Bartok one hundred years ago…
Well the beginning of the year was slightly ‘marred’ by the thought that Andrew was no longer presenting the beginning of the week. Don’t cringe; it’s an undeniable fact that modern times have caught up with some of our great contemporary historians and journalists to make them feel they are no longer ‘modern’. But I suppose we do have Kirsty Wark whose diplomatic yet incisive journalism with the charming lilt of her Scottish heritage is the one reason I still occasionally swallow Newsnight.
This morning’s Start the Week was again sustained by her engaging charm. An ambitious attempt on Radio 4 to define 1922 as the ‘pivotal’ year for modernism. Perhaps the programme could have tolled a truly contemporary bell by calling itself the ‘1922 committee’. That curious collection of back bench MPs was actually founded in 1923 which perpetrates the lie of so much in politics.
What is ‘Modernism’? Or rather what was it? Can you really define the ‘Here and Now? Two great works of literature which are often cited to define the pivotal moment in 1922 are Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Wasteland; and many other interesting contenders are mentioned in Kirsty Wark’s programme, but I did not hear one mention of the great Hungarian Béla Bartók. I contend that, just as very few would be able to tell you whom the Imre Varga statue outside South Kensington tube station represents, too few recognise Bartók’s contribution to the development of music in the last century. So I would just like to present my humble credentials by drawing your attention to his two Violin Sonatas written in 1921 and 1922. These are works which are totally up there with the very latest creative blasts in those early post war years. Those roaring 20’s growled with figures riling against the politics of the times.
1922 was in fact the year Bartók came to London to perform his sonatas with Jelly d’Aranyi. We need to form a new 1922 committee...for so many reasons!
My incentive to immerse myself in Bartók’s two great violin sonatas came about through a decision to focus on Hungarian music in our Festival; the Internationale Fredener Musiktage. https://fredener-Musiktage.de/festivalgeschichte-archiv/#2010
We recorded this CD in the Herrenhaus Correns known today as the Siemensvilla in Berlin. An imposing villa in what was traditionally known as the Rosenthalviertel and now officially known as the Komponistenviertel (composer’s quarter), it was built in 1910 and used for banquets and gatherings during the horrendous Nazi era. It incorporates a music salon which has an ideal acoustic for live recordings.
The first requisite for broaching a project of this kind is to be sure you have a pianist who is committed to what is a truly taxing undertaking. Bartok was himself a brilliant pianist and he pretty much takes it for granted that his interpreters are going to have similarly fluent technical ability. The piano part of both sonatas was highly original when written in 1921/22 and remains a veritable challenge for pianists today. The first movement of his first sonata requires the pianist to spread his hands in wide symmetrical movements over the keys creating a rhapsodic and rich counterpart to the individual writing for the violin. The third movement in contrast uses a percussive notation to drive the work with that energetic verve characteristic of eastern gypsy music. Both sonatas, but predominantly the second, make overt use of the chromatic colouring of cluster chords. Perhaps most striking is the fact that Bartok respects the individual characteristics of both violin and piano. The lyricism of the violin part is apparent while the harmonic richness of the piano is exploited to the full.
If you are only going to dip your ears into this then go to the third movement of the first sonata. Here the barbaric nature of Bartók’s eastern temperament is apparent. These sonatas though are not suited to a fleeting listen. They are mammoth works which can only really be appreciated after several hearings, and they are as relevant to the twentieth century as the violin sonatas of Brahms were to the nineteenth.
