Notes for: August 8, 2023
In 1904, during a summer spent in the Hungarian countryside, Bartók heard a young peasant girl singing indigenous folksongs. For the young composer it was a life-changing moment. As he wrote to his sister, “I have a new plan now, to collect the finest examples of Hungarian folksongs and to raise them to the level of works of art with the best possible piano accompaniment.” So began Bartók’s quest to collect, catalog, and classify thousands of folk melodies. With his friend Zoltan Kodály and an Edison phonograph, over the next several years Bartók set out on scores of expeditions to remote villages to record the songs of peasants whose lives were untouched by modern civilization.
Bartók believed that one couldn’t understand Hungarian music without also understanding the music of its neighbors, so he soon spread his efforts to include the villages of populations that bordered Hungary, particularly the Slovaks to the north and the Romanians to the east. As he said years later in an interview, “All peasant music deeply interests me, and my goal is to extract the essence from it.” Over the next several years, Bartók transcribed many of the songs he gathered – an effort he described as “the mounting of a jewel.” The Romanian collections, with their unique harmonies and rhythms, proved to be a particularly rich trove. In 1915 he published piano transcriptions of Romanian Christmas Carols and Romanian Folk Dances, as well as a Sonatina for piano that was based on Romanian material. Two years later he orchestrated the Folk Dances. Many other versions of these dances followed, including the one for viola and piano on today’s program – a testament to the popularity of this marvelous work. The Folk Dances consist of six colorful miniatures, each with its own character. Bartók recorded two Gypsy fiddlers playing Stick Game, the lively, rhythmically decisive melody that opens the set. It is followed by Sash Dance, a lighter, quicker dance in a different style, a pattern that Bartók will follow throughout the work. The slower third dance, In One Spot, is more exotic, with the viola playing at the top of its register and modal harmonies giving the music an oriental character. Next comes a wistful Horn Dance that, with its augmented seconds, sounds equally exotic. A foot-stamping Polka and a breathless Fast Dance bring the dances to a close.
In addition to their obvious charms, the Romanian Folk Dances are a succinct compendium of the folk elements that Bartók would absorb and make his own, including flexible tempos, irregular rhythms, asymmetrical phrases, dissonant harmonies, and the distinctive tonality that he described in his Autobiography as “emancipation from the exclusive rule of the traditional major-minor system.”