In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Folklore Transformed in Bartók’s Dance Suite In his book The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig looked back at the land of his youth and early manhood,the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of the pre–World War I era, as a “world of security” in which “everything had its form, its appropriate measure and weight.” Zweig observed further how In this vast realm, everything stood fixed and unmovable and in the highest position stood the aged Emperor; but should he die,one knew (or one expected) that another would come and that nothing would change in the well-designed framework . No one believed in wars, revolutions, or upheavals. Everything radical and violent seemed obsolete in an age of reason. This feeling of security was the cherished safeguard of millions,a common ideal of life.. . .Only he who could look without concern to the future enjoyed the present with wholehearted feeling.. . .With disdain one regarded earlier epochs,with their wars, famine, and revolts, as a time in which humanity was not yet mature and had not yet been sufficiently enlightened.1 With the historical distance of a century,we can recognize the multinational,polyglot Austro-Hungarian monarchy of that period as a precursor of the European Union of today.Not just the security but something of the rich cultural interchange of the region has since been restored,despite the irreparable,almost inconceivable destructionwreakedthroughHitler’sdictatorship,whenAustriawasabsorbedinto Germany while Hungary became allied to the Third Reich. For many decades, from the aftermath of World War I until the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 Bartók’s Dance Suite 139 and beyond,the eastern parts of the former Habsburg monarchy have undergone tumultuous changes. Stefan Zweig and Béla Bartók were exact contemporaries. Both were born in Austria-Hungary in 1881, and both died in exile from Fascist Germany and wartorn Europe: Zweig by his own hand in Brazil in 1942; Bartók of leukemia in New York City in 1945.2 Other parallels extend into the musical sphere. Zweig was a prominent writer and occasional librettist whose operatic collaboration with Richard Strauss on Die schweigsame Frau (The silent woman) helped trigger his departurefromGermanyandwhoseoutstandingcollectionofmusicmanuscriptsis now held in the British Museum.The composer Bartók did a different kind of collecting ,gathering innumerable folk melodies from rural communities in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Moldavia, Wallachia, Bulgaria, and as far away as Algeria. He continued this research activity during the last years of his life in New York,working on a collection of Serbian and Croatian folk songs held at Columbia University. Through his fieldwork,Bartók was a pioneer ethnomusicologist,but fruits of this preoccupation were also absorbed into his creative work as composer. The present chapter focuses on Bartók’s Dance Suite from 1923, a sometimes underestimated piece that displays a provocative relation to the political circumstances of its composition.The work’s unpretentious title has contributed to misunderstanding . In May 1925, after hearing the Dance Suite at the Prague Festival of the International Society for Modern Music, Theodor W. Adorno wrote about it as follows: The piece is called a suite not from modesty or coquetry; it is not at all a symphony and not inclined to appear as such in any of its parts. It owes its existence to particular circumstances and was composed for a concert commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Ofen and Pest and is in this sense as well an occasional work. . . . A few transparent, recognizable character dances follow one another loosely; the ritornelli which connect them fill blank spaces rather than serve to organize the whole; and the finale,which makes reference thematically to the first movement,brings the familiar material together in a harmless way without striving for synthesis and without attempting very much in the way of contrapuntal combinations.3 Adornoacknowledgesthework’s“occasional”originsincommemorationofthefiftieth anniversary of the unification of Budapest as a single city,but he fails to consider the cultural circumstances of 1923 or the associations of the “recognizable character dances” linked by ritornelli.4 Unlike Adorno, we have the benefit of hindsight and of the composer’s own comments on his artistic goals and challenges as contained in letters and essays from later years. These sources as well as analysis of the work and its genesis support a different view, as we shall see, whereby the Dance Suite appears as an ambitious and original work, embodying what Bartók himself once [18.190.217.134] Project MUSE...

Share