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Bartók, Beethoven and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
The first movement of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) has been noted for its Beethovenian use of sonata form and shares a number of features with the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. This article examines the relationship between these two composers and these two works, starting with an examination of Bartók's use of sonata form. It attempts to establish whether Bartók borrowed gratefully from his predecessor in an attempt to ‘synthesize’ old and new, folk and art, or whether he misread Beethoven in the anxious process of carving a place for himself in the musical canon.
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References
1 Malcolm Gillies, ‘Bartók, Béla’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols. (London, 2001), ii, 787–818 (p. 788). Otto Gombosi, in an unpublished biography, challenges this and states that the work performed was Beethoven's Sonata in C, op. 2 no. 3; see Benjamin Suchoff, Béla Bartók: Life and Work (Lanham, MD, 2001), 268, n. 18.
2 See, for example, John A. Meyer, ‘Beethoven and Bartók: A Structural Parallel’, Music Review, 31 (1970), 315–21, and Mark A. Radice, ‘Bartók's Parodies of Beethoven’, ibid., 42 (1981), 252–60.
3 Richard Cohn, ‘Pitch–Time Analogies and Transformations in Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion’, Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations, ed. Jack Moser Douthett, Martha M. Hyde, Charles J. Smith and John L. Clough (Rochester, NY, 2008), 49–71 (p. 69, n. 1); Paul Wilson, The Music of Béla Bartók (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), 141.
4 Roy Howat notes that Bartók entitled an early draft ‘Sonate pour 2 Pianos et Percussion’, as if to align the work with Debussy or the Stravinsky of Les noces. Roy Howat, ‘Masterworks II’, The Bartók Companion, ed. Malcolm Gillies (London, 1993), 315–30 (p. 329, n. 2). Another possible influence was Igor Markevitch's alternative or rehearsal scoring for two pianos and percussion of his ballet L'envol d'Icare (1932). It is not clear, however, whether Bartók studied this work in the two-piano version. Clive Bennett, ‘Icare’, Tempo, new series, 133–4 (1980), 44–51 (p. 44).
5 Béla Bartók, ‘About the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion’, Essays, ed. and trans. Benjamin Suchoff (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1992), 417–18 (p. 417).
6 Recording by Béla Bartók and Ditta Bartók-Pasztory (broadcast performance recorded by Columbia in 1940), available in Naxos Classical Archives, 9.80806.
7 Malcolm Gillies, ‘Bartók and his Music in the 1990s’, The Bartók Companion, ed. Gillies, 3–17 (p. 15).
8 Malcolm Gillies, ‘Bartók and his Music in the 1990s’, The Bartók Companion, ed. Gillies, 14. See also Malcolm Gillies, ‘Stylistic Integrity and Influence in Bartók's Works: The Case of Szymanowski’, International Journal of Musicology, 1 (1992), 139–60.
9 Edwin von der Nüll, Béla Bartók: Ein Betrag zur Morphologie der neuen Musik (Halle, 1930), 108, quoted and trans. in Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (3rd edn, Oxford, 1993), 231–2.
10 Günter Weiss-Aigner, ‘Youthful Piano Works’ and ‘Youthful Chamber Works’, The Bartók Companion, ed. Gillies, 101–9 and 215–25. Between 1899 and 1901 Bartók orchestrated the first 194 bars of Beethoven's ‘Pathétique’, one of a number of exercises (BB19) he submitted to Koessler. See László Somfai, Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1996), 300. I am grateful to Amanda Bayley for pointing this out.
11 János Kárpáti, Bartók's Chamber Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 1994), 23.
12 János Kárpáti, Bartók's Chamber Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 1994), 400.
13 János Kárpáti, ‘The First Two Piano Concertos’, The Bartók Companion, ed. Gillies, 498–514 (p. 513).
14 Meyer, ‘Beethoven and Bartók’, 315–16.
15 Joseph Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 139.
16 Radice, ‘Bartók's Parodies’, 255–9.
17 James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory (Oxford, 2006), 235.
18 Bartók, ‘The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music’, Essays, ed. Suchoff, 340–4 (p. 340).
19 James Webster, ‘Formenlehre in Theory and Practice’, Musical Form, Forms and Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections, ed. William Caplin, James Hepokoski and James Webster (Leuven, 2009), 123–39 (p. 123). Here and elsewhere below, italics are present in the original text unless otherwise indicated.
20 Bartók, ‘Structure of the Fourth Quartet’, Essays, ed. Suchoff, 412–13 (p. 412).
21 Bartók, ‘Analysis of the Fifth String Quartet’, Essays, ed. Suchoff, 414–15 (p. 414).
22 Somfai, Béla Bartók, 13.
23 Bartók, ‘About the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion’, 417.
24 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 11.
25 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 73.
26 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 119.
27 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 152.
28 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 117.
29 Hepokoski and Darcy cite Mozart's Piano Sonata in D, K.284, I, bar 21 as an example. Ibid., 30–4.
30 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 120.
31 While bar 50 is, as they point out, a strong candidate, Hepokoski and Darcy prefer to delay its onset until bar 74. Ibid., 152.
32 See While bar 50 is, as they point out, a strong candidate, Hepokoski and Darcy prefer to delay its onset until bar 74., 232, for a discussion of essential structural closure.
33 Straus, Remaking the Past.
34 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (London, 1932), 3–11 (p. 4).
35 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (London, 1932), 3–11, 4.
36 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (London, 1932), 6–7.
37 Bartók, private interview with Serge Moreux, 1939, reported in Moreux, Béla Bartók (London, 1953), 92.
38 Bartók, private interview with Serge Moreux, 1939, reported in Moreux, Béla Bartók (London, 1953), 92.
39 János Kárpáti, ‘Bartók, Schoenberg, Stravinsky’, Bartók Studies, ed. Todd Crow (Detroit, MI, 1976), 93–8 (pp. 94, 98). (The original article dates from the 1960s: János Kárpáti, ‘Bartók, Schoenberg, Stravinsky’, New Hungarian Quarterly, 10 (1966), 211–16.)
40 Kárpáti, Bartók's Chamber Music, 400.
41 Ferenc Bonis, ‘Quotations in Bartók's Music: A Contribution to Bartók's Psychology of Composition’, Studia musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 5 (1963), 355–82 (p. 361). The passage identified by Bonis begins in bar 27, where Liszt has modified the theme from its first appearance in bar 11.
42 Barbara Nissman, Bartók and the Piano (Lanham, MD, and Oxford, 2002), 135.
43 Kárpáti, Bartók's Chamber Music, 400.
44 Ernő Lendvai, The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály (Budapest, 1983), 319.
45 Elliot Antokoletz, ‘Organic Expansion and Classical Structure in Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion’, Bartók Perspectives, ed. Elliot Antokoletz, Victoria Fischer and Benjamin Suchoff (Oxford, 2000), 77–94 (p. 77).
46 Elliot Antokoletz, ‘Organic Expansion and Classical Structure in Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion’, Bartók Perspectives, ed. Elliot Antokoletz, Victoria Fischer and Benjamin Suchoff (Oxford, 2000), 77–94 (p. 77).
47 Judit Frigyesi, Bela Bartók and Turn of the Century Budapest (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1998), 121.
48 Kárpáti, ‘Bartók, Schoenberg, Stravinsky’, 97.
49 Malcolm Gillies, ‘The Canonisation of Béla Bartók’, Bartók Perspectives, ed. Antokoletz, Fischer and Suchoff, 289–302 (p. 295).
50 Kárpáti, ‘Bartók, Schoenberg, Stravinsky’, 98 (my italics).
51 An extraordinary combination of all the opening intervals with a particular emphasis on ic 1 and ic 5, some vertically and some horizontally, is heard in the finale beginning at bar 315.
52 See Kárpáti's discussion of Adorno. Kárpáti, ‘Bartók, Schoenberg, Stravinsky’, 97–8.
53 Straus, Remaking the Past, 11.
54 Igor Stravinsky, in Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (Garden City, NY, 1963), 14.
55 Lynn Hooker, ‘The Political and Cultural Climate of Hungary at the Turn of the Century’, The Cambridge Companion to Bartók, ed. Amanda Bayley (Cambridge, 2001), 7–23 (p. 17).
56 Leon Botstein, ‘Out of Hungary: Bartók, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music’, Bartók and his World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 3–62.
57 Letter to Márta and Hermina Zeigler (1909), in Bartók, Béla családi levelei, ed. Béla Bartók, Jr (Budapest, 1981), 187–8, trans. and quoted in Tibor Tallián, Bartók, Béla (Budapest, 1981, Eng. trans. 1988), 88, and in Somfai, Béla Bartók, 11.
58 Letter to Márta and Hermina Zeigler (1909), in Bartók, Béla családi levelei, ed. Béla Bartók, Jr (Budapest, 1981), 187–8, trans. and quoted in Tibor Tallián, Bartók, Béla (Budapest, 1981, Eng. trans. 1988), 88, and in Somfai, Béla Bartók, 11., trans. and quoted in Frigyesi, Béla Bartók, 120. (This passage is not included in the extract quoted by Somfai, Béla Bartók, 11.)
59 Julie Brown, Bartók and the Grotesque, RMA Monographs, 16 (Aldershot, 2007). On p. 25, Brown quotes the same passage from Bartók's letter to Márta that is quoted from Frigyesi above; however, Brown uses the translation made by Gillies and Gombocz (Malcolm Gillies and Adrienne Gombocz, Bartók Letters: The Musical Mind, which remains unpublished). In this translation the word ‘hyperbole’ is used in place of ‘grotesque’. Nevertheless, Brown's study makes the significance of grotesquery abundantly clear.
60 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York and Oxford, 1973; 2nd edn, 1997); idem, A Map of Misreading (New York and Oxford, 1975; 2nd edn, 2003).
61 Except, perhaps, the orchestration of the ‘Pathétique’ referred to in note 10.
62 Vikárius has argued that misreading of predecessors and contemporaries may combine with other defences such as the use of folk music: ‘The allusion to folk music is a defence against great models, possibly primarily against Beethoven.’ László Vikárius, Modell és inspiració Bartók zenei gondolkodásában: A hatás jelenségének értelmezéséhez (Model and Inspiration in Bartók's Musical Thinking: Toward the Interpretation of the Phenomenon of Influence) (Pecs, l999), 206; trans. and quoted by Klára Móricz, ‘The Anxiety of Influence and the Comfort of Style’ (review of Vikárius, Modell és inspiració), Studia musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 40 (1999), 473–4.
63 The set formed by the last four pitch classes is 4-9: [1,2,7,8], the same set identified as significant at the end of the transition (bars 80–3).
64 In bar 9 the sequence is: 4-17: [1,2,5,t] and [0,1,4,9]; 2-4: [4,8]; 4-21: [3,5,7,9] and [0,2,8,t]; 3-12: [3,7,e]; 4-7: [2,3,6,7]; 4-19: [1,2,6,9]. In bar 12, the same sequence is transposed.
65 Brown, Bartók and the Grotesque, 145. Brown is referring to Bartók's essay ‘Liszt's Music and Today's Public’, Essays, ed. Suchoff, 451–4, where he discusses the ‘irony’ of the fugato in Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor (p. 453).
66 Brown, Bartók and the Grotesque, 141.
67 Kárpáti regards the D as the dominant of G, but in the context of the brief suggestion of G minor in the melody in bars 88–90; he also casts it in the simultaneous role of ‘mistuned’ dominant of G♯. Kárpáti, Bartók's Chamber Music, 416.
68 In the first movement the recapitulation begins at bar 274 at the golden section (443 bars×0.618 = 273.77). The temporal golden mean (12′ 10″×0.618=7′ 31″) is roughly coterminous with bar 264.
69 See Erno˝ Lendvai, Béla Bartók: An Analysis of his Music (London, 1971), 18–26; idem, The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály, 324–6; and Howat, ‘Masterworks II’, 320–2.
70 Somfai, Béla Bartók, 81. Somfai points out that Bartók's papers contain many calculations but none of them related to golden mean/Fibonacci proportions.
71 The temporal golden mean of the first-movement Allegro falls at 5′ 55″, shortly after bar 274, which using Bartók's timings occurs 5′ 40″ from the start of the Allegro.
72 Somfai, Béla Bartók, 198.
73 Straus, Remaking the Past, 17.
74 See, for example, Elliot Antokoletz, The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1984); Jonathan Bernard, ‘Space and Symmetry in Bartók’, Journal of Music Theory, 30 (1986), 185–201; Lendvai, Béla Bartók; and idem, The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály.
75 Richard Cohn, ‘Bartók's Octatonic Strategies: A Motivic Approach’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 44 (1991), 262–300; Lendvai, Béla Bartók; idem, The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály; Michael Russ, ‘Functions, Scales, Abstract Systems and Contextual Hierarchies in the Music of Bartók’, Music and Letters, 75 (1994), 401–25; Wilson, The Music of Béla Bartók.
76 Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, 281.
77 See Wilson, The Music of Béla Bartók, 145, Example 6.4.
78 There are, however, some very rare appearances of triplet semiquavers at bars 146–50 and 275.
79 Cohn, ‘Pitch–Time Analogies’, 51.
80 Cohn, ‘Pitch–Time Analogies’, 52.
81 Cohn, ‘Pitch–Time Analogies’, 51. His reference is to Daphne Leong, ‘A Theory of Time-Spaces for the Analysis of Twentieth-Century Music: Applications to the Music of Béla Bartók’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Eastman School of Music, 1999).
82 As Cohn points out, the two quavers are placed in such a way that the second quaver falls on the weak triplet quaver of a triplet group, an attack point not sounded in the foregoing coda, and its activation corresponds with the demise of octatonic writing in the movement. Cohn, ‘Pitch–Time Analogies’, 54–5.
83 Kárpáti, Bartók's Chamber Music, 409.
84 Antokoletz, ‘Organic Expansion and Classical Structure’, 84.
85 Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York and London 1980), 408.
86 The most powerful metaphors are between domains that are quite different in kind, for example: ‘A tsunami swept through the financial markets.’ Furthermore, as figures of speech, it is possible to substitute one metaphor for another, for example: ‘The financial markets came off the rails dramatically.’ The impact of the application of metaphor is retained, but there is a world of difference between a tidal wave and a rail crash.
87 Kevin Korsyn, ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, Music Analysis, 10 (1991), 3–72 (p. 28).
88 The revisionary ratios are summarized succinctly as a map in Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 84.
89 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14.
90 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14.
91 Richard Taruskin, ‘Revising Revision’ (review of Korsyn, ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, and Straus, Remaking the Past), Journal of the American Musicological Society, 46 (1993), 114–38 (p. 117).
92 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 96.
93 Harold Bloom, ‘The Breaking of Form’, Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Bloom et al. (New York, 1979), 1–31 (p. 15).
94 Taruskin, ‘Revising Revision’, 117–18.
95 Korsyn, ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, 54. This view echoes Korsyn's Bloomian analysis of the anxious influence of Chopin's Berceuse op. 57 on Brahms's Romanze op. 18 no. 5, in which the music of Chopin is a metaphor for otherness in Brahms.