Béla Bartók by David Cooper (review)

Music scholar David Cooper begins his latest work on Belá Bartók with a delightful caveat about biographies from Mark Twain. That American author points out the impossibility of excavating the complete personal story of biographical subjects: “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man [sic]—the biography of the man himself [sic] cannot be written” (p. xi). Cooper examines Bartók’s clothes and buttons, that is to say, the composer’s compositions and professional pursuits (including his ethnomusicological “forays and collections” [p. xiv]) in engaging and well-researched detail. He leaves to the side most speculation about the composer’s inner life and his own commentary about biographical events.

Each of Cooper’s twelve chapters covers approximately three years of the composer’s life, except for the first chapter, which deals with Bartók’s family history and early childhood. In the course of these chapters, the reader will find analyses of nearly every work Bartók wrote within the chronologically-organized narrative of his life. Cooper also provides brief and useful excursions into relevant cultural and political contexts. Though written for an academic and musicologically-informed audience, Cooper confines scholarly debate to the postlude, notes, and brief asides (thereby also creating difficulties that I will address later). He also keeps each of the twelve chapters relatively independent, often reintroducing key figures, so that readers can easily zero in on years of interest or specific compositions. In addition to his lucid prose, Cooper includes a useful list of works that concatenates four different thematic catalog systems for Bartók’s works (the Belá Bartók, Szőllősy, Waldbauer, and Denijs Dille thematic catalogs), opus numbers, year(s) of composition, and instrumentation.

Though Cooper tends to avoid speculation, he occasionally integrates moments of intimacy where I as a reader felt drawn into Bartók’s inner world. Cooper achieves these moments by effectively drawing on quotations from letters and Bartók’s own scholarly work as well as recollections from the composer’s friends and acquaintances. I was transfixed by Cooper’s descriptions of Bartók’s inspiration for the First Violin Concerto, the composer’s love letters, his favorite poem, and his interactions with Benny Goodman, Henry Cowell, and Peter Warlock, as well as his time at a nudist colony. These brief moments ephemerally achieve what Twain did not think possible. Or, since we will never have access to Bartók’s real inner life, at the very least Cooper achieves masterful and research-based moments of perceived closeness.

This book will be welcomed in several fields of music scholarship, including musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, music performance, and composition, and has much to offer a more general readership. For each of these professional groups the book may prove useful for personal scholarship and reading as well as for classroom and seminar teaching. Cooper’s independent and excerptible chapters, chronological ordering, and sidelining of scholarly debate, lend themselves to introductory reading for those looking for basic biographical information and music–theoretical analyses of Bartók’s works.

The music–theoretical analyses introduce the pieces well; they are mostly macro-level descriptions that provide useful frameworks for a first encounter with these works, rather than detailed close readings. The analyses assume an undergraduate-level knowledge of music theory, form, modes, and post-tonal uses of pentatonicism and octatonicism. For general readers who lack this knowledge, Cooper’s decision to interpolate these analyses into his narrative makes it easy to skip these portions of the book.

Cooper’s music analyses and listening charts or tables make up a sizable portion of the book and are, in general, one of its great strengths. But unexplained references, the lack of score examples from early works, and occasionally jolting transitions deserve comment. Occasionally Cooper makes reference to musical similarities between Bartók’s compositions and those of composers such as Hugo Wolf, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Max Reger, and Ludwig van...