Péter Laki

Bartók in Hungarian Poetry

 

When I was a student at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, I spent a lot of time in a classroom where a famous photograph of Béla Bartók, by Kata Kálmán, was hanging on the wall. Whenever I looked at this picture, it seemed to me that Bartók's eyes were constantly on me. I tried to escape his probing look, and moved to another corner of the room. But those large, deep, and expressive eyes were following me wherever I went. The impression was akin to what Rainer Maria Rilke described in his poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo:" denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern. ("For there is no place at all / that isn't looking at you. You must change your life.")
The perception that Bartók is constantly looking at us and therefore we have to change our lives is practically as old as Bartók reception itself. And the people who were best able to put this perception into words were poets, like Rilke who had expressed a similar perception about an ancient Greek statue.
Three entire anthologies have been devoted to poems written about Bartók in Hungary: the anthologies were published in 1965, 1981, and 1995, respectively.1 The editor of the most recent volume, József Bényei, has counted more than 300 poems, written by 200 poets. There are even a few that were intended to accompany inauguration ceremonies for Bartók statues by such artists as Béni Ferenczy and Tibor Szervátiusz, trying to describe a probing visage and the eyes with which I began my remarks. If I were a poet, I would insert a new poem on Bartók at this moment, instead of discussing earlier poems. Yet I think such a discussion is not without interest. The very fact that there are so many Bartók poems tells us something important about how Bartók has been perceived by observers, contemporaries and members of subsequent generations, who were not professional musicians and therefore did not approach the music from a technical angle.
Without a doubt, we have so many poems because poets (like the rest of us) have felt Bartók's music to be like his gaze in that photograph: inescapable. The music forces you to ask some probing questions about life, according to the overwhelming testimony of listeners from what is now almost a full century of Bartók reception.
From the outset, Bartók's music has given rise to extra-musical associations. Even in the absence of a literary programme by the composer, the music has almost always been perceived as evoking specific feelings, positive or negative.
The earliest Bartók poem known to me is, incredibly, not by a Hungarian poet but by Amy Lowell, who published "After Hearing a Waltz by Bartók" in her volume Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, printed in Boston in 1914. It is a rather curious piece that cannot be based on more than a superficial encounter with Bartók's music, yet as we shall see, it offers a good starting point for our investigation. The "waltz" in question is the last of the Fourteen Bagatelles, Op.6, written in 1908.
How did Amy Lowell come across this Bagatelle before 1914? There is no record of a performance in the United States at such an early date. We know, however, that Lowell visited London in 1913 and again in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Bartók himself was not in England in those years, but there was a German-born pianist living in London by the name of Franz Liebich, who made recent Hungarian music something of a specialty, as Malcolm Gillies tells us in his book Bartók in Britain.2 Amy Lowell could well have been introduced to Bartók's music at one of Liebich's recitals.
Lowell probably didn't know that the waltz was titled "Ma mie qui danse" (My Dancing Sweetheart). She certainly couldn't have any inkling of the biographical background of the piece: it was written after Bartók's great love, the violinist Stefi Geyer, broke with him. Nor could Lowell have been aware that the previous Bagatelle - No.13 - bore the title "Elle est morte" (She is Dead), giving the waltz a positively macabre colouring. She had no idea that in 1911, Bartók had orchestrated this piece as the second, torz ("Grotesque") movement of his Two Portraits, where it followed the "ideal" portrait - the lyrical image of Stefi Geyer in the early violin concerto dedicated to her.
In this macabre waltz, the conventional oom-pah accompaniment figure is distorted. It is based on the same melody as the "ideal" portrait, but the melody, too, is distorted here: instead of notes of equal length, we have an alternation of very long and very short notes, underscoring the grotesque character. In the Bagatelle No.13 ("Elle est morte"), the same melody is played upside down in an unmistakable instance of death symbolism, with a characteristic funeral-march accompaniment.
Amy Lowell couldn't possibly have known any of this. Yet the "waltz" prompted her to write quite a macabre poem in which a man murders his rival for a woman. Perhaps the first stanza will suffice to evoke the lurid atmosphere:

But why did I kill him? Why? Why?
In the small, gilded room, near the stair?
My ears rack and throb with his cry,
And his eyes goggle under his hair,
As my fingers sink into the fair
White skin of his throat. It was I!

What is interesting - in the light of the Hungarian poems to which I shall turn shortly - is the violence of the images, which we shall see again, in different form, in works by writers who knew their subject much more intimately than did Lowell.

Bartók belonged to a generation that gave Hungary several of her most outstanding poets (Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, Árpád Tóth). Among these, Gyula Juhász was the only one to pay poetic homage to the composer. Juhász heard the voice of nature - forests, winds - in the music, as well as the presence of a "primeval soul": Az ázsiai mély, nagy, / Szilajbús, büszke méla, / Pogány és boldog lélek, / A régi, régi Éden / A zenédben! (approximately: "Asian, profound, great, / fierce, sad, proud, dreamy, / pagan and happy soul, / the old, old Eden in your music!"). Yet Juhász was almost alone in perceiving the "old Eden" in Bartók at the time. Most others, including the leading avant-gardist poet Lajos Kassák, or Béla Balázs, the librettist of Bluebeard's Castle and The Wooden Prince, heard something entirely different. They introduced a motive that has remained a constant element in Bartók's Hungarian reception: the savagery of the music that found expression in its relentless dissonant quality. Balázs wrote: Bizony zenéd nem andalító mámor, / Kérlelhetetlen acélszerkezet, / Bús föld alól dübörgő lázadás. / Vad fájdalom, sikító fájdalom. / Ki bántott téged? ("Your music is no sweet ecstasy, / a relentless structure of steel, / a throbbing subterranean rebellion, / a savage pain, a shrieking pain. / Who wounded you?") Balázs identified this "savage pain" with the pain of the destitute peasant class, a pain Bartók supposedly came to share as he collected peasant songs in the villages. Yet at the same time he found an equally painful paradox in that, having transformed peasant music in his own compositions, Bartók had rendered that music unintelligible to the very people with whom it had originated in the first place. Most belőled süvít a bennük fojtott / Lázadó kín, s ők meg nem ismerik, / És nem is hallják. Kiknek muzsikálod / Az égnek borzadt, kicsorbult kaszákat / Magyar magányban? ("The rebellious pain, which they have repressed, / roars in you now, but they don't know it / and can't hear it. To whom do you sing / those blunt scythes, rising up heavenward in horror / in your Hungarian solitude?") For Lajos Kassák, Bartók was "Satan" himself, aki / levett kalappal sétál, vagy odaül a zongorához, / csörömpöl, sír és néha ugat olyan irtóztatón / hogy elsötétül az ég s a házak falai beomlanak ("Who walks with his hat off or sits at the piano, / Rattles, cries, and sometimes barks, / So that the sky becomes dark, and the walls of the houses crumble.") Of course, both Balázs and Kassák had the deepest admiration for Bartók; Balázs was Bartók's collaborator, as I mentioned before; Kassák, for his part, published excerpts of Bartók's music in the periodicals he edited and considered the composer a seminal figure. For Kassák, the destruction of the crumbling walls is almost a welcome event: it is a manifestation of a supernatural power that brings renewal to the world.
It may be surprising to find so many images of violence and destruction in poems that are undoubtedly admiring in tone. There is a curious paradox (another one!) at work here: for all their admiration, many of Bartók's listeners found it hard to deal with the radical innovations heard in the music - above all, the very non-traditional treatment of harmony and rhythm. In other words, the music was very dissonant, the rhythmic patterns often aggressive in their relentless use of ostinato and other non-classical devices. What to do? A natural solution is offered by the idea that Bartók's modernism somehow reflects the turmoil of the world we live in - a common notion upon which Gyula Illyés built his 1955 Bartók poem, long a frequent item at poetry recitals. Here Illyés took issue with those who heard only hangzavar ("harsh discord") in Bartók's music, yet he himself heard the music as harsh and discordant. He invoked fűrész foga közé szorult / reszelő sikongató / jaját ("the screech of rasp wedged in the teeth of buzzing saw") - certainly not a very pleasant sound, and brought his lengthy poem to its climax with the triple oxymoron káromlással imádkozó, / oltárdöntéssel áldozó, / sebezve gyógyulást hozó ("praying with blasphemy, sacrificing with sacrilege, wounding to cure"). Truly cruel images all, but the poet claims that all the cruelty is necessary to express - and exorcise - humankind's horrible suffering. This reading remained influential for a very long time, but it did not go unchallenged. In a direct reference to Illyés, István Vas wrote: Hangzavar? Diszharmónia? Nehéz? Bonyolult? / Lehet: nem értek hozzá. Énnekem a zene volt, / Az első, amit bevettem, az első, aminek / Jelentése volt, amit meg tudtam érteni... / A dallam volt, az egy ültömben is felfogható, / Az összhang, a magától értetődő, a tartás, / Amely csontomba szervült... ("Harsh discord? Disharmony? Difficult? Complicated? Could be: I can't judge. To me, it was the music, / The first I had taken in, the first that had / a meaning I could understand, / A melody I could grasp in a single sitting, / Harmony, self-evident, an attitude / That has seeped into my bones.")
Did it take a personal connection or a more musically trained ear that enabled Vas to grasp Bartók's music "in a single sitting?" Later in the poem he recalls his first wife, the dancer Etel Nagy (Lajos Kassák's adopted daughter, deceased by the time the poem was written) perform a choreographed version of Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. In one of his autobiographical volumes he relates how he, a young city dweller, found a new sense of self-awareness by singing, at friendly gatherings, the peasant songs collected by Bartók and Kodály. Vas's description of Bartók is direct and personal, his absorption of the music seemingly unproblematic.
Yet the majority of the poetic reactions to Bartók's music continued to "problematise" the music, more or less along the lines of the influential Illyés poem. In the Second Piano Concerto, the poet and learned translator of Homer, Gábor Devecseri heard Fate itself approaching with big thundering steps and cruelly treading humanity underfoot. To Géza Képes, another esteemed poeta doctus, the four instruments in the Fifth Quartet were four Greek Fates, spinning the thread of destiny. His poem is pervaded by images of death and the disintegration of human consciousness in a sea of wild and colorful animal life.
Bartók, in all these interpretations, appears as an heir of Ember az embertelenségben ("Man in the Midst of Inhumanity"), the famous World War I poem by Endre Ady. But it is an important feature of many of the "turmoil" poems that they show a way out of the turmoil - more precisely that they claim that Bartók's music shows such a way. In his Bartók poem, László Bóka makes explicit references to the Holocaust and a thousand miseries on this earth: ahol hullákat teremnek a fák / és gázkamrákban fullad meg a kín, / itthon gyalázat, szégyen tengeren túl, / magány, betegség, betegség, magány, / hol a tűz megfagy s a zengő dal elfúl, / hol nincs már mérték és nincs már arány... ("where corpses grow on trees / and pain chokes in the gas chambers, / disgrace at home, shame across the sea, / solitude, sickness, sickness, solitude, / where fire freezes and the song is drowned, / where there is no measure and no proportions...") until salvation arrives in these lines: ott egy ötfokú lépcsőn valaki / a földi porból föllépett az égig ("there on a five-step ladder / someone stepped up from the dust to heavens.") The expression "five-step ladder," in Hungarian, also means a "pentatonic ladder," a clear allusion to the folk music through which Bartók accomplished the aforementioned miracle.
In other words, Bartók is represented as an almost god-like figure fighting and defeating the forces of evil, bringing about salvation through music, and bringing order and harmony into a confused and chaotic world.
One of the most beautiful poems about order and chaos in Bartók was written by Sophie Török, the wife of one of Hungary's greatest literary classics, Mihály Babits. To Sophie Török we owe some recordings of Bartók's piano playing that might otherwise have been lost; she had managed to capture some radio broadcasts on a very imperfect early tape recorder in the 1930s. It is worth reading at least a few lines from this little-known document: Amit teremsz, a csodálatos gyümölcs / tudatlan ínyemnek félelmetes volt és keserű. / Mégis bámultalak nagyszerű fa! mert / tudtam, nehéz jel van rajtad és minden / lomboddal istennek szolgálsz. ("The wonderful fruit you bear was frightening and bitter to my ignorant lips. / Yet I admired you, o splendid tree, because I knew / you are marked by a great sign and / every leaf in your foliage serves God.") Later in the poem she describes the singular experience when the beauty of Bartók's music suddenly reveals itself to her ears like a splendid landscape emerging from the fog as an airplane approaches the ground for landing... Yet Török felt compelled to conclude in the end: De országod nem e földről való. ("Yet your country is not of this earth.") Magad vagy benne Alkotó és Teremtmény ("You are both Creator and Creature in it"). Could this image of a creator trapped in his own creation be an echo of a famous poem, A lírikus epilógja ("The Poet's Epilogue") by Sophie Török's husband (mert én vagyok az alany és a tárgy... "For I am both subject and object")? If that were the case, the poem would seem to be projecting an extraneous set of problems onto Bartók; yet on a more abstract level, we are dealing with the same dilemma between a creator who is a moral icon and a work of art that is found to be hard to digest.
This dilemma was, of course, further exacerbated by politics - a particularly thorny issue which would deserve to be treated in a separate article. Since part of Bartók's work seemed compatible with Communist ideologies while others just as clearly did not, the composer's name and work could be invoked in the name of different, and even contrasting, points of view. His ethnomusicological work extolled the working class, his anti-Fascism could serve as a moral example; yet he was not exactly free from what Zhdanov and Révai called "formalist tendencies", and he ended his days in an "imperialist" country. These ambiguities obviously made Bartók an even more attractive subject for poets, whose leanings, preoccupations and agendas may have been vastly different from one another.
Of the significant poets of the second half of the twentieth century who resolved or transcended this dilemma, even the briefest of surveys must mention two: Sándor Weöres and László Nagy. Weöres, perhaps the most "musical" of all Hungarian poets by virtue of his verbal virtuosity and brilliant sense of rhythm, sings the praise of the "divine husbandman" (isteni gazda) who operates on a cosmic scale creating "celestial chemistry" (égi kémia), yet is oblivious to, or at least unconcerned with, the impact of his work.
Nagy, on the other hand, profoundly steeped in the folk culture of Hungary and Eastern Europe, turns Bartók into Prince Árgílus, the victorious hero of Hungarian folk-tales who defeats the evil sorcerer.. A "merciless, pure lover" (irgalmatlan tiszta szeretőý), the Bartók of László Nagy's poem is passionate but not sentimental, strict but benevolent, small in stature but universal in his impact: he reaches the sun by virtue of his uncompromising, disciplined efforts "fights his way up to the solar corona" (a napkoronáig felküzdi magát).
There are two Bartókian motives to which poets have returned more frequently than to anything else: emigration, and the miraculous transformation of nine young hunters into stags as told in Cantata profana. Actually, one could say that the two subjects are really one and the same - the connection was made clear by an unforgettable passage in Sir Georg Solti's memoirs.

I had always interpreted this story [the story of the Cantata profana] as an allegory of Bartók's life, but as I conducted the Cantata that day I realized that I, too, was the stag. I was born and trained to communicate music, just as the sons were born and trained to hunt, and I was lucky to have grown up in Hungary, a country that lives and breathes music - that has a passionate belief in the power of music as a celebration of life. But one day, when I was still young, I was parted from my family and left my native country. I hunted and searched for music, and destiny turned me into the object of my hunt. The circumstances of life became my "antlers" and prevented me from returning home.

It is here that we reach the core of Bartók's message, and its implications are far from being exhausted, in poetic terms or otherwise. Bartók was virtually alone among the significant Hungarian artists and intellectuals of his time to leave the country after the outbreak of World War II without being threatened in their person - solely for moral reasons. The composer was already an icon in the eyes of many because of his unique combination of rediscovered peasant music and Western modernism and the actual act of emigration. Now his personality acquired a whole new dimension: Bartók, who endured a great deal of hardship during the five years he spent in the United States, became a hero, suffering in a world both strange and hostile. The words of the folk-song he had made famous, Elindultam szép hazámból ("I left my beautiful fatherland") came to be applied to him as he assumed the role of the bujdosó. That word, which means a person going into exile, has an ancient ring to it, evoking a fate shared by many folk heroes from the Hungarian tradition, as well as that of a great many soldiers and leaders who had to leave the country in the wake of failed uprisings or lost battles. A number of poets have elaborated this motif, describing a number of its aspects. The old home has ceased to be a home; in György Somlyó's words: De már indult a bujdosó világgá, / S mentünk mi is, ki-ki amerre várt rá / a külön kis, hazai hontalanság ("But the wanderer was already leaving, / and we went too, each our own way, / wherever our own homegrown homelessness awaited us.") The new home was not a home either: In György Vitéz's poem, the kulcs, which means both musical clef and doorkey, is inserted into a "foreign lock," and the tall object beheld by the composer is not a Hungarian mountain peak but a New York skyscraper. Yet although Bartók never lived to see Hungary again, he has returned through his music; in his "Bartók's Homecoming," a sequel to his "Bartók's Farewell," Somlyó wrote, pointedly: Hisz otthonunk nekünk csak az lehet, / hol tiszta otthonra lel, visszatérve, / földönfutó, világjárt éneked. ("For we can only call a place home / where your homeless song, having wandered the globe, / can return to find its pure home.") The nation reclaimed its musical hero, and the new generation, coming of age after Word War II, felt the new music, as the young András Fodor stated in his frequently anthologized poem from 1948. Dissonance seemed to be less and less of a problem: Fodor heard instead a görcsbetorpanó, / kibomló teljes összhang: új világ, mert / igazi. ("Total harmony, contracting in a cramp but then released: / a world that is new, because it is real.")
There are many poems about individual Bartók works; I have already referred to a few. The Concerto for Orchestra has been particularly popular with poets, since it is a work written in emigration, and quotes a well-known Hungarian operetta song (Szép vagy, gyönyörű vagy, Magyarország - "You are fair, you are beautiful, o Hungary") that was taken as an explicit sign of the composer's homesickness. Yet no work has inspired more poetic responses than the choral masterpiece that itself had taken its inspiration from a poem: Cantata profana, the story of the miraculous transformation of nine young hunters into nine stags. This work, a modern reinterpretation of a piece of ancient mythology, is a paean to nature, extolled over human society; but it is also a compassionate portrayal of an insoluble conflict between the world of the sons and the world of their parents. Many poets came under the spell of this great work; their responses, commentaries and variations run an uncommonly wide gamut. For the surrealist and stream-of-consciousness poet Ferenc Juhász, the generational conflict becomes a tragic experience that ultimately destroys both parties. The mother, who does not speak directly in Bartók's work (she is only quoted by the father) takes center stage here. Her grief, her infirmity, her maternal care, the memories of the family's past life, are set against the irreversibility of the son's transformation. Sándor Csoóri, likewise, dwells on the "flipside" of the story: the magic transformation is not a pure victory of nature and freedom: the portrait of the abandoned father, sitting all shrivelled up in his misery, is extremely disquieting, as is the image of the goose, the would-be supper, that bled to death in vain.
Numerous poems present the transformation as a tragedy that cut the sons off from their families forever. Lines such as these leap off the page: Sem szarvas, sem ember ("Neither stag nor man") - Éva Petrőczi; A tiszta forrás is piros habot forgat ("The pure spring too swirls with red foam") - László P. Horváth. István Ferenczes even wrote an "Anti-Cantata Profana" in which the sons do come home to re-embrace a society about which, by the way, they harbour no illusions: instead of the now-polluted water of the "pure spring," the sons will drink fröccs (the spritzer Hungarian workers gulp down, standing, in dingy pubs), in order to reach the hoped-for state of mindennapi köd ("everyday fog..."). The new generation has learnt that moving from one frame of reference into another - whether we change countries, or species, or both - is a process fraught with profound contradictions, and the idyllic ending of Bartók's Cantata profana leaves quite a few questions open.
But that doesn't mean the ending is questionable: the visionary optimism of that magical D-major chord is as valid as ever and continues to give us hope, in spite of everything that may have worked to destroy that hope. And this is what makes Bartók timely; this is what makes me wish I were a poet so I could add my own voice to the next anthology of Bartók poems.
Sixty years after Bartók's death, we no longer see any contradiction between the composer's moral stature and his music. The latter has long since ceased to strike any sensitive listener as "problematic," "chaotic," or overly dissonant. We now see Bartók as one of the last great composers, if not the very last one, to achieve a perfect balance between tradition in the classical sense and modernist innovation. In his string quartets (and not only there), Bartók appears as true an heir of Beethoven as anyone in the 20th century could possibly be, precisely because he did not regard Beethoven as simply a model from the past but above all as an example of how to make bold moves into the future. In addition, the way he integrated folk elements into a classical Western context has become a model for composers of all backgrounds and nationalities. Some analysts credit him with the creation of a whole new harmonic system. Ethnomusicologists see him as one of the pioneers of their discipline. But I think his significance lies above all in the fact that he said extremely important things about the human condition in his music. His stage works are filled with profound commentaries about human relationships, expressed, I hasten to add, much more completely in the music than in the librettos. The Cantata profana is a paean to nature the like of which no composer has ever written. Yet even in the untexted compositions - his orchestral music, his chamber and piano solo works - Bartók's message is loud and clear: his Dance Suite is devoted to the idea of peace among nationalities that in real life were co-existing much less than peacefully. The dance finale of that work and many others, often following deep and introspective earlier movements, express true optimism that is never cheap or artificial. His "night musics" explore mysterious nocturnal noises that reverberate in our equally mysterious souls. Musical construction itself becomes the vehicle of expression; the symmetrical structures of which he was so fond are a palpable symbol of bringing order and harmony into the world - a motive our poets have so frequently emphasised. Moreover, in transforming and manipulating his musical themes, Bartók conveys special messages, as he does for instance in his Violin Concerto No.2, whose first and last movements are based on the same melodic material but are completely different in character. What that says about "sameness" and "otherness" is too subtle for words, but if you listen to the music you will understand.
Sixty years after his death, we can no longer claim Bartók as a "contemporary" composer. His place as one of the greatest Western composers of all times is firmly established; it is from that place that he looks at us now, wherever we may be in the room or in the world.

 

Péter Laki
is Visiting Associate Professor at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. His books include Bartók and His World (Ed., 1995) and Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook.