Why You Cannot Leave Bartók Out

Why You Cannot Leave Bartók Out
Author(s): Richard Taruskin

Source: Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 47, Fasc. 3/4, Bartók's
Orbit. The Context and Sphere of Influence of His Work. Proceedings of the International
Conference Held by the Bartók Archives, Budapest (22-24 March 2006). Part I. (Sep., 2006),
pp. 265-277
Published by: Akadémiai Kiadó
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Why You Cannot Leave Bartok Out
Richard TARUSKIN
University of California, Berkeley
815 Galvin Drive, El Cerrito, CA 94530, U.S.A.
E-mail: taruskin@aol.com
(Received: 25 March 2006; accepted: 25 May 2006)
Abstract: The astonishing omission of Bartok- inadvertent, but justified by the editor
ex post facto - from the recent Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music prompts
reflection on why Bartok is such an indispensable figure in any adequate account of the
music of this time - and after. All the more indispensable has he become, paradoxically
enough, now that musicology is at last turning away from the "poietic fallacy,"
according to which composers are the only historically significant agents in music
history, and giving due weight to meditation and reception. To imagine "Life without
Bartok" will be among this paper's thought experiments. Another, perhaps inevitably,
will be a comparison of Bartok and Stravinsky, not only as composers but also as forces
in cultural life, both in their time and in ours.
Keywords: Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky, mediation and reception, Germanocentrism,

poietic fallacy
The invitation to address this conference as its keynote speaker was perhaps
the most gratifying invitation I have ever received. The implied compliment,
since - as I probably shouldn't remind you -1 am not a card-carrying Bartokian,
was in itself irresistible. The opportunity to be the guest of those to whom I had
long ago played the happy host at Berkeley -1 mean of course Laszlo Somfai,
our distinguished Bloch lecturer of 1989, and Tibor Tallian, who gave us a
memorable departmental colloquium talk a few years later - was another
overwhelming blandishment. And finally, at least one-third of you are old
friends and acquaintances, not to mention beloved Doktorkinder; another
third are familiar names to which I am delighted to be able to put faces; and the
Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47/3-4, 2006, pp. 265-278

DOI: 10.1556/SMus.47.2006.3-4.4
0039-3266/$ 20.00 ? 2006 Akademiai Kiado, Budapest
266 Richard Taruskin
remaining third a group of likely future friends. So of course I succumbed to

temptation and accepted the invitation.
Which left me with a problem - namely, what to say about Bartok to a
roomful of people who know more about Bartok than I do. It was a question to
which I had no ready answer when I accepted the invitation a year or so ago.
As time went on it began to nag, and made me worry. When the organizers
began to press me for a title and an abstract, my worry mounted toward panic. I
ransacked my mind for clues as to what I might offer a roomful of Bartokians
on their home turf to justify their (that is, your) flattering faith in me.
Apologies on behalf of Stravinsky, perhaps? I don't think Igor Fyodorovich
would exactly welcome me as a spokesman. Greetings from the wider world
of musicology, then? Nobody elected me ambassador. Should I aspire to the
usual role of the keynote speaker and set an agenda? That would hardly be in
character; as some of you may know, my preferred mission in life is not to set
agendas but rather to wpset them. The longer I thought about it, the harder it
became to decide what to do.
And then I received a gift from God. The editors of the journal Nineteenth
Century Music invited me to review two big books: The Cambridge History of
Nineteenth-Century Music, which had come out in 2001, and its companion,
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, which followed in
2004.l Like most historical surveys nowadays, these were multiply authored
volumes, incorporating between them the work of 46 scholars from a variety
of German- and English-speaking countries. To my amazement and conster
nation, I discovered that Bartok had been left out of the twentieth-century
volume. This is the kind of thing that can happen when different authors are
working independently, and that is why there are editors. But in this case the
editor, Nicholas Cook, made a point, in his introduction, of not intervening on
Bartok's behalf. "It is hard to know," he wrote, whether the lacuna "is to be
seen as an accidental shortcoming that the editors should have remedied, or as
symptomatic of a revaluation of twentieth-century classicism that makes
Bartok's particular synthesis appear less important than it once did. Time will
tell; pending that, our authors' priorities stand."2
What nonsense. Cook was being silly as well as disingenuous. The authors
had implied no such "priorities." I'm sure they all assumed that somebody was
covering Bartok - and so, obviously, had Cook himself, or else why make a
point of it in the introduction? In my review, I made an example of him for his
1 My review appeared under the title "Speed Bumps," Nineteenth-Century Music, XXIX, no. 2
(2005-6), 185-207.
2 Nicolas Cook, "Introduction," The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (henceforth CH20)
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.
Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006
Why You Cannot Leave Bartok Out 267
laxness and his failure to do his job properly. But I held back from pressing any
further claims on Bartok's behalf, for two reasons. First, as anyone who reads
the book (or, to save time, reads my review) will discover, there were plenty of
sins of commission to complain about without fussing over sins of omission.
And second, reviews that complain about omissions - and in particular, about
the omission of particular persons - usually miss the point. At least I have to
think so, since my own recent history of music3 has suffered so much abuse
from Sibelius fans, and Busoni fans, and Elgar fans, and Hoist fans, and
Vaughan Williams fans (as you see, I'm especially popular in Great Britain),
and Pierre de la Rue fans, and even Florian Gassmann fans - and no, I am not
making this up!
What makes the omission of Bartok a more serious offense? If I think it is
- and I certainly do! - I'll need better reasons than simply my own opinion,
however widely it may be shared, that he was a better, or at least a more
significant, composer than Hoist or Gassmann. To argue for any particular
figure simply on the basis of your personal admiration is to fall prey to what I
like to call the "poietic fallacy," the assumption (to put it crudely) that
history is really collective biography, or (to put it just a bit more urbanely)
that creative individuals are the only significant agents in the history of the
arts.4
I certainly do not believe that to be the case; in fact, since finishing The Oxford
History of Western Music I seem to have been doing little else but combating the
poietic fallacy on many fronts, both offensively and defensively. So if I am to
offer an effective critique of Nicholas Cook's decision to allow the inadvertent
omission of Bartok from The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music to
stand, I shall have to do it on other than poietic terms. That is what I now propose
to do. And in the course of doing it, I will be offering apologies on behalf of
Stravinsky after all, and I will even, perhaps, be advancing - or at least I may lay
myself open to accusations of advancing - an agenda.
It is not as though the name Bartok never appears in The Cambridge History of
Twentieth Century Music (any more than the name Sibelius never appears in
The Oxford History of Western Music). There are eighteen index entries for
Bartok. Anyone tracking them down will find Bartok's name in various lists:
of composers who explored "the dialectical and reciprocal connections
between high-art traditions and popular and folk music";5 or of composers
3 R. Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4 See R. Taruskin, "The Poietic Fallacy," Musical Times, Spring 2004,7-34.
5 Leon Botstein, "Music of a Century: Museum Culture and the Politics of Subsidy," CH20,47.
who "loosened the restrictive bonds of tonality";6 or of composers "whose

music was not consistently associated with specific compositional ap
proaches";7 or of composers published by Universal Edition;8 or of composers
who "introduced eighteenth-century principles into their works in an
innovative way";9 or of composers who wrote Weltanschauungsmusik,10 or of
composers whose music Pierre Boulez did not mind conducting;11 or (yes!
still!) of composers "influenced by twelve-tone thinking but retaining tonal
features."12 One will find acknowledgement that Bartok's concertos have
joined the standard repertoire for piano and violin, that his string quartets
"move beyond those of his predecessors,"13 that his style resonates faintly in
film music, that he used "superimposed modal systems,"14 and that he had "an
interest in symmetrical forms."15
Although I did not use it that way in my review, this little survey of Bartok
references certainly exposes - in its contradictions, its hazy formulations, its
tendentious errors and its superannuated rhetoric - the incoherence of the
conventional narrative of the history of twentieth-century music that we have
been putting up with for so long. Indeed, the insistence that the proliferation of
specialized knowledge has made multiple authorship mandatory (asserted by
the editors of both Cambridge volumes) insures that incoherence shall ever
remain inviolate, following the hallowed example of the blind men and the
elephant.
But beyond matters of professional deformation, the list of scattered
references to Bartok certainly confirms my diagnosis of the poietic fallacy.
Except for the references to Universal Edition and to Pierre Boulez's con
ducting, from which one can deduce the bare fact that Bartok's music was
mediated after all by publishers and performers, he is viewed entirely alone,
sitting within the four walls of his workshop, producing scores. One would not
learn from The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Music that Bartok
was a performer himself, let alone a great one; one would not learn that he was
a committed teacher (though not of composition) who wrote a wealth of
6 Christopher Butler, "Innovation and the Avant-garde, 1900-20," CH20, 75. Another example of
Butler's wizened neo-Hegelian rhetoric (73, note 10): "Bartok's work is an excellent example of the balance
between the imperatives of progress, and of assimilation of the new to the traditional."
7 Joseph Auner, "Proclaiming the Mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern," CH20,224.
8 Stephen Banfield, "Music, Text and Stage: Bourgeois Tonality to the Second World War," CH20,115.
9 The unexplained oxymoron is Hermann Danuser's: "Rewriting the Past: Classicisms of the Inter-War
Period," CH20,279.
10 Michael Walter, "Music of Seriousness and Commitment: The 1930s and Beyond," CH20,301.
1 l Arnold Whittall, "Individualism and Accessibility: The Moderate Mainstream, 1945-75," CH20,366.
l2Ibid.,37S.
13 Butler, op. cit, 83.
14 Alastair Williams, "Ageing of the New: The Museum of Musical Modernism," CH20,515.
15 Peter Elsdon with Bjorn Heile, "Personalia," CH20,618.
pedagogical piano music; one would not learn that he emigrated from Europe
to America, or why. And above all, one would not learn that, shortly after his
death, his music was the site of one of the great cruxes, indeed one of the great
pitched battles, in the reception history of twentieth-century music. In my
view, these matters are far more important than Bartok's use of superimposed
modal systems, whatever they might be, or the fact that his string quartets
moved beyond those of his predecessors. It is these matters, involving the
social mediation and reception of music, and the buffeting the arts and their
practitioners have suffered in the turbulent political environment of the
twentieth century, that make Bartok indispensable to the historiography of
twentieth-century music.
But even in a historiography confined to the poietic, Bartok is indispens
able, and his absence crippling. Composers' styles and methods will always be
an important part of the story, and it should not be supposed that in calling for a
broadened musicological perspective I mean to slight or eliminate the poietic
from the account. I emphatically reject what I call "the great Either/Or," the
insistence (most influentially maintained by Carl Dahlhaus) that one must
choose between narrating "the history of art" and narrating "the history of
art.9'16 Great artifacts and their makers will always fascinate us. For some of us
they will always remain the central part of the story, and there is no reason why
they should not be. All I would insist upon is that they be properly con
textualized and explained, and that is what requires the broader purview. I do
not want to substitute one partial view for another. I want the whole story. And
that is how you end up writing six volumes.
A proper poietic account of Bartok would emphasize his fascination with
symmetries of all kinds - not just formal, but also (and especially) harmonic. The
description of that side of his craft was pioneered by George Perle, and magnif
icently developed by Elliott Antokoletz.17 And it is altogether missing from The
Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, which with unbelievable
crudity recognizes only two twentieth-century styles, "tonal" and "atonal"
(becoming "serial"). There is no discussion of interval cycles, none of octatonic
or whole-tone collections, no mention of transpositional or inversional in
variance, nor of any "modes of limited transposition," let alone matrices of
criss-crossing chromatic scales that maintain between them a constant intervallic
sum, whether in the work of Bartok or Berg, Strauss or Stravinsky, Debussy or
16 See Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson, chapter 2 ("The Significance
of Art: Historical or Aesthetic?").
17 George Perle, "The String Quartets of Bela Bartok," in Edward H. Clinkscale and Claire Brook, eds.,
A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein (New York: Pendragon Press, 1977), 193-210;
Elliott Antokokletz, The Music of Bela Bartok: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century
Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
Messiaen. Anyone who has studied such harmonic phenomena and the tech
niques to which they have given rise knows that they can be most economically
and comprehensively demonstrated in the work of Bartok.
That Bartok is unrepresented in the Cambridge History is thus a symptom
of a greater misrepresentation and a traditional one, which goes by the name of
Germanocentrism. Harmonic symmetry is a strain that, while traceable to
Schubert, received its strongest impetus from Liszt and went from Liszt into
Bartok, and (via Rimsky-Korsakov) into Ravel and Stravinsky.18 Eliminate
that strain and you are left with the Germanic straight-and-narrow, to which
Strauss and Berg can now be assimilated without acknowledging their non
Teutonic inheritances. Germanocentrism is so thoroughly ingrained in Anglo
phone musicology that it has become transparent. The best way of bringing it
to light is to study Bartok's work as assiduously as Schoenberg's; but before a
bias can be countered it must be acknowledged. So right there, still within the
confines of the poietic, we already have a compelling reason why one cannot
leave Bartok out: he is the prime antidote to the Germanocentric disease.
Now the main symptom of the disease, as with all ethnocentrisms, is to
confuse the particular with the universal. Germanocentrists never think that
they are Germanocentric; in that sense one can say that no one is knowingly
Germanocentric, at least since 1945. The tell-tale mark of Germanocentrists is
to think of themselves as universalists, in contrast to particularists of various
kinds. This is something that observers of American politics will recognize.
The rich white men who wield political power in America are always warning
against the "special interests," by which they mean the interests of anyone
who is not rich, not white, or not male. The equivalent in music is the notion
that there is a classical "mainstream," outside of which we are dealing with
various regionalisms or folk traditions, representing a less fully developed
humanity. "Once," Leos Janacek recalled, "an educated German said to me:
'What, you grow out of folk song? That is a sign of a lack of culture!'... I tur
ned away and let the German be."19 Or to recall what is surely your favorite
Stravinsky quote, his silly condescension toward Bartok: "I never could share
his lifelong gusto for his native folklore. This devotion was certainly real and
touching, but I couldn't help regretting it in the great musician."20
Poor Bartok. Such a remark came with particularly bad grace from Stra
vinsky, whose Germanocentrism, however belated, was certainly real and
18 See R. Taruskin, "Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky's 'Angle,'" Journal of
the American Musicological Society, XXXVIII (1985), 72-142.
19 Mirka Zemanova, ed., Jandcek's Uncollected Essays on Music (London: Marion Boyars, 1989), 61.
20 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1959), 82.
touching, but whose tendency to dissemble was regrettable. He had his

reasons, of course, and we will come back to them soon enough. But for a third
Germanocentric voice, and probably the least self-aware, I give you Robert P.
Morgan, in his textbook Twentieth-Century Music. Morgan seems at first
blush to do all right by Bartok, with a seven-page discussion that goes beyond
his debt to folklore, acknowledging his heritage from Liszt and his brush with
"atonality." But when, a few pages later, Morgan found himself dismissing
Janacek in two pages, he justified it with the remark that "it was Bartok who
came to be viewed as the dominant compositional voice of Eastern Europe."21
That remark is a classic, not just for its chilling recollection of the era of nume
rus clausus, but also for the way it evokes another endearing foible of Amer
ican politics, what we call "tokenism." Having included one East European -
or one woman, or one gay, or one black - one is then justified in ignoring all
the rest. (Stravinsky perpetrated a classic of tokenism when he admitted using
one folk song in Le Sacre duprintemps.) If these are the terms that gain Bartok
admission to Morgan's survey, he might just as well have been excluded.
But let us return to Stravinsky. He and Bartok ought by rights to have
become a historiographical pair, a cliche like Bach and Handel, Mozart and
Haydn, Debussy and Ravel. Bartok certainly thought so, at least at first. Stra
vinsky was always his prime exhibit of a composer who had successfully
renovated his style on the basis of folklore; and Bartok was so sure of
Stravinsky as a kindred spirit that he actually saw as a proposition in need of
proof not that Stravinsky quoted folk songs (the proposition for which I had,
many years later, to mount an elaborate proof),22 but rather that Stravinsky
occasionally used themes of his own invention.23 Stravinsky's extraordinary
knack, in his prewar ballets for Diaghilev, and especially in his wartime
compositions like Pribaoutki or Svadebka {Les Noces), for blending folklore
and modernism gave Bartok enormous encouragement. And beyond themes,
it was precisely the most novel aspects of Stravinsky's music, its form and
rhythm, that were most heavily indebted to folklore. "Even the origin of the
rough-grained, brittle and jerky musical structure backed by ostinatos,"
Bartok marveled in his Harvard University lecture of 1943, "so different from
any structural proceeding of the past, may be sought in the short-breathed
Russian peasant motives."24
2 1 Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music (Ney York: Norton, 1991), 119.
22 R. Taruskin, "Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring," Journal of the American Musicological
Society, XXXIII (1980), 501-543.
23 Bela Bartok, "The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music" (1931), in Benjamin Suchoff, ed.,
Bela Bartok's Essays (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976), 343.
24 Ibid.
Stravinsky fairly screamed denial until the day he died, but of course Bartok
was correct. And yet Stravinsky managed, with the help of an enormous
publicity machine, to dissociate himself from the early neonationalism that
allied him with Bartok, and set himself up, however improbably, as an arbiter
of musical universalism. Bartok and Stravinsky no longer look like a "natural"
pair, and it may be worth noting that the program of this conference contains
papers on Bartok and Sibelius, Bartok and Enesco, Bartok and Ravel, Bartok
and Schoenberg, and Bartok and Boulez, but no paper on Bartok and Stra
vinsky (except for this unannounced one). Needless to say, no music history
text would ever think of excluding Stravinsky, and the Cambridge History
accords him his usual place as the antipode to Schoenberg, with three
sustained discussions corresponding to his Beethovenish three periods, and a
total of 70 index entries, almost four times the number for Bartok. Is that a just
dispensation? No, it is not. I think it is fair to say, and as a card-carrying Stra
vinskian I feel entitled and even bound to say it, that Stravinsky has been as
much overrated in conventional music historiography as Bartok was ever
underrated. How Stravinsky managed his amazing feat of dissociation and
self-reinvention is a subject for another day (and I've told that story before).25
Here I'd like to consider why.
Stravinsky's vociferous rejection of folklore as a legitimate source for
professional music went back to his years as a "white emigre" in Paris. It is
sometimes maintained by historians that Stravinsky was not really a "white
emigre" on the order of, say, Rachmaninoff, because his expatriation took
place before the Russian Revolution. But it was only after 1917 that it became
clear to Stravinsky that his expatriation might be permanent, and by 1920,
with the final Bolshevik victories over the whites in the postrevolutionary
Civil War, Stravinsky allowed himself to be transformed from a gentry liberal
who greeted the Tsar's abdication with joy,26 into a passionate enemy of the
Bolsheviks, who had after all expropriated his family's property and
impoverished him. The change was symbolized by his move from neutral
Switzerland to France, where he divided his time for a while between Paris
and Biarritz in the Pyrenees, the main redoubt of the uprooted Russian
nobility. In 1939, lecturing in French (also at Harvard University), the Parisian
Stravinsky went out of his way to deride the "dancing collective farm" and the
"symphony of Socialism." These were the musical emblems, popularized by
25 R. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali
fornia Press, 1996).
26 "Toutes nos pensees avec toi dans ces inoubliables jours de bonhuer [sic] que traverse notre chere [sic]
Russie liberee [sic]": Telegram from Stravinsky to his mother, Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya, from Morges,
Switzerland, 24 May 1917, in L. S. Dyachkova, ed., /. F. Stravinskiy: Stat'i i materiali (Moscow: Sovetskiy
kompozitor, 1973), 489.
Shostakovich, of the Red Russia Stravinsky abhorred, where an art "national

in form and Socialist in content" (in Stalin's own words) was official, en
forceable cultural policy. Bartok only lived under Communism for five
months, in 1919, and never had to contend with the doctrine of Socialist
Realism. (His music did, but that is another story - and I will get to it.)
By the time Stravinsky made his odious remark about Bartok he had been
living in America for twenty years. By 1959, a dozen years into the Cold War,
Stravinsky was following the herd and trying to establish credentials as a
twelve-tone composer. That meant seeking the "universal" (and politically
safe) truth of numbers to validate his art, rather than the particular (and
politically risky) reality of nation. Indeed, a Russian living in the United States
in the 1950s might have had especially strong reasons to repudiate his national
heritage, in addition to the reasons Stravinsky had while living in Paris in the
1920s. And alongside the aesthetic anxieties that propelled him toward the
twelve-tone technique (anxieties that have been touchingly described since
Stravinsky's death by Robert Craft, who helped nurse him through them),27
there must have been some political anxieties as well.
Here the contrast between Stravinsky and Bartok is especially telling. It can
be dramatically encapsulated by recalling their differing responses to the Nazi
Entartete Musik exhibition in 1938: Stravinsky protested that he had been
included, Bartok protested that he had been excluded.28 That was Bartok's
finest hour, followed two years later by a tragic sequel, his emigration to
America - an emigration that was not undertaken (as Stravinsky's was) for the
sake of convenience and as a result of a lucky break (the invitation to give the
Harvard lectures), but one that was undertaken out of idealistic principle, and
led to privation. Of all twentieth-century musicians, Bartok is the one who
most awe-inspiringly exemplifies for me uncompromising devotion to an
exacting humanitarian code.
Is it a coincidence that 1938 also marks the turning point in Bartok's
creative biography symbolized, if you will, by the stylistic gap between the
Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion of 1937, the last work of Bartok's that
could fairly be described as belonging to the esoteric avant-garde, and the
Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano, composed the next year, in which he
reconnected with the kind of popular "verbunkos" Hungarianism he had
formerly rejected? That turn in Bartok's style might be compared with the one
27 Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948-71 (revised and expanded ed., Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), 72-73.
28 See Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, III, ed. Robert Craft (New York: Knopf, 1985), 265 (letter to
Willy Strecker of B. Schotts Sohne, 27 May 1938); Bela Bartok, Letters, ed. Janos Demeny (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1971), 274 (letter to Hans Priegnitz, 12 January 1939).
in Prokofieff s style that coincided around the same time with his return to
Soviet Russia. But again, what is variously written off as opportunistic or
coerced in the case of the Russian composer was the result of a voluntary
commitment on the part of the Hungarian, a renunciation that did not bring
him glory, at least in the short run. On the contrary, it has made Bartok a
problem for conventional historians who are still wedded to neo-Hegelian
deterministic paradigms, and for a long time it brought about a decline in
Bartok's reputation.
Here again the Bartok/Stravinsky dialectic is instructive. In the 1920s,
Stravinsky's aggressive early neoclassicism knocked Bartok for a loop, and
provided the stimulus for his most concentrated modernist phase. David
Schneider has shown how direct an impact Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano
and Winds - not only the score, but also Stravinsky's performance of it as
pianist in Budapest in 1926 - had on Bartok, who was in the audience. Bartok
found the work at once irresistible and repellent. The tension this contra
dictory reaction created in him was one of the most powerful stimulants he
ever received. It roused him from a three-year creative block and led him to his
maturest phase. A letter from Ditta Pasztory-Bartok to the composer's mother
about Stravinsky's performance, quoted by Schneider, gave vivid expression
to that ambivalence: "We very, very much enjoyed the evening," she wrote.
"Truly one gets caught up in this miraculously beautiful-sounding machine
music, music of pulsating rhythm." But it was a music in which "there is
absolutely no room for feelings, in which you can find no part that causes tears
to come to your eyes." In short, she wrote, "it is not my homeland."29
Bartok saw it as his task to reconcile that dynamic pulsation, in which he
sensed the lingering reverberation of Stravinsky's earlier neonationalist
manner, with a sense of homeland that would restore the missing feelings and
tears. His First Piano Concerto, the most direct emulation the pianist-com
poser Bartok could offer the pianist-composer Stravinsky, was the outcome.
The love-hate relationship with Stravinsky is manifest at all levels of the
concerto's form and substance, from reflexive near-quotations on the surface
to profound transformations in which Stravinsky's monumental, wholly
abstract rhythmic gearshifts are made over into what Laszlo Somfai calls
"Hungarian culmination points": sudden heavy infusions of national style at
an abruptly broadened tempo.30
29 Quoted in David E. Schneider, "Bartok and Stravinsky: Respect, Competition, Influence, and the
Hungarian Reaction to Modernism in the 1920s," in Peter Laki, ed., Bartok and His World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 184.
30 See L. Somfai, "A Characteristic Culmination Point in Bartok's Instrumental Forms", Conference in
Commemoration of Bela Bartok: Budapest 1971, 53-64.
Bartok immediately followed up on the First Piano Concerto with his Third
and Fourth Quartets, the works that are commonly regarded as his modernist
extreme. Here again the Stravinskian pulsation is combined with national style,
only now the national style is rendered more abstract by means of the most
intensely concentrated preoccupation - elucidated for us all by Elliott Anto
koletz31 - of symmetrical pitch structures that bear a distinct and very traceable
relationship to the harmonic idiom of Stravinsky's neoprimitivist music, but
distilled and systematized beyond anything Stravinsky ever attempted. That is
true emulation: the effort not merely to imitate, but to surpass.
Far less often noted is the convergence between Bartok's populist swerve,
culminating in the Concerto for Orchestra, and the somewhat later but over
lapping one that Stravinsky undertook in America during the war years. Here
the emblematic Stravinsky scores would be the Symphony in Three Move
ments and some lesser-known pieces like the Scherzo a la russe and the Sonata
for Two Pianos. The war years brought to Stravinsky the same new urgency of
communication and the same sense of social solidarity that had earlier
mitigated Bartok's commitment to stylistic novelty. Stravinsky even, and very
unexpectedly, recovered a sense of Russian patriotism in wartime Hollywood.
The Scherzo and the Sonata quote Russian folk songs (the Sonata quite
secretly: nobody knew or suspected until Lawrence Morton spilled the beans
at a Stravinsky centennial conference in 1982),32 and the scoring of the
Symphony in Three Movements pays covert homage to Glinka. Its first move
ment features a piano obbligato. In the second, a solo harp holds forth. In the
third, the two solo instruments play in tandem, producing a silvery tinkle in
which any Russian opera lover will recognize the evocation of the bard's gusli
(the Russian folk psaltery) in the Prologue to Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila,
that great national epic of heroic deeds.
Stravinsky, as we know, lapsed quickly back into modernist respectability
and social indifference after the war, whereas Bartok had no postwar period. It
is enticing if fruitless to speculate on what sort of music Bartok might have
written had he lived to Stravinsky's age, or what his personal reaction to the
early Cold War might have been. But, as we also know, his legacy suffered
terribly during that infamous period. His work, which drew its authenticity in
his own eyes from its dialectic of folklore and modernism, was ruthlessly
partitioned, like Europe itself, into Eastern and Western zones. Within the
Soviet bloc, which of course included his homeland after 1949, the works in
31 See E. Antokoletz, "Principles of Pitch Organization in Bartok's Fourth String Quartet" In Theory
Only, III, no. 6 (September 1977), 3-22; also The Music of Bela Bartok (see note 17, supra), passim.
32 See L. Morton, "Stravinsky at Home," in Jann Pasler, ed., Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and
Modernist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 335-336.
which folklore was perceived to predominate were touted most undia

lectically, as Danielle Fosler-Lussier has documented in depressing detail, by
the culture politicians as obligatory models, and the rest was anathematized
or, in some cases, actually banned.33 The Western European avant-garde,
meanwhile, made virtual fetishes out of the Third and Fourth Quartets, which
they insisted on misreading as proto-serial, and accused the composer of the
Concerto for Orchestra, to recall Rene Leibowitz's chilling article, published
by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1947 of "compromise."34 That may well rank as the
greatest critical injustice ever visited upon a great artist, when we recall the
"uncompromising devotion to an exacting humanitarian code," as I put it a
few minutes ago, to which Bartok had sacrificed his personal comfort, fortune,
and prestige.
In the 1950s, in the aftermath of his first visit to Europe since before the war,
Stravinsky suffered a Schoenberg crisis as profound and transforming as
Bartok's Stravinsky crisis had been in the 1920s. Few, though, would claim
today, except in pockets of unregenerate Cold War opinion like American
music departments, that Stravinsky weathered his Schoenberg crises as
successfully as Bartok had weathered his Stravinsky crisis, or that his capit
ulation to historical determinism was less damaging a "compromise" than
Bartok's reconciliation with the public had been. By now it is obvious that
there was envy, as well as repressed contrition, in the barbs that Stravinsky
hurled not only at Bartok but at practically everybody in his late memoirs,
dictated to Robert Craft.
Bartok ended his career in a state of neglect and seeming weakness. In the
slow movement of the Third Piano Concerto, written literally on his deathbed,
he wistfully paraphrased Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang, the "Solemn
Song of Thanksgiving" from the A minor String Quartet, which celebrated a
recovery from illness that Bartok knew he would not duplicate. The injustice
of his historical position relative to Stravinsky's persists in the academic
literature, as we have seen in the case of the Cambridge History of Twentieth
Century Music, but I believe that as the Cold War recedes into history, Bartok
will emerge as the stronger, more compelling and durable human presence,
and his standing in historiography will eventually come into alignment with
his place of honor in the performing repertoire.
Ultimately, to leave Bartok out of the historical narrative means leaving out
practically the only redeeming exception to the dismal saga of modernist
33 See D. Fosler-Lussier, Music Divided: Bartok's Legacy in Cold War Culture (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, forthcoming).
34 R. Leibowitz, "Bela Bartok ou la possibilite de compromis dans la musique contemporaine." Les temps
modemes. XXV (1947), 706-734.
responses to barbarism. Is the unredeemed version really the story we prefer?

Will we try to maintain, even at this late date, the pretense of aesthetic
autonomy as enunciated by Schopenhauer a century and a half ago, that
"alongside world history there goes, guiltless and not stained with blood, the
history of philosophy, science, and the arts"?35 The history of Bartok's
reception offers the strongest possible refutation to that deceitful pose. Having
studied it, no one could possibly believe that modern music evolved in lofty or
innocent detachment from modern politics.
Many if not most historians of the arts are still trying to maintain the old
pretense, which is one of the many reasons why the value of high art has within
our memories so lost its credibility. The figure of Bartok offers a rebuke - and
following rebuke, a possible redemption - to the sad history whereby over the
course of the twentieth century the autonomy of art has degenerated into
irrelevance, and the disinterestedness of artists has degenerated into moral
indifference. That rebuke, and the redemption that Bartok alone can offer, are
something I, for one, am unwilling to leave out.
35 Artur Schopenhauer, Parerga undParalipomena (1851), transcribed here from the vocal score of Hans
Vfitmer's Palestrina (Berlin: Fiirstner, 1916).

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Why You Cannot Leave Bartók Out

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Why You Cannot Leave Bartók Out

Author(s): Richard Taruskin

(Received: 25 March 2006; accepted: 25 May 2006)

Keywords: Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky, mediation and reception, Germanocentrism,

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47/3-4, 2006, pp. 265-278

remaining third a group of likely future friends. So of course I succumbed to

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

who "loosened the restrictive bonds of tonality";6 or of composers "whose

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

touching, but whose tendency to dissemble was regrettable. He had his

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

Shostakovich, of the Red Russia Stravinsky abhorred, where an art "national

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

which folklore was perceived to predominate were touted most undia

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

responses to barbarism. Is the unredeemed version really the story we prefer?

Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, 2006

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