8. Bartok

Béla Bartók's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 (1926). For Bartók (1881-1945) a central challenge was how to capture the spirit of folk music in a work of modern music that no longer belonged to the same genre—he seldom suffered from the sentimental pastoralism of many nationalist composers. The sources for his compositions became more abstact than specific excerpts of folk music, and his compositions wove musical elements that were not otherwise associated, employing variational procedures and other structural ideas. The result was never pastiche. We can see how he combined "realist" motivic sources with "modernist" compositional techniques driven by individual artistic inspiration in the first concerto for piano and orchestra. The initial theme employs a kolomeika-type rhythm from the Carpathian Ukraine. (Here are two one-minute settings, one arranged for viola, another for orchestra. Can you guess which one was arranged by Bartók and which one by Janáček?) 


Both the rhythmic scheme and the corresponding melodic style form the basis for the theme of the concerto. 

Suffice it to say that Bartók has already greatly distorted basic aspects of the rhythm, yet he has done so precisely in order to invoke the excitement of these dance pieces within an otherwise sober orchestral idiom. As you listen to the complete first movement, note how the many themes that are spun out of the introduction become ever more distant from the thematic origin and from one another.


In her analysis of the First Piano Concerto, Judit Frigyesi identifies several basic ideas that recur in most of Bartók's mature musical works. Consider these as you listen.

  • The choice of some basic melodic-rhythmic idea, a kind of Urmusik, which nevertheless has clear folk-music associations. A melodically and rhythmically "minimal" element is used as the cohesive force that symbolically and structurally unites the styles of classical and folk music and has the potential to connect an infinite number of themes.
  • The recapturing and intensifying of the "spirit" of folk music in a complex theme, through the distortion and/or superposition of unrelated elements of folk and art music.
  • The dissolution of a theme into its most minimal motivic (tonal, rhythmic) elements at formally accentuated points (such as the introduction, the recapitulation, or the corresponding section of another movement).
  • Monothematism and the polarization of themes—continuous transformation of themes into variants that are structurally logical but unexpected in character (typically either a caricature or an almost sentimental nationalist symbol) and have a basic thematic continuum.
  • The concept of bridge form—the design of the large-scale form around a central movement in a symmetrical fashion, with the last movement being the recomposition of the first.

(Unfairly neglected for the moment: Zoltán Kodály)