String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2

by Béla Bartók

Acclaimed as the most important quartets since Beethoven, the six string quartets of Béla Bartók offer a summation of the composer's compositional style and development, and they constitute one of the great monuments of twentieth-century music. This outstanding new volume unites the first two of Bartók's chamber masterpieces.
The stirring first quartet, written in 1908, captures the composer's great stylistic rebirth, as the intense Romanticism of the opening movement gives way to a propulsive finale reflecting the composer's growing interest in Hungarian folk music. The second quartet, written during World War I, finds Bartók's creativity unimpeded by wartime privations. The three-movement work echoes the meditative qualities of the first quartet in its outer movements, but its lively central movement suggests the traditional music of North Africa. A combination of boldly disparate influences, it remains a work of astonishing force and originality.

Genres: Music

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2004

About the author

Works, including the music for the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) and Concerto for Orchestra (1943), of Hungarian pianist and composer Béla Bartók combine east European folk with dissonant harmonies.

Since 1920, small childhood hometown of Béla Viktor János Bartók in the kingdom within Austria constituted Sânnicolau Mare or great Saint Nicholas, Romania.

From his mother, he got his first lessons, but from the age of 18 years in 1899, he studied under a protege of the great late Franz Liszt. At the royal academy in Budapest, he met Zoltán Kodály, lifelong friend. Kodály, Claude Debussy of France, Johannes Brahms, and old Magyar melodies influenced Bartók, who met Richard Strauss in 1902. Indeed, Bartók of founded study of ethnomusicology, a passion in which his friend Kodály joined him, studying and incorporating much country into his own.