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six Tradition Restored The Violin Concerto, Verbunkos, and Hungary on the Eve of World War II 218 Except for the Sixth String Quartet, with its Mesto spreading ever more cancerously with every recurrence and finally engulfing the whole last movement, Bartók’s last European works (Divertimento, Contrasts, and the Violin Concerto) are notoriously difficult to relate to the political tensions in Hungary at the time of their composition. Of these works, the Violin Concerto is especially perplexing, for its lush lyricism seems to clash most oddly with the forebodingly late date at the end of the score: 31 December 1938. In his discussion of the work, György Kroó includes a description of the increasing unease in Hungary preceding the Second World War and Bartók’s agitation in the face of Nazi expansion. Finding no direct connection between the mood of the Violin Concerto and the tenor of the time, Kroó resorts to dispensing with the disjunction by simply attributing it to “unknown laws between life and art, man and artist.”1 Halsey Stevens, addressing interpretation on a far more local level, comes to nearly the opposite conclusion. Hearing caustic sarcasm in the orchestral outbursts following the “twelve-tone” phrases of the second theme area of the first movement (mm. 92–95), he reads this theme as direct criticism of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic style.2 Like most opposites, Kroó’s and Stevens’s interpretations share a common assumption: for there to be a connection between a composition and a given context, the work must address that context specifically and directly. Kroó, taking the significant context to be the Nazification of Central Europe, which literally brought Germany to Hungary’s borders with the Anschluss in April 1938, and focusing on what he takes to be the spirit of the work as a whole, perceives no such connection; Stevens, taking advanced compositional techniques of the 1930s as the significant context and focusing on a few startling moments, finds one. Neither position can be disproved; neither does justice to the complexity of the work. Although Hungary was undeniably a place of extreme political tension in the late 1930s and Bartók was well aware of Schoenberg’s compositional practices, neither critic allows for a multivalent, flexible, or indirect manifestation of his chosen context in the composer’s work. Furthermore, though Bartók’s letters from this time reveal him to be highly disturbed by the spread of National Socialism, we must not forget that these documents were private, written to confidantes, whereas the Violin Concerto is a large-scale, commissioned work in one of the most public genres. To argue persuasively for a connection between aspects of the musical style of the Violin Concerto and the relevant political and musical contexts of its time while trivializing neither work nor context requires a delicate balancing of general mood and specific circumstance, public and private. Most of all it demands a good hard look at Bartók’s position in Hungary in the years 1937 and 1938 and a sufficiently contextualized notion of what might constitute his artistic response to it. To put events surrounding the composition of the Violin Concerto in perspective, our account begins after the work’s completion at a time of political tension in Hungary that Bartók anticipated, but never personally experienced.We then turn back to the early 1930s to work toward an understanding of Bartók’s relationship to the conditions in the later part of the decade before relating these to musical details of the composition. Getting Out In the spring of 1941 Hungarian prime minister Count Pál Teleki faced a difficult decision: he could either offer aid to the Germans in their planned invasion of Yugoslavia, or withhold it and risk an almost certain German invasion of Hungary. Teleki was no liberal. Having been the leading champion of the infamous numerus clausus, the 1920 legislation that limited Jewish admission to Hungarian universities,and an instrumental supporter of other anti-Jewish regulations, Teleki had robust anti-Semitic credentials.3 Despite a domestic policy congenial to the Germans, Teleki was known as an “Anglophile,” the unofficial designation for politicians in favor of official neutrality for Hungary.4 The profundity of Teleki’s dilemma, his helplessness in the face of the contradiction between his hopes for a nonaligned Hungary and the realities that now confronted him, is best conveyed by his reaction: he escaped responsibility for the decision by putting a bullet through his head. Bart...

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