major 2nds or minor 7ths. Mainly in his private time, Bartók also
worked on the final forms of his volumes of Romanian instrumental
and vocal melodies, which were essentially complete by December
1942, and of Romanian folk texts, which took until late 1944. He also
revised and polished his Turkish volume, which was finished in late
1943. Without prospect of publication for either, Bartók deposited
them in the music library at Columbia, to be available ‘to those few
persons (very few indeed) who may be interested in them’. These
Romanian volumes were published in 1967, the Turkish in 1976. A
further ethnomusicological appointment, for work on Amerindian
music, was periodically offered by the University of Washington,
Seattle, but never taken up.

The ‘magnificent possibilities’ to which Bartók’s New York agent had

made reference in 1940 soon turned out to be illusory. Twice during
1941 he ventured on tours across the continent, presenting
numerous solo or two-piano recitals in universities or colleges. More
prestigious engagements were few. His last solo concerto
performances took place in Chicago on 20 and 21 November 1941,
and his last public appearances were with his wife on 21 and 22
January 1943, when Reiner conducted the American première of his
Concerto for two pianos, percussion and orchestra BB121, an
arrangement of the Sonata for two pianos and percussion. After
January 1943 Bartók did still seek performing engagements, and
though in January 1945 he played for a New Jersey radio broadcast,
for a variety of health and logistical reasons no further public
performances followed. As a composer, too, his American output was
initially meagre. The orchestral version of the Sonata was made in
1940 and the arrangement of his Second Suite, as the Suite for Two
Pianos op.4b BB122, in 1941. But he did not engage in any original
composition until the spring of 1942, when some ideas emerged
perhaps for a suggested concerto for ‘combinations of solo
instruments and string orchestra’. From April 1942, however,
chronic illness intervened and Bartók put this work aside.

Although suffering more acutely, Bartók decided to go ahead with a

visiting appointment at Harvard for the spring semester of 1943.
There his duties were to present one recital and two lecture series
on recent Hungarian music, principally his own and that of Kodály,
and on folksong and ethnomusicological procedure. While Bartók
only managed to present three of the first series’ lectures and to
draft a fourth, these Harvard lectures provide Bartók’s most candid
and detailed explanation of his compositional techniques. He was
then hospitalized, with a tentative diagnosis of blood (polycythemia)
and lung (tuberculosis) disorders. The American Society of
Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), of which Bartók was
not a member, decided to underwrite the costs of his medical
treatment and recuperation. For the following three summers
recovery took him to Saranac Lake in New York State, and for the

Page 35 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 1943–4 winter to a sanatorium in Asheville, North Carolina. It was
while on these rest cures away from New York that Bartók’s final
compositions were written.

The Concerto for Orchestra BB123 was commissioned by the

Koussevitzky Music Foundation in May 1943. Probably drawing on
some of his fleeting ideas from 1942, Bartók started in August 1943
to draft the work in five movements, less overtly symmetrical,
however, than Bartók’s other recent five-movement compositions.
The various folk-music and art-music components of its style are also
less integrated than in his music of the 1930s. In a programme note
Bartók depicted the work’s mood as gradually progressing from the
‘sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of
the third, to the life-assertion of the last one’. The exception to this
progression, as Bartók noted, was the jesting ‘game of pairs’ second
movement, in which he imitated the two-part parallel Dalmatian
style found in Parry’s collection. The fourth movement, ‘Intermezzo
interrotto’, is uncharacteristically cheeky in mood, with its parody of
a tune from Shostakovich’s then-popular Seventh Symphony, and
nostalgic quotation of a popular song, Szep vagy, gyönyörű vagy
Magyarország (‘You are lovely, you are beautiful, Hungary’) by
Zsigmond Vincze. Another strong, nostalgic influence upon the first
and third movements is Bartók’s own style from the 1908–11 period,
in particular that of Bluebeard’s Castle. The life-asserting finale is,
however, a boisterous roll-call of some of Bartók’s favourite folk
styles. It attempts, if with limited success, to combine aspects of
sonata form with the loose ‘chain’ forms which Bartók had invoked
in the second and third movements. First performed in Boston on 1
December 1944, the Concerto for Orchestra proved immediately
attractive to the American public, although Bartók was soon
persuaded to write a second, less abrupt ending to the finale.
Whether, or how much, Bartók’s new accessibility betrayed his
longer-term creative directions became a frequent point of debate
after his death.

During October 1943 Bartók heard excellent multiple performances

of his Violin Concerto (‘no.2’) in the hands of Tossy Spivakovsky, and
in November inspired performances of his First Violin Sonata from
Menuhin. On Menuhin’s suggestion of a commission, Bartók had by
14 March 1944 written the four-movement Sonata for solo violin
BB124, a work of overt homage to Bach, in particular Bach’s solo
Sonata in C, which Bartók had heard Menuhin perform. Of his four
major American works this astringent sonata could, however, least
be accused of stylistic compromise. Its use of Baroque imitative
techniques is sustained in the first movement, marked Tempo di
ciaccona, and also in the second movement, an ambitious four-voiced
fugue whose chromatic subject is characterized by competing major
and minor 3rds. The Presto finale is significant in introducing long
passages of quarter-tone writing, and some reference to third-tones.
However, only Bartók’s semitonal alternatives were included in
Menuhin’s posthumous edition of the work.

Page 36 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 While writing the sonata Bartók’s health again declined. The first
definite signs of leukaemia were detected in the spring of 1944,
although through the use of blood transfusions and drugs, including
penicillin, Bartók’s condition was able to be held reasonably stable
until the late summer of 1945. During the summer of 1944
ethnomusicological demands largely took over from composition, but
Bartók also regained his enthusiasm for performance, even to the
extent of wanting to make new recordings of his own works. His
financial circumstances, which had been particularly exacerbated
since 1941 because of double taxation on his British-derived royalty
income, were now somewhat more secure. The successful premières
of his first two American works within a week in late 1944 further
reinforced his confidence, and led to several offers of commissions
during the first half of 1945.

Bartók’s final two substantial compositions were both concertos.

While in Saranac during July–August 1945 he worked intensively on
the Third Piano Concerto BB127, intended for his wife to perform, in
tandem with the Viola Concerto BB128, commissioned by William
Primrose. The idea of a new piano concerto grew from Bartók’s
realization that his wife could not master some of the more
challenging sections of his previous one. In the Third, consequently,
he wanted something texturally lighter and is reported to have
examined Grieg’s concerto as one possible model for this new
lucidity. Bartók’s folk-, art- and nature-derived inspirations in the
work are relatively undisguised. The second movement, for instance,
begins with an extended imitation of Beethoven’s ‘Heiliger
Dankgesang’ (from the String Quartet in A minor op.132), while its
middle, ‘Night Music’ section makes explicit reference to the call of
the rufous-sided towhee bird, which Bartók had noted down while in
North Carolina.

Bartók died in New York on 26 September 1945, after a month-long

relapse in health. During his final weeks he managed to complete
the Third Piano Concerto, except for the scoring of the final 17 bars,
which his colleague Tibor Serly quickly accomplished. His Viola
Concerto, however, only remained in sketch, the solo part suggesting
a work of comparable lucidity and harmonic restraint to the piano
concerto, but with incomplete and less conclusive detail about
instrumentation, texture and even the final form. In early August
1945 Bartók had written to Primrose about his concept of a four-
movement work with joining ritornello passages, but the evidence of
the manuscript suggests only three movements with
interconnecting, non-ritornello passages. Since 1945 several
attempts have been made to complete the concerto, either for viola
or cello. Two of the viola versions have ‘authorized’ status: that
undertaken by Tibor Serly with additional input by Primrose, which
was published in 1950 shortly after the première, and a ‘revised
version’ of 1995 prepared by Péter Bartók and Nelson
Dellamaggiore.

Page 37 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 8. Legacy.

Dying within weeks of the end of World War II, Bartók narrowly
missed the wave of popularity which greeted his music in the first
postwar decade. A Hungarian diaspora of conductors (Reiner,
Doráti), violinists (Székely, Szigeti) and pianists (Kentner, Sándor)
energetically spread his music around the world, as did recent
commissioners of his works (Sacher, Koussevitzky, Menuhin and
Primrose).

His later works, particularly the orchestral and chamber music,

gained increasing access to mainstream concerts, sometimes to the
chagrin of the postwar avant garde. Within Hungary itself, Bartók’s
compositions were during the late 1940s and early 1950s subjected
to investigation for their socialist-realist qualities, with approval
being accorded to his folksong settings, lighter piano works, and
such orchestral works as the Dance Suite, and disapproval to what
one Hungarian critic called ‘formalist, modernist works written in an
abstract language’, such as The Miraculous Mandarin, the first two
piano concertos, the Fourth String Quartet and the Cantata profana.
The excesses of this phase passed with the early 1950s, however,
and by the mid-1950s Bartók’s works were in official favour with the
communist authorities, just as his life was now interpreted as a
socialist symbol of resistance both to European fascists and to
American capitalists. In the 1950s, however, a complex dispute arose
concerning the estates which Bartók had left, by different wills, in
Hungary and America. Lasting into the 1980s, this dispute
perpetuated a ‘cold war’ attitude of musical and scholarly non-
cooperation between the two countries of his residence, and resulted
in retarded dissemination of many important primary-source
materials as well as distinctly different research traditions and
repertory focusses.

Bartók’s influence upon other composers certainly lacked the

intensity and dogmatic hold of Schoenberg, or the widespread
impact of the neo-classical Stravinsky. Always averse to teaching
composition, Bartók did not leave behind any loyal ‘school’. The
composer most directly influenced by Bartók, and Bartók in turn by
him, was undoubtedly Kodály. So closely did the two collaborate,
especially in their earlier years, that the extent of their
interdependence cannot be fully known. Leading composers of
following generations on whose works Bartók exerted some measure
of direct influence include Messiaen, Lutosławski, Britten, Ginastera,
Copland and Crumb. Among Hungarians, György Kroó (in Ránki,
B1987) has noted that Bartók provided a powerful model particularly
for composers emerging between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, not
so much in terms of specific techniques (although there had since
1945 been much superficial imitation of his distinctive string and
percussion sounds, and of a narrow band of formal and folksong
models) as in the human and professional ideals which he offered, as
Hungarian music sought to throw off its postwar isolation and to re-
establish a pan-European significance.

Page 38 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 For a naturally reluctant teacher Bartók left a surprisingly powerful
pedagogic legacy. That legacy lies, to a minor extent, in the students
of his Academy and private piano lessons, who included the
conductor Fritz Reiner, the pianists Lajos Heimlich (Hernádi), Ernő
Balogh, Ditta Pásztory and Andor Földes, the ethnomusicologist Jenő
Deutsch, and, briefly, the conductor Georg Solti. More significant,
however, for broader musical education were Bartók’s publications:
the many, early instructive editions of piano ‘classics’ and studies
which he produced between 1907 and the mid-1920s, as well as the
Bartók-Reschofsky Piano Method, but, above all, his compositions for
young pianists (For Children, Mikrokosmos), violinists (Forty-four
Duos) and singers (Twenty-seven Choruses and many simpler
folksong arrangements). That Bartók produced the most significant
of these works in the 1930s, at the height of his maturity, attests to
the importance which he placed on educating a new generation in
contemporary styles.

As a performer, Bartók’s personal legacy was not great. With his

dour personality and diffident platform manners he did not manage
to thrill the great public; within the Hungarian context he was
overshadowed by his better-known contemporary Ernő Dohnányi. An
outstanding corner of his pianistic legacy is, nonetheless, the
collection of gramophone, piano-roll and live recordings, dating from
his last quarter-century. These performances, with their wealth of
tonal shadings, tempo fluctuations and occasional deviations from
the published scores, remind present-day interpreters of the
essentially Romantic underpinning to Bartók’s performing art.

The ethnomusicological legacy of Bartók has been varied. Within the

international history of that discipline, his stature is more that of a
precursor than of a seminal figure. His significance outside Hungary
is now largely historic, as an early proponent of transcriptional
exactitude rather than as a founder of enduring disciplinary
principles. Had he lived to complete his envisaged comparative
study of eastern European folk musics his international significance
might well have been more profound. Within Hungary his
ethnomusicological legacy is perpetuated in the Academy of
Sciences’ long-term projects for a complete edition of Hungarian folk
music and a complete collection of Bartók’s own systematization of
Hungarian folksong, both of which remain substantially unpublished.
The greatest legacy of Bartók’s folk-music studies, however,
undoubtedly lies in his own compositions. It was exactly those
ethnomusicological fascinations with musical detail and subtle
observations of variant forms (which have led to periodic
accusations from latter-day ethnomusicologists that he was not
‘seeing the wood for the trees’) which fed his greatest creative
strengths. What contemporaries such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky
could not well appreciate was that Bartók’s folk-music studies
provided him with a limitless arsenal for creative transformation. His
approach to art-music sources was similarly transformational, as his
Romanian colleague Constantin Brăiloiu once observed:
‘Impressionism, polytonality, atonality, motorism: Bartók has

Page 39 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 passionately lived through all these revolutions and reshaped, as it
were, for his own use, with his own rich resources, all systems’ (in
Moreux, E1949).

9. Interpretation and analysis.

Bartók’s highly synthetic process of composition has elicited diverse

interpretations of his works. These interpretations have often plotted
his achievement as a composer against such generalized coordinates
as East and West, Romanticism and Modernism, nationalism and
internationalism. More conservative studies of his art have tended to
emphasize the first coordinate of these pairs, while more progressive
studies, the second. In aesthetic terms Bartók plotted himself as
moving along a spectrum from Beethoven (artist and harmonist)
towards Bach (craftsman and contrapuntalist), with a decisive point
of change around 1926. Between the frequently claimed modernist
poles of Schoenberg (Expressionist or emancipator of pitch) and
Stravinsky (neoclassicist or emancipator of rhythm), Bartók has
sometimes been interpreted as a figure of compromise, and
therefore of a lesser creative significance. János Kárpáti (in Crow,
B1976), however, views Bartók’s position among modernists as one
of synthesizing greatness:

in Bartók’s art there is not a simple association between

these two differing musical conceptions [Schoenberg and
Stravinsky] but an organic synthesis of them. Far from
wishing to reconcile the two extremes, Bartók merely used
them in forming his own creative system … he found a point
upon which the heritage of the past and the revolution of
the present – in Adorno’s words, restoration and progress –
were converging.

Few commentators agree on the precise balance of Bartók’s

syntheses, for his approach to composition was highly eclectic. He
progressed pragmatically through life, ever fascinated by new folk-
or art-music experiences and contemptuous of theorizing about
music. Most noticeably after his several fallow periods of
compositional incubation – 1905–7, 1912–14, 1923–6, 1931–4, 1940–
3 – Bartók launched into fresh creative phases with varying degrees
of stylistic continuity. The most marked changes in compositional
direction could be considered to have taken place in 1907–8 and
1926. Probably the most significant speculative deviation in his
output occurred during 1918–22, when, under the influence of both
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Bartók seemed to be approaching an
atonal goal. The 1934–40 period, with its many major works in
chamber, orchestral, vocal and solo piano genres, shows a more
regular transcendence of inspirational sources than does any other;
accordingly, these pieces are often deemed his most mature. Bartók
himself was indifferent to charges of eclecticism or ‘borrowing’. He
considered the concept of artistic originality an outworn Romantic-

Page 40 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 era obsession, and openly acknowledged his liberal attitude to the
use of materials by quoting Molière’s defence to a charge of
plagiarism, ‘Je prends mon bien où je le trouve’.

Bartók’s transformational approach to such a wide body of sources

has generated a huge variety of analyses of his music. Depending
upon the sources, theories or dialectical poles from which analyses
are initiated, starkly different results can be educed. It is perhaps a
measure of greatness that Bartók’s music can accommodate so many
different approaches yet ultimately defies them all. No one all-
embracing theory for his music is, therefore, likely to emerge.
Rather, reflecting Bartók’s own eclecticism and relatively
untheorized attitude to composition, an appropriate range of
differing analytical approaches usually produces the best overall
understanding of individual works or, indeed, the entire output.

Many analysts of Bartók’s music have based their approaches upon

the composer’s own primary-source materials, as revealed in such
documents as essays, analyses, recordings and the very notations of
his works. Those interested in the music’s pitch, rhythmic or
variational components of folk origin have used Bartók’s
ethnomusicological treatises, with their own detailed analyses, as a
profitable starting point (see Kárpáti, G1956; Burlas, E1971; Lenoir,
E1986; László, E1995). Analysts of form (such as Hunkemöller,
G1982, G1983) have drawn productively on Bartók’s work analyses,
particularly those of his later chamber pieces with their evidence of
large-scale symmetrical thinking. Bartók’s descriptions of the phases
of his modal and tonal practice, most valuably in his Harvard
lectures of 1943, have strongly influenced pitch analyses of his later
compositions (see Oramo, F1977, F1980; Kárpáti, G1967, enlarged
1994); his terms ‘polymodal chromaticism’ and ‘new chromaticism’
have thereby entered the broader analytical literature. As
compositional sketches and drafts have become increasingly
available, they have led to notationally-based forms of semiotic
analysis (see Gillies, F1989, F1993). Even Bartók’s recordings have
inspired close observation, not just of his performing style but also of
his ‘live’ variational tendencies (see Somfai in Documenta
bartókiana, 1977).

Nevertheless, the majority of analytical studies have sought their

illumination through approaches less beholden to the composer’s
own documentary legacy. Among traditional formal analysts, Halsey
Stevens (D1953) established enduring conclusions, particularly
about the string quartets. Detailed motivic or thematic analyses have
proven most analytically fruitful with such later works as the Violin
Concerto ‘no.2’ (see Michael, G1976; Somfai, G1977; Weiss-Aigner,
G1993–4), while Schenkerian approaches have been applied to the
Fourth String Quartet (Travis, G1970) and the Mikrokosmos pieces
(Waldbauer, G1982, G1987). Antokoletz (F1984), through
concentration on the interaction of intervallic cells, scalar
constructions, interval cycles and axes of symmetries, has
demonstrated how Bartók progressively transformed folk-music
sources into the more abstract principles of his compositions. Forte’s

Page 41 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 pitch-class set theory has been usefully drawn upon in analyses of
both tonal and atonal works (see Cohn, F1988, F1991; Wilson,
F1992) while Forte (F1993) has also contributed to the relatively
neglected field of analysis of Bartókian rhythm. ‘Functional’ analyses
using aspects of sol-fa solmization have been carried out by several
Hungarian scholars, notably Lendvai (F1983) and Bárdos (F1972).
Lendvai’s contribution to the analysis of proportions, particularly
golden sections, in Bartók’s music has generated one of the more
long-lived debates in the field (see Lendvai, F1971, F1983;
Bachmann, F1979; Howat, F1983).

Of increasing importance to Bartók studies during the 1980s and

1990s have been ‘genetic’ and contextual studies, which investigate
the circumstances of the creation of Bartók’s works. These studies
have included technical documentation of work stages of
compositions and resultant analytical conclusions (see Beach,
G1988; Vikárius, G1993–4, Móricz, G1995), as well as speculative
investigations of specific art-music influences upon Bartók
compositions (see Suchoff, ‘The Impact of Italian Baroque Music on
Bartók’s Music’, in Ránki, B1987; Gillies, E1992; Schneider, G1997;
Vikárius, E1999), or of cultural or natural phenomena believed to
have influenced Bartók in composing particular works (Harley,
G1994; Leafstedt, G1999).

The history of Bartók analysis has been one of slow changes in trend:
from early, postwar concerns with style analysis, mainly in the pitch
domain, through to the more structural concerns of the 1950s to
70s. Lendvai, whatever the virtues of his proportional
interpretations, was most important during these decades in placing
a solid emphasis on non-traditional, large-scale aspects of
construction. During the 1980s and 90s, despite an apparently ever-
growing divergence of methods, the tendency has again been to
concentrate on more ‘micro’ levels of composition. Over the second
half of the 20th century eastern European commentators have been
somewhat more concerned with looking to Bartók himself for
analytical inspiration, while scholars from elsewhere have been
more prominent in other categories of analysis. By the 1990s, with
the increasing internationalization of scholarship, these distinctions
were becoming tenuous.

Despite the richness and variety of approaches to Bartók’s music,

only parts of his output have been thoroughly investigated. As with
performances and recordings (see Lampert, E1995), Bartók’s
instrumental music is much more exposed than his vocal. This is
more for reasons of language and of score accessibility than for
reasons of quality. The range of his vocal music is substantially
known only in Hungary; its wider propagation remains a challenge
for the 21st century.

Page 42 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Works

Catalogues

L. Somfai: ‘List of Works and Primary Sources’, Béla Bartók:

Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (Berkeley,
1996), 297–320 [BB]

D. Dille: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Jugendwerke Béla

Bartóks, 1890–1904 (Budapest, 1974) [DD]

Publishers

Boosey & Hawkes [B], Dover [Do], Magyar Kórus [M], Rozsnyai
Károly [R], Rószavölgyi [Rv], Universal [U], Zeneműkiadó
(Editio Musica) [Z]

Editions [facsimile]

Hungarian Folksongs, with Z. Kodály, ed. D. Dille (Budapest,

1970) [BB42]

Két román tánc/Two Romanian Dances, ed. L. Somfai

(Budapest, 1974) [BB56]

Andante, ed. L. Somfai (Budapest, 1980) [BB26b]

Zongoraszonáta/Sonata, ed. L. Somfai (Budapest, 1980) [BB88]

Béla Bartók fekete zsebkönyve: vázlatok, 1907–1922/Béla

Bartók’s Black Pocket-Book: Sketches, 1907–1922, ed. L.
Somfai (Budapest, 1987)

Viola Concerto: Facsimile Edition of the Autograph Draft, ed. L.

Somfai and N. Dellamaggiore (Homosassa, FL, 1995) [BB128]

Page 43 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Stage

BB op. Title Genre Composition First Original

(acts, performance publicat
librettist) remarks

62 11 A opera (1, 1911, rev. cond. E. vs U 192

Kékszakállú B. Balázs) 1912, 1917– Tango, fs U 1922
herceg vára 18 Budapest,
[Bluebeard’s Opera, 24
Castle] May 1918

74 13 A fából ballet (1, 1914–16, cond. E. Pf score U

faragott Balázs) orchd 1916– Tango, 1921
királyfi [The 17 Budapest, fs U 1924
Wooden Opera, 12
shorter o
Prince] May 1917
suite, c19
longer or
suite, 193
see also
ORCHEST

82 19 A csodálatos pantomime 1918–19, cond. E. fs U 1924

mandarin (1, M. orchd 1924, Szenkár, rev. 1936
[The Lengyel) rev. 1926–31 Cologne, pf 4 hand
Miraculous Stadt, 27 Nov score U 1
Mandarin] 1926
scenes, o
1924
rev. as su
1927
see also
ORCHEST

Orchestral

BB op. Title, scoring Composition First Original Rem

performance publication

Page 44 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 19/3 – Valcer c1900 DD6
of p
DD6

19/4 – Scherzo, B♭ c1901 DD6

25 – Symphony, E♭ 1902, orchd Scherzo, DD6

1903 cond. I. Sch
Kerner, orch
Budapest, 29 oth
Feb 1904 mov
ske

31 – Kossuth, sym. 1903 cond. Kerner, Z 1963 DD7

poem Budapest, 13 tabl
Jan 1904 arr.
DD7

35 2 Scherzo, pf, 1904 E. Tusa, cond. Z 1961 arr.

orch [orig. G. Lehel, unp
titled Budapest, 28
Burlesque] Sept 1961

36b 1 Rhapsody, pf, 1905 Bartók, cond. Rv 1910 arr.

orch C. Chevillard, wor
Paris, early BB3
Aug 1905

39 3 Suite no.1, full 1905, rev. movts 1, 3–5, Rv 1912,

orch c1920 Vienna, 29 rev. Z 1956
Nov 1905
complete,
cond. J.
Hubay,
Budapest, 1
Mar 1909

Page 45 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 40 4 Suite no.2, movts 1–3, movt 2, cond. Bartók free
small orch 1905, movt 4, Bartók, 1907, rev. U pf, B
[orig. titled 1907 Berlin, 2 Jan 1921, rev. B
Serenade] rev. 1920, 1909 1948
1943 complete,
cond. Kerner,
Budapest, 22
Nov 1909

48a – Violin 1907–8 H.-H. B 1959 1st

Concerto (no. Schneeberger, rev.
1) [orig. op.5] cond. P. of B
Sacher, Basle, 2nd
30 May 1958 arr.
190
unp

48b 5 Két portré no.1, 1907 no.1, I. R 1911 no.1

[Two no.2, 1908, Waldbauer, 1st
Portraits]: 1 orchd 1910 cond. L. Kun, Vn
Egy ideális 12 Feb 1911 BB4
[One Ideal], 2 complete, E. 2, a
Egy torz [One Baré, cond. I. wor
Grotesque] Strasser, BB5

Budapest, 20
April 1916

59 10 Két kép [Two 1910 cond. Kerner, Rv 1912 arr.

Pictures]: 1 Budapest, 26 191
Virágzás [In Feb 1913 (Rv
Full Flower], 2
A falu tánca
[Village
Dance]

61 – Román tánc 1909–10, cond. Kun, Z 1965 arr.

[Romanian orchd 1911 Budapest, 12 wor
Dance] Feb 1911 BB5

Page 46 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 64 12 Four 1912, orchd cond. E. U 1923
Orchestral 1921 Dohnányi,
Pieces: 1 Budapest, 9
Preludio, 2 Jan 1922
Scherzo, 3
Intermezzo, 4
Marcia
funebre

74 13 A fából c1925 cond. U 1967 3 da

faragott Dohnányi, from
királyfi [The Budapest, 23
Wooden Nov 1931
Prince],
shorter orch
suite

74 13 A fából 1932 rev.

faragott exp
királyfi, longer vers
orch suite abo

76 – Román népi 1917 cond. E. U 1922, rev. arr.

táncok Lichtenberg, edn U 1991 wor
[Romanian Budapest, 11
Folk Dances], Feb 1918
small orch

82 19 A csodálatos 1924 cond. F. U 1927 Fro

mandarin [The Reiner, pan
Miraculous Cincinnati, 1 rev.
Mandarin], April 1927 suit
scenes

82 19 A csodálatos 1927 cond. U 1929

mandarin, Dohnányi,
suite Budapest, 15
Oct 1928

Page 47 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 86a – Táncszvit 1923 cond. U 1924 1 no
[Dance Suite] Dohnányi, omi
Budapest, 19 dra
Nov 1923 pf, B
(U 1

91 – Piano 1926 Bartók, cond. U 1927 arr.

Concerto no.1 Furtwängler, 192
Frankfurt, 1 edn
July 1927 199

94b – Rhapsody no. 1928–9 J. Szigeti, U 1929 arr.

1, vn, orch cond. H. pf w
Scherchen, BB9
Königsberg, 1
Nov 1929

96b – Rhapsody no. 1928, rev. Z. Székely, U 1929, rev. arr.

2, vn, orch 1935 cond. B 1949 pf w
Dohnányi, BB9
Budapest, 25
Nov. 1929

101 – Piano 1930–31 Bartók, cond. U 1932, rev. arr.

Concerto no.2 H. Rosbaud, edn U 1994 194
Frankfurt, 23 edn
Jan 1933 199

102b – Erdélyi táncok 1931 cond. M. Rv 1932 arr.

[Transylvanian Freccia, pf w
Dances] Budapest, 25 BB1
Jan 1932

Page 48 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 103 – Magyar képek 1931 nos.1–3, 5, R, Rv 1932 arr.
[Hungarian cond. M. wor
Sketches] Freccia, BB5
Budapest, 25 BB5
Jan 1932 BB5

complete, BB5
cond. H.
Laber,
Budapest, 26
Nov 1934

107 – Magyar 1933 cond. E. U 1933 arr.

parasztdalok Flipse, wor
[Hungarian Rotterdam, 8 BB7
Peasant Nov 1933 14,
Songs]

114 – Music for 1936 cond. P. U 1936–7

Strings, Sacher, Basle,
Percussion 21 Jan 1937
and Celesta

117 – Violin 1937–8 Székely, cond. B 1946 arr.

Concerto (‘no. Mengelberg, (B 1
2’) Amsterdam,
23 March
1939

118 – Divertimento, 1939 cond. Sacher, B 1940

str Basle, 11 June
1940

121 – Concerto, 2 pf, 1940 L. Kentner, I. B 1970 arr.

perc, orch Kabos, cond. Son
A. Boult, pf, p
London, 14 BB1
Nov 1942

Page 49 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 123 – Concerto for 1943, rev. cond. S. B 1946, rev. arr.
Orchestra 1945 Koussevitzky, edn B 1993 194
Boston, 1 Dec unp
1944

127 – Piano 1945 G. Sándor, B 1947, ed. last

Concerto no.3 cond. E. T. Serly and sco
Ormandy, others, rev. Ser
Philadelphia, edn B 1994
8 Feb 1946

128 – Viola Concerto 1945, inc. W. Primrose, B 1950, ed. com

cond. A. T. Serly, rev. from
Doráti, edn B 1995 dra
Minneapolis, Ser
2 Dec 1949 vers
195

Vocal-orchestral

BB Title Text Scoring Composition First

performanc

18 Tiefblaue Veilchen C. S, orch 1899

Schoenaich-
Carolath

87b Falun (Tri Slovak trad. 4/8 1926 cond. S.

dedinské scény) female Koussevitzky,
[Three Village vv, chbr New York, 27
Scenes] orch Nov 1926

Page 50 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 100 Cantata profana ‘A Rom. T, Bar, 1930 cond. A.
kilenc colindă, arr. double Buesst,
csodaszarvas’ [The and Hung. chorus, London, 25
Nine Enchanted trans. orch May 1934
Stags] Bartók

108 Magyar népdalok Hung. trad. 1v, orch 1933 cond.

[(Five) Hungarian Dohnányi,
Folksongs] Budapest, 23
Oct 1933

Other choral works

bb

30 Est [Evening], dd74 (K. Harsányi), 8 male vv, 1903 (Z

1965)

57 Two Romanian Folksongs, female vv, c1909, completed

from draft by B. Suchoff, unpubd: Nu te supăra mireasă
[On her wedding day]; Măi badiţă prostule [Fickle lover,
silly man]

60 Négy régi magyar népdal [Four Old Hungarian

Folksongs], 4 male vv, 1910, rev. 1912, c1926 (U 1928):
Rég megmondtam bús gerlice [Long ago I told you]; Jaj
Istenem, kire várok [O God, why am I waiting?];
Ángyomasszony kertje [In my sister-in-law’s garden];
Béreslegény, jól megrakd a szekeret [Farmboy, load the
cart well]

77 Tót népdalok (Slovácké ľudové piesne) [Slovak

Folksongs], 4 male vv, 1917 (U 1918): Ej, posluchajte
málo [Ah, listen now my comrades]; Ked’ja smutny
pojdem [Back to fight]; Kamarádi mojí [War is in our
land]; Ej, a ked’mna zabiju [Ah, if I fall in battle];
Ked’som šiou na vojnu [Time went on]

Page 51 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 78 Négy tót népdal (Štyri slovenské piesne) [Four Slovak
Folksongs], 4vv, pf, c1916 (U 1924): Zadala mamka
[Wedding song]; Na holi, na holi [Song of the Hay-
Harvesters]; Rada pila, rada jedla [Song from
Medzibrod]; Gajdujte, gajdence [Dancing Song]

99 Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs], mixed vv, 1930

(U 1932): A rab [The Prisoner]; A bujdosó [The
Wanderer]; Az eladó lány [Finding a husband]; Dal
[Lovesong]

106 Székely népdalok [Székely Folksongs], 6 male vv, 1932

(M 1938): 1 Hej, de sokszor megbántottál [How often
I’ve grieved for you]; 2 Istenem, életem [My God, my
life]; 3 Vékony cérna, kemény mag [Slender thread, hard
seed]; 4 Kilyénfalvi közeptizbe [In the middle of
Kilyénfalva]; 5 Vékony cérna, kemény mag; 6 Járjad pap
a táncot [Do a dance, priest]

111 Twenty-seven Two- and Three-Part Choruses (Hung.

trad.), children’s vv (vols.i–vi), female vv (vols.vii–viii),
1935–6 (M 1937, Z 1953) vol.i: Tavasz [Spring]; Ne hagyj
itt! [Don’t leave here!]; Jószág-igéző [Enchanting Song]
vol.ii: Levél az otthoniakhoz [Letter to Those at Home];
Játék [Play Song]; Leánynéző [Courting]; Héjja, héjja,
karahéjja! [Hey, you hawk!] vol.iii: Ne menj el! [Don’t
leave me!]; Van egy gyűrűm [I have a ring]; Senkim a
világon [I’ve no-one in the world]; Cipósütés [Bread-
baking] vol.iv: Huszárnóta [Hussar]; Resteknek nótája
[Loafers’ Song]; Bolyongás [Wandering]; Lánycsúfoló
[Girls’ Teasing Song] vol.v: Legénycsúfoló [Boys’ Teasing
Song]; Mihálynapi köszöntő [Michaelmas Greeting];
Leánykérő [Suitor] vol.vi: Keserves [Grief]; Madárdal
[Bird Song]; Csujogató [Jeering] vol.vii: Bánat [Regret];
Ne láttalak volna! [Had I not seen you!]; Elment a
madárka [The bird flew away] vol.viii: Párnás táncdal
[Pillow Dance]; Kánon: Isten veled! [God be with you!]
nos.iv/1, iii/1, iv/2, iv/3, iii/4 arr. with school orch (M
1937); nos.i/2, v/1 arr. with small orch (B 1942)

Page 52 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 112 Elmúlt időkből [From Olden Times] (Hung. trad.), 3 male
vv, 1935 (M 1937): Nincs boldogtalanabb
parasztembernél [No-one’s more unhappy than the
peasant]; Egy, kettő, három, négy [One, two, three,
four]; Nincsen szerencsésebb parasztembernél [No-one
is happier than the peasant]

Chamber

1/20b A Duna folyása [The Course of the Danube], DD20b,

vn, pf, 1894, pf part lost [arr. of pf work, BB1/20a]

6 Sonata, c, DD37, vn, pf, 1895

7/2–4 Violin pieces, DD39, 1895, lost

2 fantasias, DD40–41, 1896, lost

7/5 String Quartet no.1, B♭, DD42, 1896, lost

7/6 String Quartet no.2, c, DD43, 1896, lost

9/1 Piano Quintet, C, DD46, 1897, lost

10 Sonata, A, DD49, vn, pf, 1897 [pf part of 2nd movt only
sketched]

13 Piano Quartet, c, DD52, 1898

17 String Quartet, F, DD56, 1898

19/1 Scherzo in Sonatenform, f, DD58, str qt, 1899–1900

26a Duo (Canon), G, DD69, 2 vn, 1902 (in Dille:

Thematisches Verzeichnis)

26b Andante (Albumblatt), A, DD70, vn, pf, 1902 (Z 1980)

28 Sonata, e, DD72, vn, pf, 1903 (Documenta bartókiana,

i–ii, 1964–5; Z 1968)

Page 53 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 33 Piano Quintet, DD77, 1903–4, rev. to 1920 (Z 1970)

45a Gyergyóból [From Gyergyó], rec, pf, 1907 (Z 1961);

arr. pf, BB45b

52 String Quartet no.1, op.7, 1908–9 (Rv 1909)

75 String Quartet no.2, op.17, 1914–17 (U 1920, rev. edn

U 1994)

84 Sonata no.1 [MS: op.21], vn, pf, 1921 (U 1923, rev. edn
U 1991)

85 Sonata no.2, vn, pf, 1922 (U 1923, rev. edn U 1997)

93 String Quartet no.3, 1927 (U 1929, rev. edn U 1992)

94a Rhapsody no.1., vn, pf, 1928, rev. 1929 (U 1929);

orchd, BB94b; arr. vc, pf, BB94c

94c Rhapsody, vc, pf, 1928–9 (U 1930)

95 String Quartet no.4, 1928 (U 1929, rev. edn U 1995)

96a Rhapsody no.2, vn, pf, 1928 (U 1929), rev. 1945 (B

1947); orchd, BB96b

Page 54 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 104 Forty-four Duos, 2 vn, 1931 (32 nos. Schott 1932,
complete U 1933, iii–iv rev. edn U 1992) vol.i: 1
Párositó [Teasing Song]; 2 Kalamajkó [Dance]; 3
Menuetto; 4 Szentivánéji [Midsummer Night Song]; 5
Tót nóta I [Slovak Song I]; 6 Magyar nóta I [Hungarian
song I]; 7 Oláh nóta [Romanian Song]; 8 Tót nóta II
[Slovak Song II]; 9 Játék [Play]; 10 Rutén nóta
[Ruthenian Song]; 11 Gyermekrengetéskor [Lullaby];
12 Szénagyűjtéskor [Hay-Harvesting Song]; 13
Lakodalmas [Wedding Song]; 14 Párnás-tánc [Cushion
Dance] vol.ii: 15 Katonanóta [Soldier’s Song]; 16
Burleszk [Burlesque]; 17 Menetelő nóta I [Marching
Song]; 18 Menetelő nóta II; 19 Mese [Fairy Tale]; 20
Dal [Song]; 21 Újévköszöntő I [New Year’s Greeting I];
22 Szúnyogtánc [Mosquito Dance]; 23 Menyasszony-
búcsúztató [Wedding Song]; 24 Tréfás nóta [Gay
Song]; 25 Magyar nóta II vol.iii: 26 ‘Ugyan édes
komámasszony …’ [Teasing Song]; 27 Sánta-tánc
[Limping Dance]; 28 Bánkódás [Sorrow]; 29
Újévköszöntő II; 30 Újévköszöntő III; 31 Újévköszöntő
IV; 32 Máramarosi tánc [Dance from Máramaros]; 33
Aratáskor [Harvest Song]; 34 Számláló nóta [Counting
Song]; 35 Rutén kolomejka [Ruthenian kolomejka]; 36
Szól a duda [Bagpipes], with variant form vol.iv: 37
Preludium és kánon; 38 Forgatós [Romanian Whirling
Dance]; 39 Szerb tánc [Serbian Dance]; 40 Oláh tánc
[Romanian Dance]; 41 Scherzo; 42 Arab dal [Arabian
Song]; 43 Pizzicato; 44 ‘Erdélyi’ tánc [‘Transylvanian’
Dance] nos.28, 38, 43, 16, 36, 32 arr. pf, BB113

110 String Quartet no.5, 1934 (U 1936, rev. edn U 1992)

115 Sonata, 2 pf, 2 perc, 1937 (B 1942), arr. 2 pf, perc,

orch, BB121

116 Contrasts, vn, cl, pf, 1938 (B 1942)

119 String Quartet no.6, 1939 (B 1941)

124 Sonata, vn, 1944 (ed. Y. Menuhin B 1947, rev. edn with
quarter-tone variants B 1994)

Page 55 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Piano

1/1– Walczer, DD1, 1890

31 Változó darab [Changeable Piece], DD2, 1890
Mazurka, DD3, 1890
A budapesti tornaverseny [Gymnastic Contest in
Budapest], DD4, 1890
Sonatina no.1, DD5, 1890
Oláh darab [Wallachian Piece], DD6, 1890
Gyorspolka [Fast Polka], DD7, 1891
‘Béla’ polka, DD8, 1891
‘Katinka’ polka, DD9, 1891
Tavaszi hangok [Sounds of Spring], DD10, 1891
‘Jolán’ polka, DD11, 1891
‘Gabi’ polka, DD12, 1891
Nefelejts [Forget-me-not], DD13, 1891
Ländler no.1, DD14, 1891
‘Irma’ polka, DD15, 1891
Radegundi visszhang [Echo of Radegund], DD16, 1891
Induló [March], DD17, 1891
Ländler no.2, DD18, 1891
Cirkusz polka, DD19, 1891
A Duna folyása [The Course of the Danube], DD20a,
1890–94, arr. vn, pf, BB1/20b; Sonatina no.2, DD21,
1891
Ländler no.3, DD22, 1892, lost; Tavaszi dal [Song of
Spring], DD23, 1892
Szőllősi darab [Piece of (Nagy) szőllős], DD24, 1892,
lost; ‘Margit’ polka, DD25, 1893
‘Ilona’ mazurka, DD26, 1893
‘Loli’ mazurka, DD27, 1893
‘Lajos’ valczer, DD28, 1893
‘Elza’ polka, DD29, 1894

Page 56 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Andante con variazioni, DD30, 1894
Allegro, DD31, 1894, lost; all nos. unpubd

2/1 Sonata no.1, g, DD32, 1894, unpubd

2/2 Scherzo, g, DD33, 1894, unpubd

3 Fantasie, a, DD34, 1895, unpubd

4 Sonata no.2, F, DD35, 1895, unpubd

5 Capriccio, b, DD36, 1895, unpubd

7/1 Sonata no.3, C, DD38, 1895, lost

7/7 Andante, Scherzo and Finale, DD44, 1897, lost

8 Drei Klavierstücke, b, C, a♭, DD45, 1897 (no.1 Z 1965)

9/2 Two Pieces, DD47, 1897, lost

9/3 Grosse Fantasie, DD48, 1897, lost

11 Scherzo (Fantasie), B, DD50, 1897 (Z 1965)

12 Sonata, DD51, 1898, lost

14 Drei Klavierstücke, c, g, E, DD53 (nos. 1–2 Z 1965)

16 Scherzo, b, DD55, 1898, unpubd

19/2 Scherzo, b♭, DD59, c1900, unpubd

19/3 Six Dances, DD60a, c1900, facs. of no.1 pubd as Danse

orientale (Pressburger Zeitung, 1913); nos. 1–2 orchd,
DD60b

21 Scherzo, b♭, DD63, 1900, unpubd

22 Változatok [Twelve Variations], DD64, 1900–01 (Z 1965)

Page 57 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 23 Tempo di Minuetto, DD66, 1901, unpubd

27 Four Pieces, DD71, 1903 (Bárd, 1904

nos.1–3 B 1950
Z 1956, 1965): Study for the Left Hand; Fantasy I;
Fantasy II; Scherzo

31 Marche funèbre, DD75b, 1903 (Budapest, 1905, R

1910) [arr. of Kossuth, tableau 10]

36a Rhapsody, op.1, 1904 (Adagio mesto Rv 1908; complete

Rv 1923), arr. pf, orch, BB36b, arr. 2 pf, 1905 (Rv 1910)

38 Petits morceaux, 1905 (Z 1965) [free arr. of songs

BB37/2, BB24/1]

45b Három Csík megyei népdal [Three Hungarian Folksongs

from Csík], 1907 (R 1910) [arr. of rec, pf work, BB45a]:
Rubato, L’istesso tempo, Poco vivo

49 Két elégia [Two Elegies], op.8b, 1908–9 (R 1910):

Grave, Molto adagio sempre rubato (quasi
improvisando)

50 Fourteen Bagatelles, op.6, 1908 (R 1909): 1 Molto

sostenuto; 2 Allegro giocoso; 3 Andante; 4 Grave [arr. of
folksong Mikor gulyásbojtár voltam]; 5 Vivo [arr. of
folksong Ej! po pred naš, po pred naš]; 6 Lento; 7
Allegretto molto capriccioso; 8 Andante sostenuto; 9
Allegretto grazioso; 10 Allegro; 11 Allegretto molto
rubato; 12 Rubato; 13 Elle est morte (Lento funèbre);
14 Valse: ma mie qui danse (Presto); no.14 orchd as no.
2 of BB48b

Page 58 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 51 Tíz könnyű zongoradarab [Ten Easy Pieces], 1908 (R
1908), with Ajánlás [Dedication]: 1 Paraszti nóta
[Peasant Song]; 2 Lassú vergődés [Frustration]; 3 Tót
legények tánca [Slovak Boys’ Dance]; 4 Sostenuto; 5
Este a székelyeknél [Evening in Transylvania (Evening
with the Széklers)]; 6 Gödöllei piactéren leesett a hó
[Hungarian Folksong]; 7 Hajnal [Dawn]; 8 Azt mondják,
nem adnak [Slovakian Folksong]; 9 Ujjgyakorlat [Five-
Finger Exercise]; 10 Medvetánc [Bear Dance]; nos.5, 10
orchd, BB103/1–2

53 Gyermekeknek/Pro dêti [For Children], 85 pieces, i–iv,

1908–10 (R 1910, R 1912) [i–ii after Hung., iii–iv after
Slovak folksongs], rev. 1943, 79 pieces, i–ii (B 1947);
orig. ii/42 orchd, BB103/5; orig. i/16 arr. 1v, pf, 1937

54 Vázlatok [Seven Sketches], op.9b, 1908–10 (R 1911): 1

Leányi arckép [Portrait of a Girl]; 2 Hinta palinta [See-
Saw, Dickory-Daw]; 3 Lento; 4 Non troppo lento; 5
Román népdal [Romanian Folksong]; 6 Oláhos [In
Wallachian Style]; 7 Poco lento

55 Három burleszk [Three Burlesques], op.8c, 1908–11 (Rv

1912): Perpatvar [Quarrel], Kicsit ázottan [A Bit Drunk],
Molto vivo capriccioso; no.2 orchd, BB103/4

56 Ket román tánc [Two Romanian Dances], op.8a, 1909–

10 (Rv 1910; with rev. no.2, Do 1981): Allegro vivace,
Poco allegro; no.1 orchd, BB61

58 Négy siratóének [Four Dirges], op.9a, 1909–10 (Rv

1912): Adagio; Andante; Poco lento; Assai andante; no.2
orchd, BB103/3

63 Allegro barbaro, 1911 (U 1918, rev. edn U 1992)

66 Kezdők zongoramuzsikája [First Term at the Piano], 18

pieces, 1913 (Rv 1929) [from c50 pieces in
Zongoraiskola [Piano Method] of Bartók and S.
Reschofsky (Rv 1913)]

Page 59 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 67 Román kolinda-dallamok [Romanian Christmas Songs],
20 pieces in 2 sers., 1915 (U 1918, rev. edn U 1995)

68 Román népi táncok [Romanian Folk Dances], 1915 (U

1918, rev. edn U 1993): 1 Joc cu bâtă [Stick Dance]; 2
Brâul; 3 Pe loc [In One Spot]; 4 Buciumeana [Dance of
Buchum]; 5 Poargă românească [Romanian Polka]; 6
Mărunţel [Fast Dance]; orchd, BB76

69 Sonatina, 1915 (Rv 1919), rev. after 1930 (B 1950);

authorized arr. vn, pf, by Z. Székely, BB102a; orchd
Bartók, BB102b

70 Suite, op.14, 1916 (U 1918, rev. edn U 1992; omitted

movt in Új zenei szemle, v, 1955)

79 Tizenöt magyar parasztdal [Fifteen Hungarian Peasant

Songs], 1914, 1918 (U 1920): 1–4 Négy régi keserves
ének [Four Old Tunes]; 5 Scherzo; 6 Ballade (Tema con
variazioni); 7–15 Régi táncdalok [Old Dance Tunes];
nos.6–12, 14–15 orchd, BB107

80b Three Hungarian Folk Tunes, 1914, 1918 (no.1 in early

version, BB80a, in Periszkóp (1925), June–July;
complete B 1942): Leszállott a páva [The Peacock];
Jánoshidi vásártéren [At the Jánoshida Fairground];
Fehér liliomszál [White Lily]

81 Etűdök [(Three) Studies], op.18, 1918 (U 1920)

83 Improvizációk magyar parasztdalokra [(Eight)

Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs], op.20,
1920 (nos.2, 8 in Grotesken Album, ed. C. Seelig, U
1921; complete U 1922)

86b Táncszvit [Dance Suite], 1925 (U 1925, rev. edn U

1991) [arr. of orch suite BB86a]

88 Sonata, 1926 (U 1927, rev. edn U 1992)

Page 60 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 89 Szabadban [Out of Doors], i–ii, 1926 (U 1927 rev. edns
U 1990, 1996): i/1 Síppal, dobbal [With Drums and
Pipes]; i/2 Barcarolla; i/3 Musettes; ii/4 Az éjszaka
zenéje [The Night’s Music]; ii/5 Hajsza [The Chase]

90 Kilenc kis zongoradarab [Nine Little Piano Pieces], i–iii,

1926 (U 1927, rev. edn U 1995): i/1–4 Négy párbeszéd
[Four Dialogues]; ii/5 Menuetto; ii/6 Dal [Air]; ii/7
Marcia delle bestie; ii/8 Csörgő-tánc [Tambourine]; iii/9
Preludio – All’ungherese

92 Három rondó népi dallamokkal [Three Rondos on

(Slovak) Folktunes]: no.1 1916, nos.2–3 1927 (U 1930,
rev. edn U 1995)

105 Mikrokosmos, i–vi, 1926, 1932–9 (B 1940, rev. edn B

1987) vol.i: 1–6 Six Unison Melodies; 7 Dotted Notes; 8
Repetition I; 9 Syncopation I; 10 With Alternate Hands;
11 Parallel Motion; 12 Reflection; 13 Change of
Position; 14 Question and Answer; 15 Village Song; 16
Parallel Motion and Change of Position; 17 Contrary
Motion I; 18–21 Four Unison Melodies; 22 Imitation and
Counterpoint; 23 Imitation and Inversion I; 24
Pastorale; 25 Imitation and Inversion II; 26 Repetition
II; 27 Syncopation II; 28 Canon at the Octave; 29
Imitation Reflected; 30 Canon at the Lower Fifth; 31
Dance in Canon Form; 32 In Dorian Mode; 33 Slow
Dance; 34 In Phrygian Mode; 35 Chorale; 36 Free
Canon; Appendix: Exercises 1–4 vol.ii: 37 In Lydian
Mode; 38 Staccato and Legato I; 39 Staccato and
Legato (Canon); 40 In Yugoslav Style; 41 Melody with
Accompaniment; 42 Accompaniment in Broken Triads;
43 In Hungarian Style, 2 pf; 44 Contrary Motion II, 2 pf;
45 Méditation; 46 Increasing–Diminishing; 47 Country
Fair; 48 In Mixolydian Mode; 49 Crescendo–
Diminuendo; 50 Minuetto; 51 Waves; 52 Unison
Divided; 53 In Transylvanian Style; 54 Chromatics; 55
Triplets in Lydian Mode, 2 pf; 56 Melody in Tenths; 57
Accents; 58 In Oriental Style; 59 Major and Minor; 60
Canon with Sustained Notes; 61 Pentatonic Melody; 62
Minor Sixths in Parallel Motion; 63 Buzzing; 64 Line

Page 61 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 against Point; 65 Dialogue, 1v, pf; 66 Melody Divided;
Appendix: Exercises 5–18 vol.iii: 67 Thirds against a
Single Voice; 68 Hungarian Dance, 2 pf; 69 Study in
Chords; 70 Melody against Double Notes; 71 Thirds; 72
Dragons’ Dance; 73 Sixths and Triads; 74 Hungarian
Matchmaking Song, also version for 1v, pf; 75 Triplets;
76 In Three Parts; 77 Little Study; 78 Five-Tone Scale;
79 Hommage à J.S.B.; 80 Hommage à R. Sch.; 81
Wandering; 82 Scherzo; 83 Melody with Interruptions;
84 Merriment; 85 Broken Chords; 86 Two Major
Pentachords; 87 Variations; 88 Duet for Pipes; 89 In
Four Parts I; 90 In Russian Style; 91 Chromatic
Invention I; 92 Chromatic Invention II; 93 In Four Parts
II; 94 Once Upon a Time …; 95 Fox Song, also version
for 1v, pf; 96 Jolts; Appendix: Exercises 19–30 vol.iv: 97
Notturno; 98 Thumbs Under; 99 Hands Crossing; 100
In Folksong Style; 101 Diminished Fifth; 102
Harmonics; 103 Minor and Major; 104 Wandering
Through the Keys; 105 Game; 106 Children’s Song; 107
Melody in the Mist; 108 Wrestling; 109 From the Island
of Bali; 110 And the Sounds Clash and Clang …; 111
Intermezzo; 112 Variations on a Folktune; 113
Bulgarian Rhythm I; 114 Theme and Inversion; 115
Bulgarian Rhythm II; 116 Song; 117 Bourrée; 118
Triplets in 9/8 Time; 119 Dance in 3/4 Time; 120 Triads;
121 Two-part Study; Appendix: Exercises 31–3 vol.v:
122 Chords Together and in Opposition; 123 Staccato
and Legato II; 124 Staccato; 125 Boating; 126 Change
of Time; 127 New Hungarian Folksong, 1v, pf; 128
Stamping Dance; 129 Alternating Thirds; 130 Village
Joke; 131 Fourths; 132 Major Seconds Broken and
Together; 133 Syncopation III; 134 Three Studies in
Double Notes; 135 Perpetuum mobile; 136 Whole-tone
Scale; 137 Unison; 138 Bagpipe Music; 139 Jack-in-the-
Box vol.vi: 140 Free Variations; 141 Subject and
Reflection; 142 From the Diary of a Fly; 143 Divided
Arpeggios; 144 Minor Seconds, Major Sevenths; 145
Chromatic Invention III; 146 Ostinato; 147 March; 148–
53 Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm

Page 62 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 113 Petite suite [arr. of vn duos, BB104/28, 38, 43, 16, 36],
1936 (U 1938, rev. edn 1995); omitted movt [arr. of
BB104/32], unpubd

120 Seven Pieces from Mikrokosmos, 2 pf, 1939–40 (B

1947) [arr. of pf pieces BB105/113, 69, 135, 123, 127,
145, 146]

122 Suite, op.4b, 2 pf, 1941 (B 1958) [free arr. of orch work,
BB40]

Songs

15 Drei Lieder, DD54, 1898: Im wunderschönen

Monat Mai (H. Heine); Nacht am Rheine (K.
Siebel); Die Gletscher leuchten im
Mondenlicht

20 Liebeslieder, DD62, 1900 (nos.2, 4 Z 1963): 1

Du meine Liebe, du mein Herz (F. Rückert); 2
Diese Rose pflück ich hier (N. Lenau); 3 Du
geleitest mich zum Grabe; 4 Ich fühle deinen
Odem (Lenau); 5 Wie herrlich leuchtet (J.W.
von Goethe); Herr! der du alles wohl gemacht

24 Four songs (L. Pósa), DD67, 1902 (Bárd

1904): 1 Őszi szellő [Autumn Breeze]; 2 Még
azt vetik a szememre [They are accusing me];
3 Nincs olyan bú [There is no greater
sorrow]; 4 Ejnye! ejnye! [Alas! alas!]; no.1
arr. pf, BB38/2

29 Est [Evening] (K. Harsányi), DD73, 1903 (Z

1963)

32 Four Songs, DD76, 1903, lost

Page 63 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 34 Székely Folksong: Piros alma leesett a sárba
[The red apple has fallen in the mud], DD C8,
1904 (Budapest, 1905)

37 Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs],

planned 1st ser., c1904–5 (no.1 Z 1963), inc.:
1 Lekaszálták már a rétet [They have mowed
the pasture already]; 2 Add reám csókodat, el
kell mennem [Kiss me, for I have to leave]; 3
Fehér László lovat lopott [László Fehér stole a
horse]; 4 Az egri ménes mind szürke [The
horses of Eger are all grey]; no.2 arr. pf,
BB38/1

41 A kicsi ‘tót’-nak [For the Little ‘Tót’] (Hung.

children’s songs), 1905 (no.3 in J. Demény:
Bartók Béla: levelek, Budapest, 1948): 1
Álmos vagyok [I am sleepy]; 2 Ejnye, ejnye,
nézz csak ide [Oh, oh, look there]; 3 Puha
meleg tolla van a kismadárnak [The little
bird]; 4 Bim bam zúg a harang [Bim bam,
ring the bells]; 5 Esik eső esdegél [The rain is
falling]

Page 64 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 42 Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs],
1906 (R 1906), rev. 1938 (Rv 1938): 1
Elindultam szép hazámbul [I left my fair
homeland]; 2 Által mennék én a Tiszán
ladikon [I would cross the Tisza in a boat];
3a–b Fehér László lovat lopott [László Fehér
stole a horse]; 4a (4 in rev.) A gyulai kert alatt
[Behind the garden of Gyula]; 4b (5 in rev.) A
kertmegi kert alatt [Behind the garden of
Kertmeg]; 5 (not in rev.) Ucca, ucca, ég az
ucca [The street is on fire]; 6 Ablakomba,
ablakomba, besütött a holdvilág [In my
window shone the moonlight]; 7 Száraz ágtól
messze virít a rózsa [From the withered
branch no rose blooms]; 8 Végigmentem a
tárkányi, sej, haj, nagy uccán [I walked to the
end of the great street in Tárkány]; 9 Nem
messze van ide Kis Margitta [Not far from
here is little Margitta]; 10 Szánt a babám [My
sweetheart is ploughing]; also nos. 11–20 by
Kodály; nos.1, 2, 4, 9, 8 rev. 1928 as Five
Hungarian Folksongs, BB97

43 Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs], 2nd

ser., 1906–7 (nos.4, 6, 7, 8, Z 1963): 1 Tiszán
innen, Tiszán túl [On this side of the Tisza, on
that side of the Tisza]; 2 Erdők, völgyek, szűk
ligetek [Woods, valleys, narrow parks]; 3
Olvad a hó [The snow is melting]; 4 Ha
bemegyek a csárdába [Down at the tavern]; 5
Fehér László lovat lopott [László Fehér stole a
horse]; 6 Megittam a piros bort [My glass is
empty]; 7 Ez a kislány gyöngyöt fűz [This
maiden threading]; 8 Sej, mikor engem
katonának visznek [The young soldier]; 9
Még azt mondják [And they still say]; 10 Kis
kece lányom [My dear daughter]; nos.5, 10
arr. pf, BB53/ii/28, 53/i/17

Page 65 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 44 Two Hungarian Folksongs, 1907 (no.1 Z
1963, no.2 in Documenta bartókiana, iv,
1970): Édesanyám rózsafája [My mother’s
rose tree]; Túl vagy rózsám, túl vagy a
Málnás erdején [My sweetheart, you are
beyond the Málnás woods]

46 Four Slovakian Folksongs (nos.1, 3, 4 Z

1963): 1 V tej bystrickej bráne [Roses in the
Fields], 1907
2 Pod lipko nad lipko, 1907
3 Pohřebni písen [Dirge], 1907
4 Pritelel pták [The Message], 1916
no.2 lost

47 Nyolc magyar népdal [Eight Hungarian

Folksongs], nos.1–5 1907, nos.6–8 1917 (U
1922): 1 Fekete főd [Black is the earth]; 2
Istenem, Istenem [My God, my God]; 3
Asszonyok, asszonyok, had’ legyek társatok
[Wives, wives, let me be one of your
company]; 4 Annyi bánat [So much sorrow]; 5
Ha kimegyek [If I climb]; 6 Töltik a nagyerdő
útját [They are mending the great forest
highway]; 7 Eddig való dolgom [Up to now
my work]; 8 Olvad a hó [The snow is melting]

65 Nine Romanian Folksongs, c1912 [completed

from draft by B. Suchoff, unpubd]: 1 I went
off to church one day; 2 Ev’ry lad wants me to
perish; 3 Woe is me; 4 See the verdant silken
tassel; 5 In the village hall; 6 While I still
lived with my mother; 7 You are far away
from me; 8 Many thoughts have come into
mind; 9 Those who have bad luck

Page 66 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 71 Öt dal [Five Songs], op.15, 1916 (U 1961, rev.
edn U 1991): 1 Tavasz [Spring] (K.
Gombossy); 2 Nyár [Summer] (Gombossy); 3
A vágyak éjjele [Night of Desire] (W.
Gleiman); 4 Tél [Winter] (Gombossy); 5 Ősz
[Autumn] (Gombossy)

72 Öt dal [Five Songs] (E. Ady), op.16, 1916 (U

1923): 1 Három őszi könnycsepp [Autumn
Tears]; 2 Az őszi lárma [Autumn Echoes]; 3
Az ágyam hivogat [Lost Content]; 4 Egyedül a
tengerrel [Alone with the Sea]; 5 Nem
mehetek hozzád [I cannot come to you]

73 Krutí Tono vretena [Tony Whirls the Spindle],

1916 (Z 1963)

87a Falun (Dedinské scény) [Village Scenes]

(Slovak trad.), female v, pf, 1924 (U 1927, rev.
edn U 1994): 1 Szénagyűjtéskor (Pri hrabaní)
[Haymaking]; 2 A menyasszonynál (Pri
neveste) [At the Bride’s]; 3 Lakodalom
(Svatba) [Wedding]; 4 Bölcsődal
(Ukoliebavka) [Lullaby]; 5 Legénytánc (Tanec
mládencov) [Lads’ Dance]; nos. 3–5 arr.
female vv, chbr orch, BB87b

97 Five Hungarian Folksongs, 1928 (Z 1970)

[rev. of BB42, nos1, 2, 4, 9, 8]

Page 67 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 98 Húsz magyar népdal [Twenty Hungarian
Folksongs], i–iv, 1929 (U 1932) vol.i, Szomorú
nóták [Sad Songs]: 1 A tömlöcben [In Prison];
2 Régi keserves [Old Lament]; 3 Bujdosó
ének [The Fugitive]; 4 Pásztornóta
[Herdsman’s Song] vol.ii, Táncdalok [Dancing
Songs]: 5 Székely lassú [Slow Dance]; 6
Székely friss [Fast Dance]; 7 Kanásztanc
[Swineherd’s Dance]; 8 ‘Hatforintos’ nóta
[‘Six-Florin’ Dance] vol.iii, Vegyes dalok
[Diverse Songs]: 9 Juhászcsúfoló, [The
Shepherd]; 10 Tréfás nóta [Joking Song]; 11
Párosító I [Nuptial Serenade]; 12 Párosító II
[Humorous Song]; 13 Pár-ének [Dialogue
Song]; 14 Panasz [Complaint]; 15 Bordal
[Drinking Song] vol.iv, Új dalok [New-Style
Songs]: 16 (i) Allegro: Hej, édesanyám [Oh,
my dear mother]; (ii) Più allegro: Érik a
ropogós cseresznye [Ripening Cherries]; (iii)
Moderato: Már Dobozon [Long ago at Doboz];
(iv) Allegretto: Sárga kukoricaszár [Yellow
Cornstalk]; (v) Allegro non troppo: Búza,
búza, búza [Wheat, wheat, wheat] nos.1, 2,
11, 14, 12 orchd, BB108

109 Hungarian Folksong: Debrecennek van egy

vize [arr. of pf work, BB53/i/16], ?1937 (in B.
Paulini: Gyöngyösbokréta, Budapest, 1937, p.
10)

125 Ukrainian Folksong: A férj keserve [The

Husband’s Grief], 1945 (facs. in J. Demény,
ed.: Bartók Béla levelei, Budapest, 1951)

126 Ukrainian Folksongs, cycle, c1945, inc.: 1 Ta

ne sa mam [I was not alone]; 2 Ne budu ja
vodu piti [I shall not drink the water]; 3 Če
my chlopci nekopalci [Not in a ditch, lads]

Page 68 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 See also
PIANO
[Mikrokosmos,
BB105/65,
74b, 95b, 127]

Arrangements of Bartók’s works by or involving

others

— Romanian Folk Dances, vn, pf, arr. Z. Székely, 1925–6

(U 1926) [arr. of pf work BB68]

— Hungarian Folk Tunes, vn, pf, arr. J. Szigeti with

Bartók’s advice, 1926–7 (U 1927) [arr. of pf work BB53,
orig. nos.ii/28, i/18, ii/42, ii/33, i/6, i/13, ii/38]

102a Sonatina, vn, pf, arr. E. Gertler with Bartók, c1930 (Rv
1931) [arr. of pf work BB69; used by Bartók as basis for
orch version BB102b]

109 Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs], vn, pf, i–ii,

arr. T. Országh with Bartók, 1931 (R 1934) [arr. of pf
work BB53, orig. nos.ii/34, ii/36, i/17, ii/31, i/16, i/14, i/
19, i/8, i/21]

— Five Pieces from Mikrokosmos, str qt, arr. T. Serly,

1941–2 (B 1942) [arr. of pf pieces BB105/139, 102, 108,
116, 142]

— Mikrokosmos Suite, orch, arr. T. Serly, c1942 (B 1943)

[arr. of pf pieces BB105/139, 137, 117, 142, 102, 151,
153, prefaced by orch of material from piano work
BB80b (1942 version)]

Page 69 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Editions and arrangements by Bartók
Concert arrangements for piano
B. Bartók, ed.

Italian kbd music, 1–11, BB A4a–k, 1926–8 (New York,

1930): 1 B. Marcello: Sonata, B♭; 2 M. Rossi: Toccata no.1,
C; 3 M. Rossi: Toccata no.2, a; 4 M. Rossi: Tre correnti; 5–
8 A.B. Della Ciaia: Sonata, G: Toccata, Canzone, Primo
tempo, Secondo tempo; 9 G. Frescobaldi: Toccata, G; 10
G. Frescobaldi: Fuga, g [misattrib.; by G. Muffat]; 11 D.
Zipoli: Pastorale, C

J.S. Bach: Sonata VI, bwv530, org; BB A5, c1929 (Rv 1930)

H. Purcell: Two Preludes, BB A6, c1929 (Los Angeles,

1947)

Educational editions of piano works

J.S. Bach: Das wohltemperierte Klavier, 1–4 (R 1907–8,
rev. i–ii R 1913); 12 Easy Piano Pieces (Rv 1916; rev. with
extra no., Rv 1924)

L. van Beethoven: 25 Sonatas (Rv 1909–12; opp.101, 111,

unpubd); 7 Bagatelles, op.33; Variations, op.34; ‘Eroica’
Variations and Fugue, op.35; Polonaise, op.89; 11 neue
Bagatellen, op.119 (all R 1910); Ecossaises (Budapest,
1920)

F.F. Chopin: 14 Valses (Budapest, 1920); F. Couperin: 18

Pieces (R 1924); J. Haydn: 19 Sonatas, nos.1–17 (R 1911–
13); nos.18–19 (R 1920); W.A. Mozart: 20 Sonatas (R
1910–12); Fantasy K397/K385g (R 1910); D. Scarlatti: 10
Sonatas (R 1921, 1926); F. Schubert: 2 Scherzi (R 1911);
R. Schumann: Jugendalbum (R 1911); Studies by J.B.
Duvernoy, S. Heller, L. Köhler (Budapest, 1917–20)

Page 70 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Critical editions
F. Liszt: Hungaria, rev. 1911; in Musikalische Werke, 1/5
(Leipzig, 1907–36/R)

F. Liszt: Ungarischer Marsch, Ungarischer Sturmmarsch,

orch, 1916; in Musikalische Werke, 1/12 (Leipzig, 1907–
36/R)

F. Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsodies, pf, 1911–17, incl. in

Musikalische Werke, 2/2, ed. P. Raabe (Leipzig, 1926/R)

Miscellanea
Cadenza: L. van Beethoven: Pf Conc. no.3, 1st movt, BB
A2, 1900, unpubd

Cadenzas: W.A. Mozart: 2 Pf Conc., K365/316a; BB A7,

c1939, unpubd

Arr. ‘Rákóczi’ March, BB A1, pf 4 hands, 1896, unpubd

Arr. L. van Beethoven: Erlkönig, WoO131; BB A3, orchd

c1905, unpubd

Unpubd frags., see DD appendices B–E (juvenilia) and

main text of BB

Writings
books and collected writings only
for listing of individual articles see Grove6
Cântece poporale româneşti din comitatul Bihor
(Ungaria)/Chansons populaires roumaines du
département Bihar (Hongrie) (Bucharest, 1913); repr. as
Ethnomusikologische Schriften, iii, ed. D. Dille (Budapest,
1967); Eng. trans. of preface in Béla Bartók Studies in
Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Suchoff (Lincoln, NE, 1997),1–23

Page 71 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 ed., with Z. Kodály: Erdélyi magyar népdalok [Hungarian
folksongs from Transylvania] (Budapest, 1923/R); Eng.
trans. of preface in Béla Bartók Studies in
Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Suchoff (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 77–
134

Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramureş (Munich, 1923);

repr. as Ethnomusikologische Schriften, ii, ed. D. Dille
(Budapest, 1966); Eng. edn as Rumanian Folk Music, v,
ed. B. Suchoff (The Hague, 1975)

A magyar népdal [The Hungarian folksong] (Budapest,

1924); Eng. trans., 1931/R; repr. in Hung. and Ger. in
Ethnomusikologische Schriften, i, ed. D. Dille (Budapest,
1965–8), 341–432; rev. Hung. version in Bartók Béla
írásai, v, ed. D. Révész (Budapest, 1990)

Melodien der rumänischen Colinde (Weihnachtslieder)

(Vienna, 1935), repr. with unpubd pt. 2 as
Ethnomusikologische Schriften, iv, ed. D. Dille (Budapest,
1968); Eng. edn as Rumanian Folk Music, iv, ed. B.
Suchoff (The Hague, 1975)

ed. B. Szabolcsi and A. Szőllősy: Bartók Béla válogatott

zenei írásai [Selected musical writings of Béla Bartók]
(Budapest, 1948, 2/1956)

with A. Lord: Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York,

1951); repr. as Yugoslav Folk Music, i, ed. B. Suchoff
(Albany, NY, 1978)

ed., with Z. Kodály: A magyar népzene tára [Corpus of

Hungarian music] (Budapest, 1951–)

ed. D. Carpitella: Béla Bartók: scritti sulla musica

popolare (Turin, 1955)

ed. Z. Vancea: Béla Bartók: Însemnări asupra cîntecului

popular [Béla Bartók: notes on folksong] (Bucharest,
1956)

Page 72 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 ed. A. Elscheková, O. Elschek and J. Kresánek: Slovenské
lľudové piesne/Slowakische Volkslieder, 1 (Bratislava,
1959); ii (1970), iii (forthcoming); Eng. trans. of preface in
Béla Bartók Studies in Ethnomusicology, ed. B. Suchoff
(Lincoln, NE, 1997)

ed. E. Hykischová: Béla Bartók: Postřehy a názory [Béla

Bartók: observations and opinions] (Bratislava, 1965)

ed. D. Dille: Ethnomusikologische Schriften (Budapest,

1965–8)

ed. A. Szőllősy: Bartók Béla összegyűjtött írásai [Collected

writings of Béla Bartók], 1 (Budapest, 1966)

ed. B. Suchoff: Rumanian Folk Music (The Hague, 1967–

75)

ed. D. Dille: Documenta bartókiana, 4 (Budapest, 1970)

[incl. essay drafts and variants]

ed. B. Szabolcsi: Musiksprachen, Aufsätze und Vorträge

(Leipzig, 1972)

ed. L. Vikár: Béla Bartók’s Folk Music Research in Turkey

(Budapest, 1976)

ed. B. Suchoff: Béla Bartók: Turkish Folk Music from Asia

Minor (Princeton, NJ, 1976)

ed. B. Suchoff: Béla Bartók Essays (London, 1976)

ed. L. Somfai: Documenta bartókiana, 5 (1977) [incl. essay

drafts and variants]

ed. B. Suchoff: Yugoslav Folk Music (Albany, NY, 1978)

‘Bartók és a szavak’ [Bartók and words], Arion, no.13

(1982) [whole issue, incl. essay drafts and variants]

ed. T. Tallián: Bartók Béla írásai, i: Bartók Béla önmagáról,

műveiről, az új magyar zenéről, műzene és népzene

Page 73 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 viszonyáról [Béla Bartók’s writings, i: on himself, his
music, new Hungarian music, and the connection between
art and folk music] (Budapest, 1989)

ed. S. Kovács and F. Sebő: Magyar népdalok, egyetemes

gyűjtemény, 1 [Hungarian folksongs, complete collection,
i] (Budapest, 1991; Eng. trans., 1993)

ed. B. Suchoff: Béla Bartók Studies in Ethnomusicology

(Lincoln, NE, 1997)

Recordings
coll., with Z. Kodály: Magyar népzenei
gramofonfelvételek, 1 [Hungarian Folk-Music
Gramophone Recordings, i], rec. 1937

coll., with J. Deutsch and S. Veress: A Magyar rádió és a

néprajzi múzeum gyűjteménye [Collection of the
Hungarian Radio and Ethnographic Museum], rec. 1937–
9; reissued as Hungarian Folk Music: Gramophone
Records with Bartók’s Transcriptions, Hungaroton, LPX
18058–60 (1981) [ed. L. Somfai]

Centenary Edition of Bartók’s Records (Complete), i:

Bartók at the Piano, 1920–1945; 2. Bartók Record
Archives: Bartók Plays and Talks, 1912–1944, Hungaroton,
LPX 12326–38 (1981) [ed. L. Somfai, Z. Kocsis, J.
Sebestyén, with notes by L. Somfai] (Budapest, 1981, i:
rev. 2/1991, ii: rev. 2/1995)

Bibliography

A: Documents, catalogues and source information

J. Demény, ed.: Bartók Béla levelei [Letters] (Budapest,
1948–71, enlarged 2/1976; Eng. trans., 1971)

Page 74 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 J. Demény: ‘Bartók Béla tanuló évei és romantikus
korszaka’ [Bartók’s years of study and his romantic
period], ZT, 2 (1954), 323–487 [documents of 1899–1905]

J. Demény: ‘Bartók művészi kibontakozásának évei:

találkozás a népzenével’ [Bartók’s years of artistic
development: contact with folk music], ZT, 3 (1955), 286–
459 [documents of 1906–14]

B. Szabolcsi, ed.: Bartók: sa vie et son oeuvre (Budapest,

1956, 2/1968)

V. Juhász, ed.: Bartók Béla amerikai évei [Bela Bartók’s

American years] (New York, 1956; Eng. trans., 1981)

F. Bónis, ed.: Bartók Béla élete képekben [Béla Bartók’s

life in pictures] (Budapest, 1956, 2/1958)

J. Ujfalussy, ed.: Bartók breviárium (Budapest, 1958,

3/1980) [letters, essays and documents]

W. Reich, ed.: Béla Bartók: eigene Schriften und

Erinnerungen der Freunde (Basle, 1958)

J. Demény, ed.: ‘Bartók Béla megjelenése az európai

zeneéletben’ [Bartók’s appearance in European musical
life], ZT, 7 (1959), 5–425 [documents of 1914–26]

J. Demény, ed.: ‘Bartók Béla pályája delelőjén’ [The zenith

of Bartók’s career], ZT, 10 (1962), 189–787 [documents of
1926–40]

V. Bator: The Béla Bartók Archives: History and Catalogue

(New York, 1963)

F. Bónis: Béla Bartóks Leben in Bildern (Budapest, 1964,

enlarged 2/1972 in Hung. and Ger.; Eng. trans., 1972,
2/1981)

D. Dille, ed.: Documenta bartókiana, 1–4 (Budapest, 1964–

70)

Page 75 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 E. Helm: Béla Bartók in Selbstzeugnissen und
Bilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1965)

V. Čížik, ed.: Bartóks Briefe in die Slowakei (Bratislava,

1971)

D. Dille: Thematisches Verzeichnis der Jugendwerke Béla

Bartóks, 1890–1904 (Kassel, 1974)

F. László, ed.: 99 Bartók-levél [99 Bartók letters]

(Bucharest, 1974)

F. László, ed.: Béla Bartók scrisori [Béla Bartók letters]

(Bucharest, 1976)

L. Somfai, ed.: Documenta bartókiana, 5–6 (Budapest,

1977-81)

V. Lampert: Bartók népdalfeldolgozásainak forrásjegyzéke

[Catalogue of sources of Bartók’s folksong arrangements]
(Budapest, 1980); Ger. trans. in Documenta bartókiana, vi
(Budapest, 1981), 15–149

P. Autexier, ed.: Béla Bartók: musique de la vie (Paris,

1981)

L. Somfai: ‘Manuscript versus Urtext: the Primary Sources

of Bartók’s Works’, SMH, 23 (1981), 2–66

B. Suchoff: ‘The New York Bartók Archives’, MT, 122

(1981), 156–9

A. Wilheim: ‘A Bartók Bibliography, 1970–1980’, SMH, 23

(1981), 477–92

B. Bartók, jr and A. Gombocz, eds.: Bartók Béla családi

levelei [Letters of the Béla Bartók family] (Budapest,
1981)

B. Bartók, jr: Apám életének krónikája [Chronicle of my

father’s life] (Budapest, 1981)

Page 76 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 F. Bónis, ed.: Így láttuk Bartókot: harminchat emlékezés
[So saw we Bartók: thirty-six recollections] (Budapest,
1981, 2/1995)

B. Bartók, jr: Bartók Béla műhelyében [In Béla Bartók’s

workshop] (Budapest, 1982)

L. Somfai: ‘The Budapest Bartók Archives’, FAM, 29

(1982), 59–65

H. Lindlar: Lübbes Bartók-Lexikon (Bergisch Gladbach,

1984)

E. Antokoletz: Béla Bartók: a Guide to Research (New

York, 1988, 2/1997)

T. Tallián: Bartók fogadtatása Amerikában, 1940–1945

[Bartók’s Reception in America, 1940–1945] (Budapest,
1988)

M. Gillies: Bartók Remembered (London, 1990)

L. Somfai: ‘Problems of the Chronological Organization of

the Béla Bartók Thematic Index in Preparation’, SMH, 34
(1992), 345–66

G. Kiss: ‘A Bartók Bibliography, 1980–1989’, SMH, 35

(1993–4), 435–53

J. Gergely, ed.: Béla Bartók: eléments d’un autoportrait

(Paris, 1995)

G. Kroó, ed.: Bartók Béla, 1881–1945 (Budapest, 1995;

Eng. trans., 1997) [CD-ROM]

B: Symposia, collections of essays

Béla Bartók: a Memorial Review (New York, 1950)

Musik der Zeit, Ungarische Komponisten, no.9 (1954)

[Hungary issue]

Page 77 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Z. Kodály, B. Rajeczky and L. Vargyas, eds.: Studia
memoriae Belae Bartók sacra (Budapest, 1956)

Liszt–Bartók: Budapest 1961

Conference in Commemoration of Béla Bartók: Budapest

1971

F. László, ed.: Bartók-dolgozatok [Bartók studies]

(Bucharest, 1974)

T. Crow, ed.: Bartók Studies (Detroit, 1976)

F. László: Bartók Béla: tanulmányok és tanúságok [Béla

Bartók: essays and testimonies] (Bucharest, 1980)

International Music Council Congress: Budapest 1981 [

SMH, xxiv/3–4 (1982)]

F. László, ed.: Bartók-dolgozatok, 1981 [Bartók studies,

1981] (Bucharest, 1982)

F. Spangemacher, ed.: Béla Bartók zu Leben und Werk

(Bonn, 1982)

J. Gergely, ed.: Béla Bartók vivant (Paris, 1985)

G. Ránki, ed.: Bartók and Kodály Revisited (Budapest,

1987)

M. Gillies, ed.: The Bartók Companion (London, 1993)

P. Laki, ed.: Bartók and his World (Princeton, NJ, 1995)

Bartók Colloquium: Szombathely 1995 [SMH, xxxvi/3–4

(1995); xxxvii/1 (1996)]

C: Periodical issues
Musikblätter des Anbruch, 3/5 (1921)

Page 78 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Musikblätter des Anbruch, 8/5 (1926)

Melos, 5–6 (1949)

Új zenei szemle, 1/4–5 (1950)

Musik der Zeit, Béla Bartók, no.3 (1953)

Long Player, 2/10 (1953)

ReM, no.224 (1953–4)

ReM, nos.328–35 (1980)

Igaz Szó, 29/2 (1981)

SMH, 23 (1981)

SMH, 24 (1982), suppl.

Musik-Konzepte, no.22 (1981)

Jb Peters, 4 (1981–2)

‘Bartók és a szavak’ [Bartók and words], Arion, no.13

(1982)

Melos [Stockholm], nos.12–13 (1995)

D: Life and works

E. Haraszti: Bartók Béla élete és művei [Béla Bartók’s life
and works] (Budapest, 1930; Eng. trans., 1938)

D. Dille: Béla Bartók (Antwerp, 1939)

J. Demény: Bartók élete és művei [Bartók’s life and works]

(Budapest, 1948)

Page 79 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 A. Molnár: Bartók művészete, emlékezésekkel a művész
életére [Bartók’s art, with recollections of the artist’s life]
(Budapest, 1948)

H. and J. Geraedts: Béla Bartók (Haarlem, 1952, 2/1961)

H. Stevens: The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (New York,

1953, rev. 3/1993 by M. Gillies)

I. Martïnov: Béla Bartók (Moscow, 1956, 2/1968)

J. Uhde: Béla Bartók (Berlin, 1959)

L. Lesznai: Béla Bartók: sein Leben, seine Werke (Leipzig,

1961; Eng. trans., 1973)

P. Citron: Bartók (Paris, 1963, 3/1994)

G. Berger: Béla Bartók (Wolfenbüttel, 1963)

Z. Pálová-Vrbová: Béla Bartók, 1881–1945: život a dílo

[Béla Bartók: life and works] (Prague, 1963)

J. Ujfalussy: Bartók Béla (Budapest, 1965, 3/1976; Eng.

trans., 1972)

I. Nest’yev: Béla Bartók, 1881–1945: zhizn′ i tvorchestvo

[Bartók: life and works] (Moscow, 1969)

T. Zieliński: Bartók (Kraków, 1969; Ger. trans., 1973)

D. Dille: Béla Bartók (Antwerp, 1974)

V. Lampert: Bartók Béla (Budapest, 1976)

S. Arvidsson: Béla Bartók (Göteborg, 1981)

Y. Queffélec: Béla Bartók (Paris, 1981)

T. Tallián: Bartók Béla (Budapest, 1981; Eng. trans., 1988)

P. Griffiths: Bartók (London, 1984)

Page 80 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 J. de Waard: Bartók (Haarlem, 1993)

A. Castronuovo: Bartók (Sannicandro Garganico, 1995)

K. Chalmers: Béla Bartók (London, 1995)

E: General biographical and critical studies

A. Cserna: ‘Bartók Béla és művei’ [Béla Bartók and his
works], Zeneközlöny, 15 (1917)

C. Gray: ‘Béla Bartók’, Sackbut, 1 (1920), 301–12

E. Wellesz: ‘Ungarische Musik, i: Béla Bartók’,

Musikblätter des Anbruch, 2 (1920), 225–8

Z. Kodály: ‘Béla Bartók’, ReM, 2/5 (1921), 205–17

M.-D. Calvocoressi: ‘Musicisti contemporanei: Béla

Bartók’, Il Pianoforte, 3 (1922), 113–17

C. Gray: ‘Béla Bartók’, A Survey of Contemporary Music

(London, 1924), 194–209

E. von der Nüll: ‘Zur Kompositionstechnik Bartóks’,

Anbruch, 10 (1928), 278–82

H. Leichtentritt: ‘On the Art of Béla Bartók’, MM, 6/3

(1928–9), 3–11

E. von der Nüll: Béla Bartók: ein Beitrag zur Morphologie

der neuen Musik (Halle, 1930)

L. Pollatsek: ‘Béla Bartók and his Work’, MT, 72 (1931),

411–13, 506–10, 600–602, 697–9

H. Leichtentritt: ‘Bartók and Hungarian Folksong’, MM,

10 (1933), 130–39

E. Ormándy: ‘Modern Hungarian Music’, Hungarian

Quarterly, 3 (1937), 164–8

Page 81 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 E. Blom: ‘Bartók’s Third Period’, Tempo, no.5 (1941), 2–4

B. Kiss: Bartók Béla művészete [Béla Bartók’s art] (Cluj,

1946)

J. Weissmann: ‘Béla Bartók: an Estimate’, MR, 7 (1946),

221–41

R. Leibowitz: ‘Béla Bartók ou la possibilité de compromis

dans la musique contemporaine’, Temps modernes, 3
(1947–8), 705–34

S. Moreux: Béla Bartók: sa vie, ses oeuvres, son langage

(Paris, 1949; Eng. trans., 1953)

C. Mason: ‘Bartók and Folksong’, MR, 11 (1950), 292–302

E. Balogh: ‘Bartók’s Last Years’, Tempo, no.36 (1955), 14–

16

J. Székely: Bartók tanár úr (Pécs, 1957, 2/1978; Ger. rev.

1995)

A. Fassett: The Naked Face of Genius: Béla Bartók’s

American Years (Boston, 1958; R/1970 as Béla Bartók: the
American Years) [a novel]

F. Fricsay: Über Mozart und Bartók (Copenhagen, 1962)

F. Bónis: ‘Quotations in Bartók’s Music’, SMH, 5 (1963),

355–82

W. Rudziński: Warsztat kompozytorski Béli Bartóka [Béla

Bartók’s compositional workshop] (Kraków, 1964)

J. Downey: La musique populaire dans l’oeuvre de Béla

Bartók (diss., U. of Paris, 1966)

A. Cross: ‘Debussy and Bartók’, MT, 108 (1967), 125–31

J. Demény: Bartók Béla: a zongoraművész [Béla Bartók:

the pianist] (Budapest, 1968, 2/1973)

Page 82 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 G. Kroó: ‘Bartók Béla megvalósulatlan kompoziciós
terveiről’ [Unrealized plans and ideas for projects by Béla
Bartók], Magyar zene, 10 (1969), 251–63; Eng. trans.,
SMH, xii (1970), 11–27

A. Benkő: Bartók Béla romániai hangversenyei, 1922–

1936 [Béla Bartók’s concerts in Romania, 1922–36]
(Bucharest, 1970)

G. Weiss: Die Frühe Schaffensentwicklung Béla Bartóks

im Lichte westlicher und östlicher Traditionen (diss., U. of
Erlangen-Nuremberg, 1970)

G. Kroó: Bartók kalauz [A guide to Bartók] (Budapest,

1971; Eng. trans., 1974)

L. Burlas: ‘The Influence of Slovakian Folk Music on

Bartók’s Musical Idiom’, Conference in Commemoration of
Béla Bartók: Budapest 1971, 181–7

E. Lendvai: Bartók költői világa [Bartók’s poetic world]

(Budapest, 1971)

G. Lukács: ‘Béla Bartók: on the 25th Anniversary of his

Death’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.41 (1971), 42–55

O. Nordwall: Béla Bartók: Traditionalist-Modernist

(Stockholm, 1972)

M. Rogers and Z. Oválry: ‘Bartók in the USSR in 1929’,

Notes, 29 (1972–3), 416–25

F. Bónis, ed.: Magyar zenetörténeti tanulmányok

[Hungarian studies in music history], 3 (Budapest, 1973)

W. Fuchss: Béla Bartók und die Schweiz: eine

Dokumentensammlung (Berne, 1973)

M. Carner: ‘Béla Bartók’, NOHM, 10 (1974), 274–99

Y. Lenoir: Vie et oeuvre de Béla Bartók aux Etats-Unis

d’Amérique, 1940–1945 (diss., U. of Leuven, 1976)

Page 83 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 D. Zoltai: ‘Bartók nem alkuszik’ [Bartók does not
compromise], Bartók nem alkuszik (Budapest, 1976), 136–
53

D. Dille: Généalogie sommaire de la famille Bartók

(Antwerp, 1977)

J. Breuer: Bartók és Kodály (Budapest, 1978)

D. Dille: Het werk van Béla Bartók (Antwerp, 1977)

A. Wilheim: ‘Bartók találkozása Debussy

művészetével’ [Bartók’s encounter with Debussy’s art],
Zenetudományi dolgozatok 1978 (Budapest, 1978), 107–
11

T. Tallián: ‘Bartók-marginália’, Zenetudományi dolgozatok

1979 (Budapest, 1979), 35–46

B. Bartók, jr: ‘Bartók and the Visual Arts’, New Hungarian

Quarterly, no.81 (1981), 44–9

F. Bónis: ‘Bartók und Wagner’, ÖMz, 36 (1981), 134–47

J. Breuer: ‘Adorno’s Image of Bartók’, New Hungarian

Quarterly, no.82 (1981), 29–35

R. Schlötterer-Traimer: ‘Béla Bartók und die

Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss’, ÖMz, 36 (1981),
311–18

L. Somfai: Tizennyolc Bartók-tanulmány [Eighteen Bartók

essays] (Budapest, 1981)

B. Bartók, jr: ‘Kodály und Bartók’, Kodály Conference:

Budapest 1982, 12–17

J. Takács: Erinnerungen an Béla Bartók (Vienna, 1982)

W. Frobenius: ‘Bartók und Bach’, AMw, 41 (1984), 54–67

Page 84 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 B. Pethő: Bartók rejtekútja [Bartók’s secret path]
(Budapest, 1984)

I. Volly: ‘Bartókné Pásztory Ditta’, Életünk, nos.7–8 (1984),

807–23, 873–84

J. Hunkemöller: ‘Bartóks Urteil über den Jazz’, Mf, 38

(1985), 27–36

Y. Lenoir: Folklore et transcendance dans l’oeuvre

américaine de Béla Bartók (1940–1945) (Louvain-la-
Neuve, 1986)

L. Somfai: ‘Liszt’s Influence on Bartók Reconsidered’,

New Hungarian Quarterly, no.102 (1986), 210–19

B. Suchoff: ‘Ethnomusicological Roots of Béla Bartók’s

Musical Language’, World of Music, 29/1 (1987), 43–65

B. Szabolcsi: Kodályról és Bartókról [About Kodály and

Bartók], ed. F. Bónis (Budapest, 1987)

L. Somfai: ‘Bartók Comes Home’, New Hungarian

Quarterly, no.112 (1988), 185–9

J. Frigyesi: Béla Bartók and Hungarian Nationalism (diss.,

U. of Pennsylvania, 1989)

M. Gillies: Bartók in Britain (Oxford, 1989)

D. Dille: Béla Bartók: regard sur le passé, ed. Y. Lenoir

(Namur and Louvain-la-Neuve, 1990)

M. Gillies: ‘Bartók as Pedagogue’, SMA, 24 (1990), 64–86

F. Bónis: Hódolat Bartóknak és Kodálynak [Homage to

Bartók and Kodály] (Budapest, 1992)

M. Gillies: ‘Stylistic Integrity and Influence in Bartók’s

Works: the Case of Szymanowski’, International Journal of
Musicology, 1 (1992), 139–60

Page 85 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 A. Surrans: Bartók és Franciaország/Bartók et la France
(Budapest, 1993)

J. Frigyesi: ‘Béla Bartók and the Concept of Nation and

Volk in Modern Hungary’, MQ, 78 (1994), 255–87

C. Kenneson: Székely and Bartók: the Story of a

Friendship (Portland, OR, 1994)

Z. Kocsis: ‘Dohnányi and Bartók as Performers’,

Hungarian Quarterly, no.134 (1994), 149–53

C. Pesavento: Musik von Béla Bartók als pädagogisches

Programm (Frankfurt, 1994)

J. Bényei, ed.: A mindenzég zenéje: Magyar költők versei

Bartók Béláról [Music of the universe: Hungarian poetry
about Béla Bartók] (Debrecen, 1995)

J. Breuer: ‘Bartók and the Third Reich’, Hungarian

Quarterly, no.140 (1995), 134–40

V. Lampert: ‘Bartók’s Music on Record: an Index of

Popularity’, SMH, 36 (1995), 393–412

F. László: ‘Rumänische Stilelemente in Bartóks Musik:

Fakten und Deutungen’, SMH, 36 (1995), 413–28

V. Verspeurt: ‘Een status quaestionis van het Bartók-

onderzoek’, RBM, 49 (1995), 251–8

L. Somfai: Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and

Autograph Sources (Berkeley, 1996)

J. Frigyesi: Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest

(Berkeley, 1998)

L. Vikárius: Modell és inspiráció Bartók zenei

gondolkodásában [Model and inspiration in Bartók’s
musical thought] (Pécs, 1999)

Page 86 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 F: General analytical studies
E. Lendvai: Bartók stílusa [Bartók’s style] (Budapest,
1955)

E. Kapst: Die ‘polymodale Chromatik’ Béla Bartóks (diss.,

U. of Leipzig, 1969)

L. Somfai: “‘Per finire”: Some Aspects of the Finale in

Bartók’s Cyclic Form’, SMH, 11 (1969), 391–408

L. Hartzell: Contrapuntal-Harmonic Factors in Selected

Works of Béla Bartók (diss., U. of Kansas, 1970)

E. Kapst: ‘Stilkriterien der polymodal-kromatischen

Gestaltungsweise im Werk Béla Bartóks’, BMw, 12 (1970),
1–28

P. Petersen: Die Tonalität im Instrumentalschaffen von

Béla Bartók (Hamburg, 1971)

E. Lendvai: Béla Bartók: an Analysis of his Music (London,

1971)

L. Somfai: ‘A Characteristic Culmination Point in Bartók’s

Instrumental Forms’, Conference in Commemoration of
Béla Bartók: Budapest 1971, 53–64

L. Bárdos: A Bartók-zene stílus-elemei [Style elements of

Bartók’s music] (Budapest, 1972; Eng. trans., 1984)

J. Breuer: ‘Kolinda-ritmika Bartók zenéjében’ [Colindă

rhythms in Bartók’s music], Zeneelmélet, stíluselemzés
(Budapest, 1977), 84–102

I. Oramo: Modaalinen symmetria: tutkimus Bartókin

kromatiikasta (Helsinki, 1977)

A. Szentkirályi: ‘Some Aspects of Béla Bartók’s

Compositional Techniques’, SMH, 20 (1978), 157–82

Page 87 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 T. and P.J. Bachmann: ‘An Analysis of Béla Bartók’s Music
through Fibonaccian Numbers and the Golden Mean’, MQ
, 65 (1979), 72–82

I. Oramo: ‘Modale Symmetrie bei Bartók’, Mf, 33 (1980),

450–64

M. Radice: ‘Bartók’s Parodies of Beethoven’, MR, 42

(1981), 252–60

C. Vauclain: ‘Bartók: Beyond Bi-Modality’, MR, 42 (1981),

243–51

E. Antokoletz: ‘The Music of Bartók: Some Theoretical

Approaches in the USA’, SMH, 24 (1982), suppl. 67–74

P. Dinkel: ‘La tentation atonale de Béla Bartók’, Revue

musicale de la Suisse Romande, 35 (1982), 119–26

M. Gillies: ‘Bartók’s Last Works: a Theory of Tonality and

Modality’, Musicology, 7 (1982), 120–30

E. Lendvai: The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály

(Budapest, 1983)

E. Antokoletz: The Music of Béla Bartók (Berkeley, 1984)

M. Gillies: ‘Bartók’s Notation: Tonality and Modality’,

Tempo, no.145 (1983), 4–9

R. Howat: ‘Bartók, Lendvai and the Principles of

Proportional Analysis’, MAn, 2 (1983), 69–95; see also
response by E. Lendvai, MAn, iii (1984), 255–64

L. Starr: ‘Melody-Accompaniment Textures in the Music of

Bartók’, JM, 4 (1985–6), 91–104

J. Bernard: ‘Space and Symmetry in Bartók’, JMT, 30

(1986), 185–201

R. Howat: ‘Debussy, Bartók et les formes de la nature’,

Revue musicale de la Suisse Romande, 39 (1986), 128–41

Page 88 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 L. Somfai: ‘Nineteenth-Century Ideas Developed in
Bartók’s Piano Notation in the Years 1907–14’, 19CM, 11
(1987–8), 73–91

R. Cohn: ‘Inversional Symmetry and Transpositional

Combination in Bartók’, Music Theory Spectrum, 10
(1988), 19–42

M. Gillies: Notation and Tonal Structure in Bartók’s Later

Works (New York, 1989)

R. Cohn: ‘Bartók’s Octatonic Strategies: a Motivic

Approach’, JAMS, 44 (1991), 262–300

C. Morrison: ‘Fifth Progressions in Bartók: Structural

Determinants or Mimicry?’, SMH, 34 (1992), 125–52

P. Wilson: The Music of Béla Bartók (New Haven, 1992)

E. Antokoletz: ‘Transformations of a Special Non-Diatonic

Mode in Twentieth-Century Music: Bartók, Stravinsky,
Scriabin and Albrecht’, MAn, 12 (1993), 25–45

A. Forte: ‘Foreground Rhythm in Early Twentieth-Century

Music’, Models of Musical Analysis: Early Twentieth-
Century Music, ed. J. Dunsby (Oxford, 1993), 133–45

M. Gillies: ‘Pitch Notations and Tonality (Bartók)’, Models

of Musical Analysis: Early Twentieth-Century Music, 42–
55

M. Russ: ‘Functions, Scales, Abstract Systems and

Contextual Hierarchies in the Music of Bartók’, ML, 75
(1994), 401–25

M. Gillies: ‘Bartók Analysis and Authenticity’, SMH, 36

(1995), 319–27

D. Schneider: ‘Towards Bridging the Gap: the Culmination

Point as a Fulcrum between Analysis and Interpretation’,
SMH, 37 (1996), 21–36

Page 89 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 D. Walker: Bartók Analysis: a Critical Examination and
Application (diss., McMaster U., 1996)

F. Hentschel: Funktion und Bedeutung der Symmetrie in

den Werken Béla Bartóks (Lucca, 1997)

D. Cooper: ‘The Unfolding of Tonality in the Music of Béla

Bartók’, MAn, 17 (1998), 21–38

G: Individual works and genres

Stage
E. von der Nüll: ‘Stilelemente in Bartóks Oper Herzog
Blaubarts Burg’, Melos, 8 (1929), 226–31

G. Kroó: ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’, SMH, 1 (1961), 251–

340

B. Szabolcsi: ‘Le mandarin miraculeux’, SMH, 1 (1961),

341–61

E. Lendvai: ‘Der wunderbare Mandarin’, SMH, 1 (1961),

363–429

G. Kroó: Bartók Béla színpadi művei [Béla Bartók’s stage

works] (Budapest, 1962)

E. Lendvai: Bartók dramaturgiája [Bartók’s dramaturgy]

(Budapest, 1964/R)

J. Chailley: ‘Essai d’analyse du Mandarin merveilleux’,

SMH, 8 (1966), 11–39

G. Kroó: ‘Data on the Genesis of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’,

SMH, 23 (1981), 79–123

Page 90 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 A. von Wangenheim: Béla Bartók: ‘Der wunderbare
Mandarin’ (Overath, 1985)

E. Antokoletz: ‘Bartók’s Bluebeard: the Sources of its

“Modernism”’, College Music Symposium, 30/1 (1990),
75–95

C. Leafstedt: ‘Structure in the Fifth Door Scene of

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle: an Alternative
Viewpoint’, College Music Symposium, 30/1 (1990), 96–
102

N. John, ed.: The Stage Works of Béla Bartók (London,

1991)

C.S. Leafstedt: Inside Bluebeard’s Castle (New York,

1999)

Orchestral
H. Cowell: ‘Bartók and his Violin Concerto’, Tempo, no.8
(1944), 4–6

G. French: ‘Continuity and Discontinuity in Bartók’s

“Concerto for Orchestra”’, MR, 28 (1967), 122–34

J. McCabe: Bartók Orchestral Music (London, 1974)

T. Serly: ‘A Belated Account of the Reconstruction of a

20th-Century Masterpiece’, College Music Symposium, 15
(1975), 7–25 [on Viola Concerto]

D. Dalton: ‘The Genesis of Bartók’s Viola Concerto’, ML,

57 (1976), 117–29

F. Michael: Béla Bartóks Variationstechnik dargestellt im

Rahmen einer Analyse seines 2. Violinkonzert
(Regensburg, 1976)

Page 91 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 L. Somfai: ‘Strategies of Variation in the Second
Movement of Bartók’s Violin Concerto 1937–8’, SMH, 19
(1977), 161–202

S. Kovács: ‘Re-examining the Bartók/Serly Viola Concerto’,

SMH, 23 (1981), 295–322

E. Lendvai: ‘The Quadrophonic Stage of Bartók’s Music

for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’, New Hungarian
Quarterly, no.84 (1981), 70–85

J. Hunkemöller: Béla Bartók: Musik für Saiteninstrumente

(Munich, 1982)

J. Hunkemöller: ‘Bartók analysiert seine “Musik für

Saiteninstrumente, Schlagzeug und Celesta”’, AMw, 40
(1983), 147–63

B. Parker: ‘Parallels between Bartók’s Concerto for

Orchestra and Kübler-Ross’s Theory about the Dying’, MQ
, 73 (1989), 532–56

K. Móricz: Bartók Béla: Concerto zenekarra [Béla Bartók:

Concerto for Orchestra] (diss., Liszt Academy, Budapest,
1992)

A. Rizzuti: ‘Le geometrie imperfette della Musica per

strumenti a corde, percussioni e celesta di Béla Bartók’,
NRMI, 26 (1992), 37–51

P. Bartók: ‘The Principal Theme of Bartók’s Viola

Concerto’, SMH, 35 (1993–4), 45–50

K. Móricz: ‘New Aspects of the Genesis of Béla Bartók’s

Concerto for Orchestra’, SMH, 35 (1993–4), 181–219

G. Weiss-Aigner: ‘Das zweite Violinkonzert von Béla

Bartók im Spektrum der gattungsgeschichtlichen
Entwicklung’, SMH, 35 (1993–4), 303–39

Page 92 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 M.A. Harley: ‘Birds in Concert: North-American Birdsong
in Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3’, Tempo, no.189 (1994),
8–16

K. Móricz: ‘Operating on a Fetus: Sketch Studies and their

Relevance to the Interpretation of the Finale of Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra’, SMH, 36 (1995), 461–76

B. Suchoff: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra (New York,

1995)

P. Bartók: ‘Commentary on the Revision of Béla Bartók’s

Viola Concerto’, Journal of the American Viola Society,
12/1 (1996), 11–33

D. Cooper: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra (Cambridge,

1996)

D. Maurice and others: ‘Panel Discussion: the Bartók Viola

Concerto’, Journal of the American Viola Society, 14/1
(1998), 15–49

D. Maurice: Bartók’s Viola Concerto: an Investigation of

its Genesis, Reconstruction, Reception, Revision and
Future Possibilities (diss., Otago U., 1997)

D. Schneider: Expression in the Time of Objectivity:

Nationality and Modernity in Five Concertos by Béla
Bartók (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1997)

Chamber
T. Adorno: ‘Béla Bartóks Drittes Streichquartett’, Anbruch,
11/9–10 (1929), 358–60

G. Abraham: ‘The Bartók of the Quartets’, ML, 26 (1945),

185–94

Page 93 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 M. Seiber: The String Quartets of Béla Bartók (London,
1945)

M. Babbitt: ‘The String Quartets of Bartók’, MQ, 35

(1949), 377–85

G. Perle: ‘Symmetrical Formations in the String Quartets

of Béla Bartók’, MR, 16 (1955), 300–312

J. Kárpáti: ‘Az arab népzene hatásának nyomai Bartók II.

vonósnégyesében’ [Traces of the influence of Arabic folk
music in Bartók’s Second String Quartet], Új Zenei
Szemle, 7 (1956), 8–15

R. Traimer: Béla Bartóks Kompositionstechnik dargestellt

an seinen sechs Streichquartetten (Regensburg, 1956)

C. Mason: ‘An Essay in Analysis: Tonality, Symmetry and

Latent Serialism in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet’, MR, 18
(1957), 189–201

L. Treitler: ‘Harmonic Procedures in the Fourth Quartet of

Béla Bartók’, JMT, 3 (1959), 292–8

A. Forte: ‘Bartók’s Serial Composition’, MQ, 46 (1960),

233–45 [on Fourth String Quartet]

J. Kárpáti: Bartók vonósnégyesei [Bartók’s string quartets]

(Budapest, 1967, 2/1976 as Bartók kamarazenéje
[Bartók’s chamber music]); Eng. trans., 1975, enlarged as
Bartók’s Chamber Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 1994)

B. Suchoff: ‘Structure and Concept in Bartók’s Sixth

String Quartet’, Tempo, no.83 (1967–8), 2–11

K. Stockhausen: ‘Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and

Percussion’, New Hungarian Quarterly, no.40 (1970), 49–
53

Page 94 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 R. Travis: ‘Tonal Coherence in the First Movement of
Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet’, Music Forum, 2 (1970),
298–371

V. Lampert: ‘Vázlat Bartók II. vonósnégyesének utolsó

tételéhez’ [Sketch for the last movement of Bartók’s
Second String Quartet], Magyar zene, 13 (1972), 252–63

S. Veress: ‘Béla Bartóks 44 Duos für zwei Violinen’, Erich

Doflein: Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. L.U. Abraham
(Mainz, 1972), 31–57

H. Fladt: Zur Problematik traditioneller Formtypen in der

Musik des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, dargestellt
an Sonatensätzen in den Streichquartetten Béla Bartóks
(Munich, 1974)

E. Antokoletz: Principles of Pitch Organization in Bartók’s

Fourth String Quartet (diss., City U. of New York, 1975)

G. Perle: ‘The String Quartets of Béla Bartók’, A Musical

Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein, ed. E.H.
Clinkscale and C. Brook (New York, 1977), 193–210

W. Berry: ‘Symmetrical Interval Sets and Derivative Pitch

Materials in Bartók’s Quartet No.3’, PNM, 18 (1979–80),
287–380

Y. Lenoir: ‘Contributions à l’étude de la Sonate pour violon

solo de Béla Bartók’, SMH, 23 (1981), 209–60

S. Walsh: Bartók’s Chamber Music (London, 1982)

D. Locke: ‘Numerical Aspects of Bartók’s String Quartets’,

MT, 128 (1987), 322–5

M. Beach: Bartók’s Fifth String Quartet: Studies in

Genesis and Structure (diss., U. of Rochester, 1988)

Page 95 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 C. Morrison: ‘Prolongation in the Final Movement of
Bartók’s String Quartet No.4’, Music Theory Spectrum, 13
(1991), 179–96

P. Petersen: ‘Rhythmik und Metrik in Bartóks Sonate für

zwei Klaviere und Schlagzeug und die Kritik des jungen
Stockhausen an Bartók’, Musiktheorie, 9 (1994), 39–48

Piano
A. Molnár: Bartók Két elégiájának elemzése [An analysis
of Bartók’s Two Elegies] (Budapest, 1921)

E. Lendvai: ‘Bartók: Az éjszaka zenéje’ [Bartók: The

Night’s Music], Zenei szemle, 1 (1947), 216

H.U. Engelmann: Bela Bartoks Mikrokosmos: Versuch

einer Typologie ‘Neuer Musik’ (Würzburg, 1953/R)

J. Uhde: Bartóks Mikrokosmos: Spielanweisungen und

Erläuterungen (Regensburg, 1954, 2/1988)

B. Suchoff: Guide to Bartók’s ‘Mikrokosmos’ (London,

1957, 2/1971)

D. Bratuz: The Folk Element in the Piano Music of Béla

Bartók (diss., Indiana U., 1965)

J. Vinton: ‘Toward a Chronology of the Mikrokosmos’,

SMH, 8 (1966), 41–69

T. Hundt: Bartóks Satztechnik in den Klavierwerken

(Regensburg, 1971)

D. Bratuz: ‘On Bartók’s Improvisations and the Pippa

Principle’, Studies in Music [Ontario], 2 (1977), 8–14

E. Antokoletz: ‘The Musical Language of Bartók’s 14

Bagatelles for Piano’, Tempo, no.137 (1981), 8–16

Page 96 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 I. Waldbauer: ‘Intellectual Construct and Tonal Direction
in Bartók’s “Divided Arpeggios”’, SMH, 24 (1982), 527–36

K. Agawu: ‘Analytical Issues Raised by Bartók’s

Improvisations for Piano, Op.20’, JMR, 5 (1984), 131–63

L. Somfai: ‘Analytical Notes on Bartók’s Piano Year of

1926’, SMH, 26 (1984), 5–58

P. Wilson: ‘Concepts of Prolongation and Bartók’s Opus

20’, Music Theory Spectrum, 6 (1984), 79–89

I. Waldbauer: ‘Conflict of Tonal and Non-Tonal Elements in

Bartók’s “Free Variations”’, Bartók and Kodály Revisited,
ed. G. Ranki (Budapest, 1987), 199–209

D. Yeomans: Bartók for Piano (Bloomington, IN, 1988)

V. Fischer: Béla Bartók’s Fourteen Bagatelles op.6:

Determining Performance Authenticity (diss., U. of Texas,
Austin, 1989)

I. Waldbauer: ‘Polymodal Chromaticism and Tonal Plan in

the First of Bartók’s Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm’,
SMH, 32 (1990), 241–62

L. Somfai: ‘The Influence of Peasant Music on the Finale

of Bartók’s Piano Sonata’, Studies in Musical Sources and
Style: Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue, ed. E. Wolf and E.
Roesner (Madison, WI, 1990), 535–55

J. Parakilas: ‘Folksong as Musical Wet Nurse: the

Prehistory of Bartók’s For Children’, MQ, 81 (1995), 476–
500

Vocal
P. Meyer: Béla Bartóks ‘Ady-Lieder’ op.16 (Winterthur,
1965)

Page 97 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 M. Szabó: Bartók Béla kórusművei [Béla Bartók’s choral
works] (Budapest, 1985)

L. Vikárius: ‘Béla Bartók’s Cantata Profana (1930): a

Reading of the Sources’, SMH, 35 (1993–4), 249–301

I. Arauco: ‘Methods of Translation in Bartók’s Twenty

Hungarian Folksongs’, JMR, 12 (1992), 189–211

T. Tallián: ‘Let this cup pass from me …: the Cantata

Profana and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew’, New
Hungarian Quarterly, no.139 (1995)

H: Ethnomusicological research
C. Brăiloiu: ‘Béla Bartók folkloriste’, SMz, 88 (1948), 92–4

J. Szegő: Bartók Béla, a népdalkutató [Béla Bartók, the

folksong researcher] (Bucharest, 1956)

J. Downey: La musique populaire dans l’oeuvre de Béla

Bartók (diss., U. of Paris, 1966)

J. Kuckertz: Gestaltvariation in den von Bartók

gesammelten rumänischen Colinden (Regensburg, 1963)

B. Suchoff: ‘Bartók and Serbo-Croatian Folk Music’, MQ,

58 (1972), 557–71

P.P. Domokos: Bartók Béla kapcsolata a moldvai

csángómagyarokkal [Béla Bartók’s connection with the
csángós of Moldavia] (Budapest, 1981)

S. Kovács: ‘Bartók’s System of Folksong Classification’,

New Hungarian Quarterly, no.83 (1981), 71–8

L. Vargyas: ‘Bartók and Folk Music Research’, New

Hungarian Quarterly, no.83 (1981), 58–70

S. Erdely: ‘Folk-Music Research in Hungary until 1950:

the Legacy of Bartók and Kodály’, CMc, no.43 (1987), 51–
61

Page 98 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 Y. Lenoir: ‘Le destin des recherches ethnomusicologiques
de Béla Bartók à la vielle de son séjour aux Etats-Unis’,
RBM, 62 (1988), 273–83

N. Ito: Barutoku: Minyou o ‘hakken’ sita henkyou no

sakkyoukuka [Bartók’s activities as a folk-music
researcher] (Tokyo, 1997)

See also from The New Grove Dictionary of Opera:

Bartók, Béla; Bluebeard’s Castle

More on this topic

Bartók, Béla (1881-1945), composer and
pianist <http://anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/
9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-
e-1802132> in American National Biography
Online <http://anb.org>
Bartók, Béla, (25 March 1881–27 Sept. 1945),
composer and pianist <http://ukwhoswho.com/view/
10.1093/ww/9780199540891.001.0001/
ww-9780199540884-e-222331> in Who Was
Who <http://ukwhoswho.com>
Bartók, Béla (opera) <http://oxfordmusiconline.com/
grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/
9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-
e-5000900450> in Oxford Music Online <http://
oxfordmusiconline.com>

Page 99 of 99
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).