Tibor Tallián
Let this cup pass from me...
The Cantata Profana and the Gospel According to Saint Matthew
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We know, however, that perhaps that summer, or even earlier, perhaps at the same time as reading Don Quijote, he tackled another book in Spanish. That was El Nuevo Testamento, published in Madrid in 1901. Bartók possibly acquired it at the time of his 1906 Iberian journey, adding it to a collection of Bibles that was to include editions in English, French, Italian, Romanian, and Slovak.
Let there be no misunderstanding: Bartók was no Bible-thumper. He was a born collector and comparer, and he collected the Bible primarily for its prose, because so many translations exist and they can be compared. It is worth noting too that although he owned the Bible in six languages, there was no Bible in Hungarian or German, his two "native languages", in his original collection amongst copies that had clearly been acquired early this century. (A bibliophile edition of a Roman Catholic Hungarian Bible was presented to him by the organizers on the occasion of the 1937 Éneklô ifjúság [Singing Youth] Bartók evening.) One may perhaps conclude that, albeit the six copies suggest that the text of the Bible was important to Bartók, it was nevertheless a text that was so to speak remote to him as werefrom a Central European point of viewsome of the languages in which he owned them.
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The temptation of Jesus occurs in the garden of Gethsemane. He is here tempted by the elementary human life-instinct which knows of no ethics. He implores three times: "let this cup pass from me", but then three times He overcomes His fear, subjecting Himself to the will of the Father as Socrates did to that of the Athenian judges: He was ready to drink the hemlock. (Matt. 26:39-42, And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will but as thou wilt... O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.
One of the most accentuated motifs of the temptation scene in the colindła is the cup filled with wine on the enchanted table which appears in the lure of the father. The way Bartók deliberately interprets this is that the cup the hand of the father offers to the sons is the cup of dependence. In the Cantata, the sons refuse the cup, with the only possible answer as heard in the famous closing sentence of the largest stag: "Our mouths no longer drink from cups..."
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is Deputy Director of the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His books include Béla Bartók. The Man and his Work (Corvina, 1981, 1988) and Bartók fogadtatása Amerikában (Bartók's Reception in America, Zenemûkiadó, 1988).
