MUSIC NOTES--BELA BARTOK'S MUSIC FOR STRINGS, PERCUSSION AND CELESTA

by Bill Breakstone, November 24, 2010

Hans Nathan was my first professor of music history in college. He was a Hungarian, born and raised in Budapest. We studied music from the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Classical and the Romantic Periods in our first year of classes, the fall of 1959 and the winter and spring of 1960. The emphasis was on Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. When several students asked him to touch on Rachmaninoff’s works, Dr. Nathan addressed them briefly, but offered this advice: “What you want to concentrate on among modern composers is Bela Bartok. He was the finest composer of this century. Study his music closely and in depth.”

I followed the Professor’s advice from that moment on, and have never regretted it. Last night, as I was reading Bob Woodward’s latest book, I felt the need to listen to Bartok once again. The same year I was attending classes with Dr. Nathan, Fritz Reiner, who was a student of Bartok, made a recording with his Chicago Symphony Orchestra that became one of the greatest discs of all time. It contained performances of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra; Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; and the Hungarian Sketches. I chose the middle work, and was again swept away by the music’s originality, tonality, dissonances, instrumentation and passion.

Bartok composed the work in 1936 when he was at the height of his compositional career, that period between 1934 and 1940. It is in four movements, of which Grove’s writes: “The piece shows great originality at all levels of its construction and seamlessly integrates the broadest range of Bartok’s folk-music and art-music sources.” Musicologists describe the opening movement as a fugue; I prefer to call it a passacaglia or a chromatic fantasy. Whatever, it is a masterpiece, an example of what I refer to as the building blocks of musical composition, how composers have stood on their predecessor’s shoulders through the ages and created new music that can stand on its own, even though it owes respect and pays tribute to its heredity. The thematic content of this movement permeates the following three, eventually reappearing in its original form before the orchestral tutti that powerfully closes the work.

The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is not as popular with audiences as Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, but is a favorite among conservatory students and professors of performance technique. The orchestration is astoundingly original, the use of the piano and celesta both magical and fascinating. And Reiner’s performance has never been matched over the 50 years since the recording was made. And as luck would have it, the RCA A&R men never did a better job of orchestral sound reproduction.

Thus, I will offer the same advice to music lovers unfamiliar with this masterpiece that Dr. Nathan offered me all those years ago: “Study this piece and all of Bartok’s well.” He was indeed the greatest composer of the 20th Century.