Although the eighteenth century is widely regarded as the great age of political verse, that label really applies more strictly to a sixty-year period which cuts across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: between the rise of political parties in the 1680s and the fall of Robert Walpole in 1742. During that period the lives and works of most poets were shaped, even defined, by political allegiance. After the mid 1740s poetry was rarely the province of party-politics. With the brief exception of Charles Churchill's pro-Wilkes satires of the early 1760s, few poets tackled political themes with the intensity, even “passion,” of the first half of the century. This account must by necessity be weighted heavily toward the earlier period. Yet a political canon centered on the Tory satirists Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson fails to convey adequately the complexity of party-political debates played out in the poetry of the period. The Whig party - which dominated eighteenth-century political life and institutions between the powerful cabals of Whig politicians during William III's and Anne's reigns through the twenty-year ministry of Robert Walpole and beyond - attracted and sponsored numerous poets, among them Joseph Addison, Thomas Tickell, Richard Blackmore, and Ambrose Philips. Few of these Whig poets are now read, their names familiar only from Pope's Dunciad. Pope and his fellow satirists, best known in their collective identity as the Tory-based Scriblerus Club, were remarkably successful in promoting for posterity the myth that Whig poetry was dull, long-winded, and ignorant. They were fighting a rearguard action against a dominant Whig literary culture and a modern, selfconfident British poetry inspired by great contemporary events such as William III's and the Duke of Marlborough's military victories during the Nine Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession. It is important to reinstate this Whig tradition if only to convey a better sense of the way in which poetic form both mirrored and embodied party-political debate in the early years of the century.

Because accounts of eighteenth-century English poetry so commonly stress either its supposed preoccupation with the past or its immersion in the topical present, it may help to begin by speaking of its future. Many of the period's poets did write with a “neo-classical” eye on the classical past, especially Latin models, as indeed did most Renaissance writers. Similarly, many seem to have considered the pressure of present political events one of poetry's larger concerns, as several of the chapters in this book testify, and thus wrote often on timely subjects. But perhaps more distinctive of the eighteenth- century poets than their sense of the past and appetite for news - traits which we partly share - is their tendency to look toward the future.

Writing and talking were closer in the early eighteenth century than they are today - and so were poetry and prose. A variety of institutions, but especially the urban coffee houses which hosted continuous conversation about public events and issues, encouraged the blurring of social distinctions we take for granted: between public and private, for example, or between the working and leisure classes, and especially between conversation and written texts. Texts - whether newspapers, pamphlets about current events, or printed books - were quoted extensively and became the basis for much of the public conversation, and (in turn) conversation and its colloquial and dialogic habits often migrated into print. It is not that the oral/written distinction had no meaning, but the two modes were mixed so regularly in daily practice that oral conversation took on many of the stylistic habits associated with formal writing, and the written word often was conversational in tone and habit. Poetry, where tradition set strong metrical and formal expectations, often found the cadences of conversation appealing as a vocal counter-measure.

“English nature,” that scenery of rolling hills, oak trees, green pastures, country houses, and churchyards overgrown with moss, is a creation of the eighteenth century. It is a landscape, but it is also a way of feeling - of feeling about native soil, of feeling about the past, of feeling about Englishness itself. Patriotism and nationalism, that is to say, are encoded in a symbolic view of a rural landscape and the way of life that is presumed to have flourished in that landscape. And this view has official sanction: “English Nature” is today the name of the government-sponsored organization responsible for conserving flora and fauna.

The eighteenth century was doubly responsible for the laying down of a landscape of nationalism in English people’s consciousness. It was a century of dramatic developments – of the landscaping of estates for the aristocracy who dominated power, of the enclosure of common fields, of agricultural “improvement.” But it was also a time in which writing about these developments became a means towards an idealization of social and political order, an idealization with which today’s lovers of English nature are frequently complicit. The National Trust, for example, dedicates itself to preserving the houses and parks once owned by great eighteenth-century landowners. It is currently restoring the park at Stowe to the flourishing condition that Alexander Pope celebrated in 1731, when he made it symbolize the moral and aesthetic judgment that, he said, fitted its owner, Lord Cobham, to direct the affairs of state:

Preconceptions

The study of eighteenth-century theories of poetry might be more safely ignored if we knew nothing rather than a little of the subject beforehand. The little learning that may be a dangerous thing, at least for an unbiased reading of the poetry itself, often rests on brief encounters with popular eighteenth- century works, Romantic reactions, and modern generalizations. A few points may loom disproportionately in the memory, for example, from Pope's An Essay on Criticism, epigrammatic but easily misconstrued; from Johnson's novel Rasselas, in which Imlac recommends “general truths” to poets, over the “streaks of the tulip”; from Wordsworth's retrospective simplification in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads of the prior age as artificial, or from later handbook reductions such as “neo-classicism,” “rules,” and “didacticism.”Through much of the modern era it has been assumed either that eighteenth-century poetry was inhibited by rigid theoretical principles and succeeded (when it did) by ignoring them. The authors of an influential history of criticism have earnestly insisted that eighteenth-century poetry was largely - and happily - “a hundred years behind the most advanced theory,”proceeding more along lines laid down in Renaissance treatises than in newer works such as Edward Bysshe's Art of Poetry of 1701. In this light, eighteenth-century criticism “before the rise of romantic theory” produced “only a more or less dismal continuation of the ornamentalist view” of metaphor and poetic language.

How was the city imagined in eighteenth-century poetry? To chart the territory, and measure the distance that the reader traverses in the journey from early to late century, a reader might compare two poems: Jonathan Swift's “A Description of a City Shower,” first published in The Tatler 238 on 17 October 1710, and William Blake's “London”, the eighth poem in the “Experience” section of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). (Texts given at the end of the chapter.)

In Swift’s poem, a worsening rain shower becomes a downpour and finally merges with the “flood” of the Fleet River, London’s open sewer flowing down from the north towards the Thames. Its serpentine slither collects up the town’s effluent disemboguing into the river from Smithfield Market, conveys the rubbish via St. Sepulchre’s Church (whose bells would send prisoners under sentence of death on their way to Tyburn to be hanged) and deposits it into the Holborn conduit via Snow Hill stream. At least half-seriously, the topographical organization is also a moral organization by the poem’s close: the gradually gathering inundation and the term “flood” cannot but suggest the early chapters of Genesis in which Noah’s flood is described and, shortly afterwards, the wicked cities are destroyed – London, Swift subliminally suggests, is the new Sodom/Gomorrah. Various aspects of city life, realistic observations of the effects of rain on urban dwellers (metonyms) are ratchetted up into metaphors for the condition of city life – its squalor, crowdedness, and degradation.

During the eighteenth century, British women poets built upon and varied the repertory of styles and topics bequeathed them by their foremothers. They also entered the literary marketplace in ever-greater numbers. The rising number of women poets may seem to have been predictable, given the increased access to print by writers of both sexes after the seventeenth-century lapse of laws circumscribing the press. Professional male writers were soon so numerous that the hack, that ubiquitous feature of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satire, was an established cultural icon. In fact, however, numerous factors challenged aspiring women poets. Chief, perhaps, was the conservative ideology governing notions of femininity, a trend that became ever more restrictive throughout the century. Women of middling and upper status were encouraged to define themselves as mothers and household managers rather than as active contributors to their family economies. These roles sanctioned women's pursuit of domestic activities such as childhood education but inhibited their participation in such public business as politics and scholarship. The marketing of one's literary productions was another process that involved some transactions within the public domain. If all women writers had heeded the advice that conduct books so assiduously inculcated throughout the century, few would have ventured beyond the occasional birthday tribute enclosed in a letter, or the funeral elegy confided to a journal.

Bartók worked as a piano teacher for most of his life. He began to give piano lessons as a teenager while still in Pozsony, and eventually succeeded his own teacher, István Thomán, at the Budapest Academy of Music in 1907, where he taught for nearly thirty years. During his last years in America he maintained private students. If, ironically, piano teaching was not his primary musical and creative focus, falling rather distantly behind composition, folksong study and performance, he was nevertheless a conscientious and thorough teacher. Although a few notable performers, such as György Sándor, emerged from his studio, he never established the kind of following enjoyed by his colleague at the Academy, Ernoʺ Dohnányi. Piano teaching provided a basic source of income that enabled him to devote himself to his more compelling occupations. Bartók's greatest pedagogical contributions may be, therefore, not a pianistic legacy through his students, but the creative results of applications of his compositional work to teaching purposes. From the beginning his pedagogical ideas were bound up with folksong study, which was the primary catalyst in the development of his unique musical language. As he wrote much later, in 1940:

The Six String Quartets offer a fascinating insight into the chronology of Bartók's musical style, as they span some thirty years of his compositional career. Their stylistic development is such that each Quartet is the culmination of a different phase of his artistic growth, focusing almost all his creative ideas and compositional techniques into a single genre. On the one hand they represent the continuation of a Classical tradition through an intensity of motivic writing that parallels Beethoven's, while on the other they reflect developments in musical language and a changing aesthetic during the first half of the twentieth century.

Unlike his Austro-German contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Bartók did not consciously seek to champion the cause of atonality. Rather, his interest lay in the fusion of folk and art music, the synthesis of East and West Europe: his inspiration from the folk music of different nationalities uniquely influenced the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic structures of his own music. Furthermore, developments within the realm of his string music – the String Quartets, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Divertimento for string orchestra – include the many imaginative ways in which he exploited the timbral properties of stringed instruments, devising techniques new to the idiom in order to achieve a whole new range of sonorities within the context of an extended tonality.

In M. C. Escher's drawing Three Worlds, water acts as the medium for an encounter between phenomena which otherwise could not meet. Images of tree silhouettes are shown as a reflection, existing in conceptual terms at the same distance below the surface as the real branches above it, though neither the real tree nor its reflection is truly in contact with the water. Dead leaves float on the water: on it but not of it, since only their undersides touch the surface. Under the water, or rather in it, is the hazy vision of a swimming fish, the only physical object represented which is truly in its element. We cannot ‘see’ the water since the only framing device is the physical edge of the picture, but we understand it thus from the manner in which the three worlds interrelate through it.

Somehow, aspects of this drawing put one in mind of that part of Bartók's activity concerned with the forms and structures of Western art music. These act in the same way as Escher's water, in that they form the interface between ideas and phenomena from worlds as different as the fallen leaves, the silhouette and the fish. Some belong themselves firmly within the Western art tradition, most notably that of thematic process: the unfolding of motifs, their transformation through rhythmic and decorative variation, and their subjection to different musical techniques such as ostinato or polyphonic treatment. Other ideas – those we associate with the concept of ‘nature’ music – are designed to evoke atmospheres or, as stylized noises, represent the actual sonorities of birdsong or night creatures.

Early impressions, the verbunkos

At the turn of the nineteenth century a growing national consciousness permeated the political and cultural life of Hungary. Men of letters envisaged programmes which included the creation of national art built upon the foundations of national customs and folklore. The call went out to members of literary and scientific societies asking them to collect folk tales and folksongs, and the response was so great that by mid-century the material gathered was large enough to fill several volumes. As good as the intentions of these early collectors may have been, they saw the literary value alone in folksongs and printed only their texts without the music. This unfortunate omission was partly remedied by folksong collectors of the second half of the century. Not knowing, however, the difference between the songs in oral circulation, they uncritically took up in their collections popular tunes, patriotic songs and school songs intermingled with folksongs. Not even the most important publication of the century, István Bartalus's seven-volume collection, Magyar Népdalok, Egyetemes Gyüjtemény [Hungarian Folksongs, Universal Collection], was free of its predecessor's mistakes.

Misconceptions about folksongs during the nineteenth century were also strengthened by the popularity of two rapidly growing musical trends: the verbunkos, or recruiting dance – a tempestuous, flexible, appealing, sentimental type of instrumental music which took its origin from folk music, before becoming transformed in the hands of gypsy musicians; and the popular art song – a pseudo-folksong product of dilettante composers, flooding the urban musical scene during the second half of the nineteenth century.

In his essay, ‘Out of Hungary: Bartók, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music’, Leon Botstein has argued that the composer ‘uniquely managed to reconcile the claims of formal musical modernism with the cultural politics of identity and subjective musical particularity’. While the music Bartók wrote between the end of the First World War and around 1930 does seem to be preoccupied with issues addressed by modernist composers such as Schoenberg (and the other members of the Second Viennese School), it should be noted that he could be sceptical, if not distinctly unsympathetic, towards some ‘revolutionary’ modernist artists. This can be discerned in his comments about Mondrian, Haba, Hauer and others in the first of a series of lectures given at Harvard University in 1943, where he considers the synchronic appearance of ‘revolutionary tendencies’ in all three branches of the arts. In Mondrian's case he grudgingly admits some public success, but he observes that ‘in literature there was less success, and in music no success at all’.

Although his response to a modernist artistic aesthetic may at times seem ambiguous or ambivalent, Bartók appears to have been a firm advocate and disciple of the ‘project of modernity’. Modernity, as characterized by Jonathan Rée, is concerned with an underlying epistemological contrast: ‘the modern world is enlightened, scientific, and disappointed, whereas its predecessor was superstitious, gullible and magical’.

There 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.

Open an introductory music history textbook at the section on Béla Bartók and you will find references to his deep patriotism, his folk-music research, and the relationships between these interests and his compositions. What you will not usually find, despite the weight placed on Bartók's connections to his environment, are many references to the people in that environment other than fellow composer Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) and the nebulous ‘folk’ – sometimes only the folk. While Schoenberg is associated with both Berg and Webern, and Stravinsky with Rimsky-Korsakov and Diaghilev, Bartók is usually depicted in English texts as an isolated naïf from the provinces. Since folk art and work influenced by it are often viewed as nostalgic, we could conclude that Bartók was a conservative longing for the past.

The historical record shows us something far more complex. After about 1904, Bartók seems to have thought of himself as much more of a radical than a reactionary. He stopped going to church, attempted to shock wealthy hosts, was called an anarchist by his friends, and railed against misconceptions of the peasantry. The heritage of nineteenth-century Hungary, the political environment of early twentieth-century Budapest, the resulting polarization of intellectual and cultural groups, and the progressive musicians with whom he associated (including prominent Jewish musicians), all had an impact on his views. His symphonic poem, Kossuth, of 1903 was the musical culmination of the chauvinist-nationalist views he held in his conservatoire years and immediately thereafter.

Unlike Bartók, who had almost nothing to say about his own work, Stravinsky was a man of many words, both philosophical and eminently practical. Had Bartók been minded to expand on the subject of his own music vis-à-vis performance, he too might well have observed that ‘The sin against the spirit of the work always begins with a sin against its letter’, as well as endorsing Stravinsky's remark that ‘An executant's talent lies precisely in his faculty for seeing what is actually in the score …’. But it is at this point that Stravinsky the composer evidently parts company with himself as performer, since he too-often fails, by default, to provide the very information he trusts the talented executant to note. Not so Bartók, for whom intervallic shape and motivic phrasing is a sine qua non for the cut and thrust of his Beethovenian developments. It is not so much that, like Debussy, he expanded the range of classical accentuation according to the needs of his own music, but that he succeeded in devising an articulation precisely appropriate to the needs of each particular piece (see for instance Nine Little Piano Pieces, Nos. 1–4); in other words, the relative weight of phrase and of points within that phrase may be signalled by metre, dynamics, accents and, everywhere, by articulation slurs which define shape and intervallic content. Any properly articulate performance should of course take account of all these punctuating elements.

Mixed reception: an introduction

With the premiere of his ambitious symphonic poem Kossuth (1903) in Budapest on 13 January 1904, twenty-two-year-old Béla Bartók seemed to have instantly achieved the status of a national icon. For weeks to come critics in no less than seventeen publications would echo the applause that had brought Bartók to the stage some dozen times.

Yet such unbridled enthusiasm hardly typified Bartók's reception in Hungary during his lifetime. For most of his career he was as frequently castigated by Hungarians as embraced. Even more painfully, Hungary's most prestigious musical organizations, the Opera and the Philharmonic Society, often simply ignored him. As was the case with a number of composers of his generation, a troubled relationship with the public was almost guaranteed by Bartók's allegiance to the difficult aesthetics of modernism. In Hungary, however, where musical style was often explicitly bound to the expression of magyarság (Hungarianness), the progressive (hence implicitly cosmopolitan) political stance Bartók's music was taken to represent erected further barriers to acceptance. Accordingly, reactions to Bartók's music in Hungary during his lifetime were heavily laced with social criticism, while his reception in Western Europe reflected more generic concerns about modern music. Bartók's Hungarian reception serves to remind us that not only his music, but modernist art in general – despite its appeals to abstraction and universality – carried culturally specific social messages that depended for their decoding on the contexts in which they were received.

Ever since his Academy graduation in 1903 Bartók had looked forward to visiting America. His piano teacher István Thomán had encouraged him to attend the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis in 1904, but this plan fell by the wayside as Bartók failed to develop the same international following as a pianist that his model, Dohnányi, had done.

It would be another quarter of a century before Bartók finally visited the United States. For ten weeks in the winter of 1927–28 he undertook a successful coast-to-coast tour, sometimes in association with such Hungarian colleagues as the violinists Joseph Szigeti and Jelly Arányi, and the conductor Fritz Reiner. He hoped to return soon as he liked the people and concert fees were comparatively high. Moreover, Hungarian-American friends persuaded him in 1928 to enter his Third String Quartet in a competition of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, for which he subsequently won joint first prize of $3,000. But the Depression put an end to his plans for an American return. The Philadelphia prize money instead helped to maintain something of his standard of living in the early 1930s. Bartók's second visit, of April–May 1940, was altogether more purposeful. Although performing in numerous concerts, including a prestigious appearance with Szigeti at the Library of Congress and recording his recent Contrasts (1938) with Benny Goodman and Szigeti, Bartók's aim was to determine if he should move to the United States. That brief visit provided him with a strong, and unexpected, reason to do so.

Bartók wrote more solo works for violin than for any other instrument except his own, the piano. In fact, the violin is just about the only instrument besides the piano for which Bartók wrote solo works at all, aside from the cello version of the First Rhapsody (1928), originally for violin, the clarinet part in Contrasts (1938), playing alongside the violin, and the Viola Concerto (1945, incomplete). The piano works, taken as a group, have been the subject of several extensive studies, but the solo violin works have usually been discussed individually or in small groups. As for the Viola Concerto, its incompleteness and the problems surrounding the different performing versions have understandably compelled scholars to focus on the source situation and touch on stylistic issues only tangentially.

A noteworthy difference between the respective genres of violin and piano works has to do with form. With the exception of the 44 Duos (1931), the violin works adhere exclusively to the two- or three-movement forms of sonata, concerto or rhapsody, while among the compositions for piano, one notes a large number of short character pieces (bagatelles, burlesques, dirges, sketches, or simply ‘pieces’) alongside works like the Suite or the Sonata. By considering all the solo violin/viola works in one integrated survey, one begins to see a distinct stylistic thread spanning Bartók's entire career, one that cuts across lines of genres and style periods as they are normally perceived.