Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest

by Judit Frigyesi

Bartók's music is greatly prized by concertgoers, yet we know little about the intellectual milieu that gave rise to his artistry. Bartók is often seen as a lonely genius emerging from a gray background of an "underdeveloped country." Now Judit Frigyesi offers a broader perspective on Bartók's art by grounding it in the social and cultural life of turn-of-the-century Hungary and the intense creativity of its modernist movement. Bartók spent most of his life in Budapest, an exceptional man living in a remarkable milieu. Frigyesi argues that Hungarian modernism in general and Bartók's aesthetic in particular should be understood in terms of a collective search for wholeness in life and art and for a definition of identity in a rapidly changing world. Is it still possible, Bartók's generation of artists asked, to create coherent art in a world that is no longer whole? Bartók and others were preoccupied with this question and developed their aesthetics in response to it. In a discussion of Bartók and of Endre Ady, the most influential Hungarian poet of the time, Frigyesi demonstrates how different branches of art and different personalities responded to the same set of problems, creating oeuvres that appear as reflections of one another. She also examines Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle , exploring philosophical and poetic ideas of Hungarian modernism and linking Bartók's stylistic innovations to these concepts.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography, History

357 pages, Paperback

First published February 21, 1998

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

To gather all the information from all the sources in all the diverse academic disciplines necessary to complete a work of this breadth is really difficult for me to imagine. Judit Frigyesi might be the only woman on the planet with the expertise (not to mention the desire...) to do it.

Frigyesi has somehow managed to view Bartok's life and works and social milieu with an enormous wide-angle lens and still extract essential (and often overlooked) details, to emerge ultimately with a very new interpretation of Bartok's artistic and social development, a new analysis of his works, and a new perspective on the moral, philosophical, aesthetic and political motivations that drove his imagination. This is really something else.

To do this required a strong background in (at least): social and political histories of Central Europe (Austria-Hungary and Germany in particular, including research into the seldom-illuminated cultural life and movements of peasants and gypsies); music theory, musicology and ethnomusicology; and German, English and Hungarian literature, poetry, and philosophy (and the fluency in all three languages necessary to read and interpret untranslated texts--Bartok's personal writings in particular).

In order to explain the dynamics of the intellectual movement of which Bartok was a part (and the influence these circles had on him as a person and an artist), Frigyesi takes as case studies brief slices in the outputs of three artists which she regards as interrelated and aesthetically and philosophically equivalent: a volume of poetry by Endre Ady (very little of his work has been translated into English, but it is regarded in Hungary as equal to or greater in cultural value than even Bartok's output), a failure of a play by Bela Balasz, and two underrated pieces by Bela Bartok (the first piano concerto and an opera--on Balasz's libretto--Duke Bluebeard's Castle.

Throughout her analyses of these works she weaves in mostly relevant narratives about Bartok's and Zoltan Kodaly's field research into regional folk music, Bartok's love life and literary interests, and the wildly complex and dynamic political currents in Hungary at the time (1902-1907, roughly).

The biggest surprise is that this doesn't make for boring reading (mostly). Frigyesi is certainly an academic first and foremost, but she brings to her work a passion and sensitivity that allows her to, without blinking, make claims about what an artist FEELS. It was passages in this vein that really got my pulse up. She was able to encapsulate this fledgling and precarious modernist movement--which stood often at odds with the more famous bullshitting going on in Vienna at the time--with eloquent writing about their sometimes tentative, sometimes brash explorations of the SOUL and the SELF, of the UNIVERSE, and of LOVE. This struck me often as really quite daring. A lot of academic writing, in order to justify itself, asks the big questions as we all know. But very little of it actually risks answering them.

I guess to make a long review a little longer, I can sum up my enthusiasm for this book with a short, simple statement: it made me like Bela Bartok's music more, even though I didn't think that was possible. Bravo.

Three stars because it could be a bogwalk at times. I started this book twice before finally deciding it was worth it.

[Amari]

An extremely detailed account of Bartok's and Ady's early lives, esthetics, works, and the political milieu and history of the city in which they developed. Requires a good deal of background knowledge and musical expertise on the reader's part. I had to return it to the library, but I hope to continue with it before long.

[Bob Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent description of the Hungarian Modernist movement, but I lost interest in the detailed analyses of Bartok’s music.

[Tom Brannigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I'm half way through the book and I love it. I've read so much about Viennese and German Expressionist and Modernist art, it's great to get the Eastern European slant on things. I'm aware of only one other book available on the subject written in English.