For many years, Bartok was my favorite 20th century composer.  

His dates are 1881 - 1945.

He was born in Hungary, in rural Transylvania (Dracula country), in a 
village then named Nagyszentmiklos, pronounced "nodge-sent-MIK-losh."  
Now part of Romania, it is called Sīnnicolau Mare on modern maps.  Both 
the Hungarian and the Romanian names mean "Great St. Nicholas."  

Bartok was a Magyar, an ethnic Hungarian.  In his twenties and 
thirties, he and his friend Zoltan Kodaly collected recordings of 
folksongs on wax cylinders.  The peasant music of his native land 
became the cornerstone of his mature style.

His early style, late-late Romantic with echoes of Strauss and Debussy, 
evolved into a more modernist sound characterized by dissonance and 
assymetrical rhythms.  The summit of his middle period, the Second 
Piano Concerto, is near if not at the very summit of early 20th century 
modernism.  The second movement of this work, in particular, is a 
masterpiece of Beethovenian magnitude.  His third and fourth string 
quartets, composed around the same time, are also capable of standing 
next to anything Beethoven ever wrote for that medium.  

Some of Bartok's music, including the second movement of the Second 
Piano Concerto, can sound rather spooky to new listeners.  Some of it, 
like the third movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion and 
Celesta, sounds almost too self-consciously scary to be taken 
seriously.  But this is territory that Bartok, for whatever reasons 
(growing up in Transylvania?), mapped out for himself, and he is 
entitled to it.  If you listen to the scary parts with an open mind, 
you will find that Bartok's craftmanship is as flawless there as in the 
rest of his music.

His Concerto for Orchestra, a glittery showpiece in his late "popular" 
style, is a good place to start with his music.  If you want to plunge 
right into the hardcore stuff, try the Fourth Quartet.  If you want to 
be scared out of your wits, try The Miraculous Mandarin.

Who else likes Bartok?  What are your favorite Bartok factoids?  Fave 
compositions?  Performances?

15 responses total.

Do I ever have mixed feelings about Bartok.  I like some of his late 
pieces, such as the Concerto for Orchestra and the 3rd Piano Concerto.  
I also like some of his earlier works, including the 1st Piano Concerto.

But I've heard the Miraculous Mandarin exactly once, and its presence 
on a concert program is now an absolute guarantee that I won't go.  Of 
what might vaguely be called the standard repertoire, only a few other 
composers (Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler) have works that I put in 
that category.  And they were all written in the same 25-year period.  
Weird.

(The standard orchestral repertoire, I mean.  My knowledge of chamber 
music is spotty, and seriously tackling the Bartok quartets is one 
obvious task I've never undertaken.)

Bartok's music for the nightmarish scene where the undead Mandarin is 
hanging by the ceiling cord and staring down at the prostitute, green 
light glowing from his body, has to be the creepiest music ever 
written.  The rest of the piece is expressionist-abrasive to the point, 
obviously, of being a deal-breaker for many concertgoers.  I heard an 
afternoon of rehearsals of it once when I was in college, and somehow 
the matter-of-fact practical nature of the experience tamed the music 
for me.  A little like seeing the reverse side of the scenery with all 
its support beams and bent nails.  But this isn't typical Bartok at 
all.  I'm not crazy about it, either.  

I'm surprised you like the 1st Piano Concerto, which is from the same 
early expressionist period and should be having the same effect on your 
nervous system as the Mandarin.  But Bartok was a virtuouso concert 
pianist whose piano writing was always brilliant and idiomatic, so 
maybe that's what saves the piece for you.  (I've never liked the 
standard-issue critical opinion that Bartok used the piano as a 
percussion instrument in the 1st Concerto.  The piano *is* a percussion 
instrument, at bottom.  Bartok was just letting it express its id, so 
to speak.)

Re the quartets.  When I was 16 years old, a brainy friend made me 
bring the old Juilliard/Columbia recording of the 3rd and 4th quartets 
home from the local lending library.  Based on the awestruck liner 
notes, I started with the 4th quartet.  It made no sense to me at all.  
Determined to understand what the fuss was all about, I listened to it 
again.  And again.  And again.  Twenty-one times in two days.  

And did you ever figure out what, if anything, the fuss was about?

Heh.  Yeah, after about ten hearings.  The rest were just for fun.  ;-)

I think it was the percussive use of the piano that saved the First 
Concerto for me.  And the orchestra has to keep it down a bit, if only 
to allow the piano to be heard.

I find it easier to tackle difficult works by approaching them 
sideways: instead of listening to the 4th Quartet over and over head-
on, I intend to start with the outer quartets and work in.  By learning 
the less difficult language first, I can perhaps teach myself to 
translate.

The first movement of the Second Quartet is probably the most beautiful 
thing he ever wrote, as the word "beautiful" is commonly understood.  
Absolutely ravishing.

If it's that kind of beauty you're looking for, try the Second Suite 
for Orchestra.  It's early Bartok, where he's still finding his voice.  
Still doesn't sound much like him, but you can tell he's getting 
there.  It's a colorful late-romantic piece, very atmospheric and 
sensuous.  An old Mercury recording of it with Antal Dorati conducting 
was a youthful favorite of mine.  I have it now on a CD coupled with 
the First Suite, which isn't as good, with Tibor Ferenc conducting the 
Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra.  

Another piece you might like is the Divertimento for String Orchestra.

I've heard the Divertimento, and liked it OK.

I like beauty in music, but it can definitely be taken too far, and 
often was in the decadent late-Romantic period.  Of the composers who 
are commonly heard on concert programs, the ones I most assiduously 
avoid are a group of decadent late- and post-Romantics of whom Richard 
Strauss is the most prominent.  If Bartok was coming out of that school 
in his early music, I wouldn't care for it.  "The Miraculous Mandarin" 
is an early work, and I dislike it strongly - not because it's noisy, 
but because it's lushly noisy.  By contrast, Prokofiev's "Scythian 
Suite", another ballet suite from about the same time, I like 
considerably, even though it's equally noisy - but Prokofiev, even at 
his most modernist, was a lean mean noise-making machine of purely 20th-
century esthetic, while some other composers grafted characteristically 
19th & 20th-century styles together, with grisly results.

What do you think of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe?  I've always thought of 
that as the epitome of lush gorgeousness in orchestral music, despite 
its (infrequent, and equally lush) edgy moments.  Sarah Hughes won an 
Olympic gold medal last year skating to the "sunrise" sequence, which I 
thought was a form of cheating.  It was a little like Oliver Stone 
using Barber's Adagio in Platoon.  How can you tell if the skating or 
the movie is any good with that music knocking you on your butt?

Bartok's Second Suite is more in the nationalistic school.  Lots of 
folksong-like melodies and harmonies.  Quite beautiful in places, but 
every once in a while a Straussian peroration makes you grit your teeth.

Daphnis is way too lush for me.  Or it was: perhaps I should listen to 
it again some day, but my aversion to a couple early listenings to it 
was so strong that, like "Miraculous Mandarin" and the longer tone 
poems of Strauss, it's on my don't-attend-this-concert list.

Ravel is not always like that, and I'm very fond of a few of his 
crisper pieces, like Le Tombeau de Couperin and Ma Mere l'Oye, both of 
which remind me of Respighi.

I confess that, when I was young, I could not listen to most chamber
music -- certainly not Bartok.  Now, I'm amused at my early narrowness.
 It is puzzling that Bartok has become a kind of poster boy for
difficult  music, which often means music we haven't taken the trouble
to listen to and open ourselves to.  (I played Bartok's 4th quartet for
my son who was performing in NYC with a rock band.  Though he wasn't a
classical music afficionado, he immediately turned on to the Bartok
quartets -- perhaps my enthusiasm for them was a little infectious.)  
Nicholas Slonimsky's book (I think it's called "History of  Musical
Invective")  has encouraged me to give newer music a fair hearing. 
First of all, it's great fun, and consists mostly of quotations from
outraged reviewers of newly written music by Beethoven, Brahms,
Tchaikowsky, Stravinsky, and up to the atonal or "serial" composers like
Webern, Schoenberg, et al.  It did give me some perspective on new
music, especially when I read comments about Beethoven et al that are
almost identical to what we read today about current classical music.

I know just what you mean about the supposed "difficulty" of Bartok's 
music.  It's all highly listenable.  It might take the slower types 
like me a few listenings to grasp the structure of the 4th Quartet, but 
the *sound* of it is immediately accessible, as your son found out.  

Bela Lugosi.

What about him?

He shared the first name "Bela" with Bartok.

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