Béla Bartók: modern music’s invisible man – Béla Bartók Bluebeard’s Castle

Pubblicato il 21 agosto 2013 da admin

Béla Bartók: modern music’s invisible man

Is Béla Bartók the 20th century’s most neglected composer.

The revolutionaries of early 20th-century music may not be well-loved, but at least they’re well-known. Everyone can recognise the gnomelike figure of Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg is famous just for being classical music’s favourite bogeyman, the inventor of “beastly modern music”. But Béla Bartók? How many people could recognise his image, or have even heard of him?

And yet on the level of sheer talent this Hungarian master is at least their equal. He was a superb pianist, for some, one of the great names of the era. Everyone acknowledged his uncannily sensitive ear, even Stravinsky.

If you were making a list of the greatest pieces of the first half of the 20th century, many pieces by Bartók would be there: the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the series of six string quartets (the greatest since Beethoven’s, is the general consensus), the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin and odd uncategorisable masterpieces such as the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste — which dips a toe into the music of “pure sound” decades before Cage and Stockhausen.

So why don’t we know about him? Esa-Pekka Salonen, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra and the originator of the orchestra’s Bartók series Infernal Dance, thinks the difficulty is simply getting Bartók in focus.

“There are so many different aspects – Bartók the virtuoso pianist, Bartók the great folk music collector, and the Bartók who was fascinated by mathematics and used the golden mean in his music.

“And then there’s Bartók the refugee in America during the war years, when he became the archivist of the great folk song collection at Columbia University in New York. It’s hard to make all these things add up and also, as a man he’s invisible. He didn’t mix with the artistic crowd like Stravinsky; there’s something lonely about him.”

The loneliness is a sign of the purity in Bartók’s character. People said that when he played his own music he came alive and as soon as it was over he retreated into a privacy where no one could reach him.

He was born in a remote part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1881 and though he became well-known and much-travelled he stayed stubbornly attached to the old customs of country people, and suspicious of cities. In the years before the First World War he spent years collecting folk music, the authentic “voice of the people” he treasured so much. That purity is something Salonen finds very attractive.

“You see the idealism in the way he did his folk collecting. He tramped for miles through the Balkans and Carpathians, and when he found something that interested him he stayed in the village and lived with the peasants, to discover how the music functioned in their lives.”

This story could be repeated in countries all over Europe. In England, Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp were just as assiduous in collecting folk songs. But whereas English folk song led Williams backwards towards a mystical “vision of Albion”, Eastern European folk music propelled Bartók towards the future. Its tangy exotic modes freed him from “the tyranny of major and minor scales”, as he put it, and the wild irregular rhythms of Balkan dance encouraged him to think about rhythm in a new way.

Combined with Bartók’s natural tendency to mathematical abstraction, these influences led in the Twenties to a kind of fiercely dissonant “Cubist folk music”. Salonen admits that when he was a young tough-minded Modernist it was these works that specially appealed to him. Now he views Bartók differently.

“I’ve come to appreciate the earlier works like Bluebeard’s Castle and also the wonderful Cantata Profana, which is almost never performed. The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste is still my favourite, I believe this is one of the great works of all time. The slow movement has such a strange bleak sadness, and also that quality of nocturnal, rustling elegy, which you find so often in Bartók. And then there’s the fantastic raucous energy of the dance finale.

“Bartók’s music can be unbelievably expressive and deeply touching, as well as very radical, and I hope our series will redress the balance,” Salonen says.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/8274555/Bela-Bartok-modern-musics-invisible-man.html

Composizioni principali

Musica orchestrale

Musica corale

Musica da camera

Pianoforte

Violino Solo

Musica per il palcoscenico

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Bart%C3%B3k


“Il Mandarino Meraviglioso” di Béla Bartók

http://www.controappuntoblog.org/2012/08/14/il-mandarino-meraviglioso%E2%80%9D-di-bela-bartok/

PAUL KLEE. BELA BARTOK. HERBERT VON KARAJAN. Bauhaus

http://controappunto.altervista.org/paul-klee-bela-bartok-herbert-von-karajan-bauhaus/

 

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