An Essential Addition to Bartók Studies

Bartók and His World. Ed. by Peter Laki. Bard Music Festival Series, Princeton University Press, 1995. 10+ 314 pp.

Ever since 1990, Bard College, at Annandale-on-Hudson, a small town between Albany and Poughkeepsie in upper New York State on the upper reaches of the river Hudson, has been the venue of summer music festivals. The series of concerts, lectures and round tables are designed to acquaint students and visitors with some of the great figures in music. These summer events are followed in the winter by a second act, as it were, this time in New York. The composers dealt with so far include Brahms, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, Dvor˙ak and Schumann. The 1995 festival commemorated Bartók, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death.

Linked with the Festival, Princeton University Press publishes a volume each year containing essential data and a range of articles on the composers concerned and their world. The visitors to the Bartók festival took home a valuable souvenir from the concerts and lectures in the form of this Bartók volume with studies by eminent international Bartók scholars and documents by Bartók and about Bartók.

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The volume is one of the best English-language Bartók publications in recent years. It rises above its occasional origins in the Bard Festival and can, with its background material, successfully complement Malcolm Gillies's Bartók Companion⁹ and László Somfai's Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts and Autograph Sources¹⁰, published recently. Its strength, as its title indicates, lies in its being centred on Bartók's world and not on an examination of Bartók's music.

In the first part (Essays) seven studies approach the subject of the book's title in very different ways, yet they are well aligned in their exactitude and outlook.

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The editor, Péter Laki, has done an excellent job in selecting these studies, which he has standardized with regard of quotations and notes. He also provides two additional sections, "Writings by Bartók" and "Writings about Bartók". Since a large, indeed basic, collection of Bartók's writings has been available in English ever since 1976,¹³ and a selection of his letters has also been published in English¹⁴, Laki has now endeavoured to provide material so far unpublished in English. Fortunately, he has been able to turn to substantial material which was published in Hungarian by Béla Bartók Jr, Bartók Béla családi levelei (Béla Bartók's Family Correspondence)15. Laki has called his selection "Travel Reports from Three Continents," with letters from Bartók's field work in Transylvania (1914) and Upper Northern Hungary (1918), from a summer holiday in Switzerland (1930) and from a visit to Cairo where he attended an international conference on Arabic music (1932). This section also includes an interview Dezsõ Kosztolányi, the great Hungarian writer and poet of the first half of the century, conducted with Bartók in 1925, directly after the composer returned from the Prague meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Music. There is also a short, so far practically unknown conversation, which took place after one of Bartók's concerts in Kassa (Kos˙ice) in 1926.

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Notes

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9 * London, Faber & Faber, 1993.

10 * University of California Press, 1996.

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13 * Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff, London, Faber & Faber, 1976.

14 * See Note 1. A fairly voluminous English selection of the letters is to appear in the near future, edited by Malcolm Gillies and Adrienne Gombocz.

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