Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts: political, social and cultural
- Part II Profiles of the music
- 3 Bartók's orchestral music and the modern world
- 4 The stage works: portraits of loneliness
- 5 Vocal music: inspiration and ideology
- 6 Piano music: teaching pieces and folksong arrangements
- 7 Piano music: recital repertoire and chamber music
- 8 The Piano Concertos and Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
- 9 Works for solo violin and the Viola Concerto
- 10 The String Quartets and works for chamber orchestra
- Part III Reception
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
4 - The stage works: portraits of loneliness
from Part II - Profiles of the music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts: political, social and cultural
- Part II Profiles of the music
- 3 Bartók's orchestral music and the modern world
- 4 The stage works: portraits of loneliness
- 5 Vocal music: inspiration and ideology
- 6 Piano music: teaching pieces and folksong arrangements
- 7 Piano music: recital repertoire and chamber music
- 8 The Piano Concertos and Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
- 9 Works for solo violin and the Viola Concerto
- 10 The String Quartets and works for chamber orchestra
- Part III Reception
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter
oscar wilde, the portrait of dorian grayThere is a moment at the end of Duke Bluebeard's Castle that, perhaps more than any other moment in his stage works, seems emblematic of Béla Bartók's overall career as a stage composer. It occurs when Bluebeard is placing upon Judith the crown, mantle and jewels that are to be hers in the eternity of blackness that lies ahead. ‘Every night is yours now’, he intones with great solemnity, his words and actions eliciting subdued expressions of protest from the woman he openly admires as ‘beautiful, one hundred times beautiful’. The sombre F# minor theme then returns to conclude the opera. It was here, at this moment of great dramatic and symbolic significance, that Bartók, in late 1911 or early 1912, experimented by removing all Bluebeard's words in an attempt to find a more satisfactory conclusion, thereby rendering the character all but mute for the opera's final, puzzling minutes. Bluebeard, in this revised version of the ending, now sings only one line, ‘Now it will be night forever’, furnished to Bartók almost as an afterthought by the playwright Béla Balázs, who, separately, had also sensed that the closing needed further improvement. In place of the omitted lines Bluebeard simply gestures, placing the crown, mantle and jewels upon Judith without comment or explanation, as the orchestral music wells forth around them. Bartók's experiment has never been known to the public, for six years later he restored the deleted text, modified the ending further, and shaped the conclusion into the form in which we know it today.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Bartók , pp. 62 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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