As Ferenc Bónis points out in his thor- ough notes for this sumptuous facsi-mile edition of the autograph full score of Bartók’s Dance Suite (1923), the work was the first to be commissioned from the composer by an institution—specifically the Council of Budapest, for a concert to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Buda and Pest. Perhaps this fact, more than any profound rethinking of his creative direction, moved Bartók to adopt a simpler style here than he had in his immediately preceding compositions, the two violin sonatas he wrote for Jelly d’Arányi and himself. After all, there are later works, notably the Third Quartet of 1927, which are again more difficult. But if the Dance Suite was designed to be a success with a big audience, it was a success Bartók achieved on his own terms.

This could have been the moment for nationalist celebration. (Mr. Bónis points out that Miklós Horthy was in the audience. "To our knowledge this was the only occasion when he attended a Bartók premičre.") But, on the contrary, Bartók chose the moment to express an ideal of different nations dancing together—Hungarian, Romanian and Arab—creating melodies in the several linked movements that take up elements from folk melodies he had studied in the field. As he originally planned the score, Slovaks were also to be included, though after completing the two-stave draft he excised his Slovak-coloured number.

One of the fascinations of the present edition is that it includes this movement, in a photographic reproduction and in music type. Mr. Bónis surmises that Bartók omitted it because of its "lightness" (it is indeed much simpler harmonically than the other movements, and one may well doubt whether the contrast would work in performance) and also because it would disrupt the Golden Section proportions of the composition (which seems more arguable). Most persuasive is his suggestion that Bartók began the work imagining it might be a folksy confection like others he had produced (at an early stage he wrote to his publisher about "the new dances for small orchestra"), and that the score deepened and darkened under his hand as he worked. Perhaps, once he was into the project of assembling dances of diverse national sorts, which he had not done before, the work took on an importance he had not suspected, as an image of what, in a later letter to a Romanian friend, he called his "guiding idea": "the brotherhood of peoples".

Mr Bónis’s remarks, printed in a separate fascicle, document possible models for the work’s motifs—in Mussorgsky and, even more surprisingly, Monteverdi, as well as in Hungarian and Arab folk music. He also provides a full narrative of the compositional process, traced through a complex array of sources, including a copy in full score made by the composer’s first wife, Márta, only months after their divorce. The divorce came through in June 1923. On August 19 Bartók completed the Dance Suite in Radvány, where he was, despite the recent split, spending the summer with Márta and their son; on August 28 he married Ditta Pásztory; and on August 30 he dispatched the first half of Márta’s copy to his publisher, Universal Edition. This music of "brotherhood" thus required a certain amount of sisterly compromise within the composer’s circle.

Also included in Mr. Bónis’s material are reproductions of caricatures and handbills relating to early performances, a record of those performances complete up to the end of 1927, and reviews of the first performance. The record shows how the piece could indeed have been, as a Universal advertisement proudly declared, "the most played work of the coming winter", i.e. the 1925/6 season, for during that season it was heard in cities as far-flung as Leningrad, Chicago, Manchester and Göteborg, under conductors including Henry Wood, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Pierre Monteux, Václav Talich and Fritz Reiner. Present-day composers, even the most eminent, might envy such exposure—though there were prices to be paid. The New York premičre, in April 1927, was of a "dance romance", for which Bartók’s score was combined "with folk and gypsy songs" and arranged for a fourteen-piece ensemble.

The facsimile itself, bound in black cloth, brings one rapidly back to Bartók, whose grey and red pencil annotations are clearly distinguished from his ink score. The paper’s browning is accurately imitated, and the stamps of the Budapest Historical Museum seem to confirm that one holds in one’s hand the Dance Suite before anyone but its composer had ever heard its earthy vitality—its brilliance and its savagery.