Bartok's Viola Concerto: The Remarkable Story of his Swansong (review)

Donald Maurice's book addresses one of the most controversial issues in Bartók research: the question of authenticity in Bartók's Viola Concerto, a work that the composer left unfinished and that Tibor Serly reconstructed from the unfinished manuscript shortly after Bartók's death on 26 September 1945. Controversial issues often pertain not so much to the assessment of the concerto as a work of art per se, but rather to the question of whether it preserves or faithfully represents Bartók's own stylistic qualities. While the concerto has been widely accepted since its early performances as one of the outstanding works in this genre, stylistic inconsistencies have been observed in Serly's version and in subsequent revisions by individual scholars. These inconsistencies have revealed to performers and scholars alike that the task of producing a more authentic version by scrutinizing Bartók's original manuscript and related primary-source documentation has not been a clear-cut, unencumbered endeavour.

In his letter to William Primrose on 5 August 1945, Bartók gave the following account of the compositional stage of the Viola Concerto:

However embryonic the state of the work still is, the general plan and ideas are already fixed. So I can tell you that it will be in 4 movements: a serious Allegro, a Scherzo, a (rather short) slow movement, and a finale beginning Allegretto and developing the tempo to an Allegro molto. Each movement, or at least 3 of them will [be] preceded by a (short) recurring introduction (mostly solo of the viola), a kind of ritornello.

(Fragmentary letter to Primrose, probably not mailed (BBA 186/21)).

At Bartók's death about seven weeks later, the concerto was left in three movements in unfinished draft form. On 8 September, he had stated that the Concerto was 'ready in draft, so that only the score has to be written, which means a purely mechanical work, so to speak' (quoted in Serly's foreword to the pocket score; see also Sándor Kovacs, 'Final Concertos', in The Bartók Companion, 548). When Serly asked Bartók on 21 September if the concerto was ready, Bartók answered equivocally, 'Yes and no'.

Even though the manuscript was given by Serly to the Budapest Bartók Archive in 1963 and has been made available by Peter Bartók and Nelson Dellamaggiore through publication of a facsimile edition in 1995, Bartók's equivocal answer can be clarified only in certain concrete ways, especially by an objective description of the structure and the contents of the manuscript. Initial perusal reveals a kind of mosaic appearance in which we find structural as well as textural gaps. These gaps may have been the main source of the inconsistencies found in the various revisions. This suggests that the task of uncovering an authentic final version by scrutinizing the manuscript itself is not easy, and certainly not a 'purely mechanical' endeavour. To appreciate the editorial difficulties encountered in any attempt to reconstruct Bartók's original conception, one needs first to provide a general assessment as to the stage of the manuscript in the compositional process. This is clearly one of Maurice's concerns (see e.g. p. 121). Some of the main items that are objectively described, but generally not interpreted in terms of their significance, are the connecting links between movements, the elaboration of the orchestral texture, and Bartók's occasional instrumental indications. Some of the more detailed descriptions that invoke urgent questions, which sometimes remain unanswered, however, concern ambiguities of pitch, register, ties, rhythmic durations, and exact placement of marginal interpolations.

The main intention in Maurice's book is to provide a detailed account of the Viola Concerto's history, not only from the time...