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Acknowledgments ix My interest in Bartók dates back to my days as a professional clarinetist and predates my musicological studies. In those days Bartók’s Contrasts for clarinet , violin, and piano held a special place in my repertoire, and his Violin Concerto (1938), which first captivated me at the Aspen Music Festival in 1983 when it was the required audition piece for the violin concerto competition , was for many years my favorite symphonic composition. Both works struck me as near-perfect combinations of sweet and sour: immediately accessible, but multilayered and complicated enough not to wear thin even after repeated hearings. László Somfai rekindled my interest in these two works in 1989 when he visited UC Berkeley as Bloch Lecturer at the beginning of my graduate studies there. At Somfai’s lectures I was intrigued to learn of a connection between the first movement of Contrasts, entitled “Verbunkos,” and the first movement of the Violin Concerto, which Bartók had designated “tempo di verbunkos” in an early manuscript version of the solo violin part. Much of the present book has grown out of my attempt to understand Bartók’s relationship to verbunkos, a slippery term with several interrelated meanings that I have gradually come to realize are all intimately bound to nineteenth-century Hungarian musical traditions. It gives me great pleasure to recognize and thank the individuals who have supported this project. To László Somfai, director of the Budapest Bartók Archives, I owe nothing less than the initial spark for fusing my interests as a performer to those of a scholar. I am also indebted to him for allowing me access to the materials of the Budapest Bartók Archives, for his frank and detailed criticism of my work, and for his scholarly example— especially the brilliantly eclectic set of analyses collected in Tizennyolc Bartók-Tanulmány (Eighteen Bartók Studies) that have inspired many of my own interpretations. Other members of the Hungarian Musicological Institute whose work has influenced my own and who have provided a sounding board for some of my ideas include Tibor Tallián and László Vikárius. Folk-music specialists László Kelemen, István Pávai, Bálint Sárosi, Ferenc Sebó, and Lujza Tari have generously responded to my ideas about the relationship between accompanimental patterns in Bartók’s work and Hungarian instrumental folk music. Ágnes Papp provided valuable criticism of chapter 1, and Éva Gurmai was a resourceful research assistant while I was working on chapter 3. Adrienne Gombocz of the Budapest Bartók Archives, Zsuzsa Szepesi, head of the library of the Hungarian Institute for Musicology, and Katalin Szerzó, director of the Music Division of the National Széchenyi Library, have all provided valuable assistance in the use of their collections. Csaba Nagy generously provided me with a photograph of a modern tárogató. Iván Waldbauer gave valuable encouragement at an early stage of this project. Peter Laki has been a generous critic, and, as editor of Bartók and His World, he provided a useful forum for some of the material that is now chapter 4. Judit Frigyesi’s work on the development of Bartók’s political ideas at the turn of the century has influenced my own understanding of Hungarian nationalism; I am grateful to her for encouragement and for detailed comments on an early draft of material for chapter 4. I am thankful to Danielle Fosler-Lussier and Beth Levy for friendship, scholarly example , and editing—especially their work as editors of repercussions, in which much of what is the sixth chapter of this book first appeared. Lynn Hooker has been generous in sharing her own work on Bartók and nineteenthcentury Hungarian music. Other scholars to whom I owe a debt include Elliott Antokoletz,Amanda Bayley, Michael Beckerman, Jonathan Bellman, Malcolm Gillies, János Kárpáti, and Derek Katz. I am thankful to Peter Bartók, the composer’s younger son, for granting me permission to publish a portion of Bartók’s manuscript to the Violin Concerto, and for providing me with facsimiles of manuscripts that contributed to my interpretation of the First Piano Concerto and Orchestral Suite No. 2. He also generously shared with me his reflections on his and his older brother’s decision to return their father’s body to Budapest in 1988. I thank Mary Francis of UC Press for her sage guidance and support in the publishing process, Kalicia...

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