At a time when, in the wake of Wagner the arts were supposed to be coming together, Bartók seems to have given rather little heed to what he saw. He did not, like Debussy, try to evoke impressions of the visible world by means of sound: even Bluebeard's Castle is not an exception to this, for the sonic eruptions that come from the orchestra, a new one for each opened door, are not suggestive prompts to the visual cortex but wholesale replacements of sight by hearing, moments that overwhelm us with self-sufficient auditory information. Nor did Bartók, like Schoenberg, paint-or, like Stravinsky, Sibelius and Varčse, associate with painters. And the journeys he made were all to hear.
The paucity of the seen in his life would appear to make him an unlikely subject for a documentary film, and yet István Gaál's Roots, in three hour-long parts, is an extraordinarily successful biography of the composer, partly because it makes a virtue of the sobriety Bartók's life imposes on it.
It is a film for the ears-rather like a radio programme with quiet illustrations. The focus is firmly on what is heard: music, of course, both Bartók's and that of the villages he visited, and words that, too, were his, for the entire script is skillfully put together from his letters and other writings, spoken in English as a voice-over. The fact that no other witnesses are called-and in particular that there are no talking heads on screen-gives the film a quite unusual visual calm. It also suggests the emotional isolation in which Bartók seems to have lived. And because we hear only his point of view (and only the point of view he was prepared to trust to paper), the episode of his remarriage comes across as abrupt and mysterious-like an episode in one of his scores.
The roots to which the film's title alludes are, of course, those of his music. These roots are demonstrated with breathtaking immediacy, often simply by placing together a folksong recording (some of Bartók's own are heard) and his adaptation. Exemplary performances are provided by Jenoý Jandó, Zoltán Kocsis and Dezsoý Ránki, performances heard complete, and subtly and simply filmed.
Here a long parenthesis has to be enter-ed, for Mr Kocsis has just finished his complete recording of Bartók's solo piano music -a pictureless movie, as it were, in seven long parts, this last-Philips 289 464 639-including works from rather early in the composer's career as well as one startling masterpiece from much later. The early items include the Four Pieces of 1903-a very miscellaneous set that includes a rhetorical rhapsody for left hand and a scherzo that, with its gnomic turns and ostinatos and sud-den changes of colour, is much more distinctly Bartókian-and the composer's trans-cription of the funeral march from his tone poem Kossuth of the same year. Unsurprisingly, these are not pieces Bartók chose to keep in his active repertory, and Mr. Kocsis bravely confesses that he would not have undertaken them "if he had not been compelled to do so by the need to finish this complete edition of Bartók's piano music".
But if compulsion suggests something heavy-hearted and weak-willed, that is not at all the effect of his performances. As he also says in his fascinating notes (complemented by others from the doyen of Bartók scholars, László Somfai), "these works call not so much for analysis as for help". And help he supplies, in abundance. It is a matter of treating the pieces frankly, as the wide-shooting outbursts of a young man full of creative energy that was, as yet, undirected. Then it is a matter of understanding that young man to have been Bartók-of finding in it what is personal and strong and suggestive. These late juvenilia are not likely to be recorded again too often. Nor need they be.
Still, the major pieces are the later ones. Scrupulous for completion, Mr. Kocsis includes two versions of the Rhapsody op.1: the original "long version" of 1905 and the "short version" he let his publisher issue three years later. This means that the same ten minutes or so of music are included twice over, but nobody should feel this to be a problem when the disc is so full (playing for over 76 minutes) and when Mr. Kocsis takes the opportunity to offer subtly different ways of doing things. In both versions he is, again, full of ideas that have the music springing to life in full Bartókian character-moments when the notes just blur together into a gesture, whether rapturous or full of foreboding.
An even more amazing achievement is the one fully mature piece on the record, for who knew that the Dance Suite was a great piano composition? Thus it indeed appears. Mr. Kocsis has a marvellous way of performing so that the music is filled with bodily energy but not hindered by what comes naturally: you hear the notes at play, not the fingers. And superb notes these are in the Dance Suite. Never for a moment does one feel the lack of orchestral colour, so precise and various are Mr. Kocsis's piano timbres. And the single view of phrasing and harmonic balance is excellent to hear when it is so thoroughly considered and so frankly presented. Mr. Kocsis does not need to persuade: there is nothing rampant in his performance, just complete conviction and magnificent completeness of form and detail.
Much the same qualities of honesty, intelligence and willingness to serve are there in Mr. Gaál's film, which wisely avoids the pitfalls of putting an ensemble or orchestra on the small screen by confining itself to its beautiful piano sequences by Mr. Kocsis and his colleagues, where music is allowed to shine through undisturbed. However, excerpts from quartets and orchestral works are heard on the soundtrack, and there are archival snips from the stage works, including a powerful passage from The Miraculous Mandarin in a Budapest production of the 1950s.
Such things will be a revelation to non-Hungarian audiences-similarly the wonderful shots of places where Bartók work-ed and walked, especially in Transylvania. With its wide green meadows hung between mountains and its springtime streams bubbling over ice, the film offers glimpses of an idyll and suggests that, after all, Bartók did have his eyes keenly open.