Music Divided: Bartók's Legacy in Cold War Culture (review)

The fact that Bartók's music became a focus for ideological combat after 1945 has been widely known since Danielle Fosler-Lussier's 'Bartók Reception in Cold War Europe' in Amanda Bayley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bartók (Cambridge, 2001), 202-14. But anyone curious to learn more detail may have been impatient for some time. Finally, and happily, the research is out and the wait was worthwhile. This very readable book offers a new perspective on Bartók, and also novel insights into cold war music propaganda, thus contributing to the newly internationalist strands of musicology bold enough to tackle regional and trans-border interactions.

In order to bring all this about, Fosler-Lussier takes a very focused timeframe (1947-53) and makes comparative readings of Bartók reception both on and off Hungarian soil. Her six chapters thus plot a sequential passage while alternately shifting the lens from Hungary (chs. 1, 3, 5, and 6) to western Europe and America (chs. 2 and 4). On the Hungarian side, chapter 1 provides a narrative sketch of the country's political and musical transformations between 1947 and 1950, while chapter 6 looks at the end of Stalinism in 1953; chapters 3 and 5 in between examine broadcasting and socialist realist composition. On the Western side, chapter 2 focuses on Bartók reception in Paris and Darmstadt from 1949 onwards, while chapter 4 looks at concert programming for the broader public, as well as the appropriation of Bartók for theoretical academic discourses in the USA in the 1950s. Two short Epilogues—one looking to the East, one to the West—round off the volume. Each of these extends reflection somewhat beyond 1953, even hinting at the impact of the early Stalinist era on musical thought today.

It is a firm structure that neatly contains the book's two great strengths, namely a demonstration of East-West interconnectedness, and a tracing of cold war political ideology in the musical discussions that it addresses. For example, both Paris/Darmstadt circles and Soviet circles, having initially celebrated Bartók as a valuable resource for new music, subsequently attempted to relegate his work to history. Fosler-Lussier traces this process in chapter 2 not only in the notorious Leibowitz article that denounced Bartók for his artistic 'compromise', but also through Maderna's compositional choices, a prevailing idea that one had to compose with twelve-note techniques to avoid epigonism, and Stockhausen's assertion that Bartók had been valuable insofar as he had enabled Goeyvaerts to write his Sonata for Two Pianos (1951). Chapter 1 shows an analogous process in the East by highlighting key moments: the Hungarian premiere of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in 1947, the Zhdanov Resolution (1948), the institutionalization of musical life on the Soviet model (1949), Moscow's artistic reforms, and a critical visitation by Moscow officials (1950).

Fosler-Lussier's purpose is not only to plot the parallel processes, however, but also to link them with political ideology at the highest level. This is blatant on the Eastern side, but in the West, Maderna's sudden turn away from Bartók towards Webern, she suggests, may also have been influenced by a notion that Bartók had been politically compromised when he wrote his American works. This idea, expressed by Hermann Scherchen, was a reflection of the understanding that tonality was a consequence of severe political duress (whether national socialist or communist) and was at odds with the 'freedom' that other political circumstances provided for composers to write with twelve-note rows. Chapter 3 reveals not only that Bartó k's music entered these debates on the level of cultural political discourse on each side, but also that there was a chain of reactive propaganda between them. Thus the Voice of America, seeking to...