Notes for: July 12, 2011
Bartók turned again and again during his life to writing music for children. In virtually all of this music, he blended the fanciful world of children, his strong interest in musical pedagogy, and his extensive scholarship in folk music.
The result was a unique body of children’s works rooted in folk idioms, including: For Children (1908-1909), four volumes of 85 piano pieces based on Hungarian and Slovakian folk songs; Nine Small Piano Pieces (1926); Mikrokosmos (1928-1939) six volumes of 183 piano pieces of graded difficulty; and Twenty-seven Two and Three-part Choruses for Children’s and Female Choruses (1935).
In 1931, Erich Doflein, a progressive violin teacher at the Freiburg School of Music, asked Bartók’s help, as well as that of Paul Hindemith and Carl Orff, in preparing a new violin method for his students. In the case of Bartók, he asked for permission to make violin transcriptions of several pieces in For Children, or alternatively for the composer to make such transcriptions himself. Instead, Bartók chose to write entirely new pieces specifically for the violin, and he entered into a long correspondence with Doflein on his pupils’ needs.
The result was 44 duets for unaccompanied violins, groups in four volumes of graduated difficulty. In 1936, Bartók transcribed five of the duets for piano and published them as Petite Suite. The ten violin duets that that we hear this evening are taken from the initial 1931 collection.
In a note for the premiere of the duets, Bartók wrote that his purpose was “to provide works suitable for performance by students during the first few years of study, works in which a natural simplicity is combined with the melodic and rhythmic characteristics of folk music.” A short time later he wrote a friend that in the duets he had incorporated “Hungarian, Slovak, Rumanian, Serbian, Ruthenian and even Arab melodies.” Still others are children’s game or play songs.
Bartók’s statements notwithstanding, these duets are not simply transcriptions, but are as much products of Bartók’s creative use of folk materials as is his more serious music.