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Concerto for Orchestra

About the Composition

Quick Look Composer: Béla Bartók
Program note originally written for the following performance:
National Symphony Orchestra: Iván Fischer, conductor/Bartók & Dvorák Feb 5 - 7, 2009
© Richard Freed
The Concerto for Orchestra, the last work Bartók completed in his own hand and lived to hear performed, quickly established itself as his greatest popular success. A "concerto for orchestra" is by definition a kind of display piece, specifically one in which every section of the orchestra gets its chance to shine, and this one is by all odds the grandest specimen of that genre; at the same time, it is an intensely personal work, and as such its creation proved to be a significant act of regeneration on the composer's part.

When Bartók came to America in October 1940 he was in poor health and financially insecure. The solo recitals he gave as pianist met with little success and he came to feel his compositions were being shunned by the big orchestras. He accepted low-level academic work procured for him by friends, and he attempted no creative effort until May 1943. By then he had been confined to a New York hospital for some three months, and it was there that Serge Koussevitzky, the legendary conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra visited him to offer him a commission (in the name of the newly formed Koussevitzky Music Foundation) for a major symphonic work. That gesture provided effective therapy. Bartók was well enough to leave the hospital a short time later; he began work on his new score at Saranac Lake in upstate New York in late August, and completed it in less than two months. When Koussevitzky conducted the premiere, in December 1, 1944, he pronounced the Concerto for Orchestra "the best orchestral piece of the last 25 years." Two months later, at Koussevitzky's suggestion, Bartók added a 22-bar coda to the original finale, and by the end of the decade the Concerto was a prominent part of the international repertory.

By the time the Concerto for Orchestra was introduced, Bartók had completed his Sonata for unaccompanied violin, commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin; he had undertaken the last of his three concertos for piano and accepted a commission for a concerto from the violist William Primrose. He lived long enough to complete the Third Piano Concerto, except for the last 17 bars of orchestration, which were eventually filled in by his associate Tibor Serly. Serly also managed, in a heroic four-year undertaking, to sort out the wildly unorganized sketches for the Viola Concerto so that it could be performed and published. The remarkable success of the Concerto for Orchestra created a receptive audience for those works, and its sustained popularity made it possible for Bartók's earlier works in various forms to make their way into the mainstream at last.

The period in which the Concerto for Orchestra was composed—the mid-1940s, the final years of World War II—gave rise to a number of orchestral works by various composers which were conceived in a spirit of optimism and undisguised warmth of heart, and were similarly well received. Among these we may count Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, Paul Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, and, from our own Aaron Copland, the music for the ballet Appalachian Spring and the broad-scaled Third Symphony. Just as the Prokofiev is unmistakably Russian, and the Copland unmistakably American, the Concerto for Orchestra could only have been written by the Hungarian musician and patriot Béla Bartók. The work's five movements are organized symmetrically around a central slow movement which is separated from the two outer ones by a pair of scherzos—the same layout Bartók used for his Fourth String Quartet in 1928. For the Boston premiere, he provided a program note of his own (in English), which he headed "Explanation to Concerto for Orchestra":

"The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single instruments or instrument groups in a concertant or soloistic manner. The 'virtuoso' treatment appears, for instance, in the fugato sections of the development of the first movement (brass instruments) or in the perpetuum-mobile-like passages of the principal theme in the last movement (strings), and, especially, in the second movement.

"As for the structure of the work, the first and fifth movements are written in a more or less regular sonata form. The development of the first movement contains fugato sections for the brass; the exposition in the finale is somewhat extended, and its development consists of a fugue built on the last theme of the exposition.

"Less traditional forms are found in the second and third movements. The main part of the second movement consists of a chain of independent short sections, played by wind instruments consecutively introduced in pairs (bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes, and muted trumpets). Thematically, the five sections have nothing in common and could be symbolized by the letters A, B, C, D, E. A kind of 'trio'—a short chorale for brass instruments and side drum—follows, after which the five sections are recapitulated in a more elaborate instrumentation.

"The structure of the third movement is chain-like: three themes appear successively. These constitute the core of the movement, which is enframed by a misty texture of rudimentary motives. Most of the thematic material of this movement derives from the introduction to the first movement. The form of the fourth movement—Intermezzo interrotto—could be rendered by the letter symbols A, B, A—interruption—B, A.

"The general mood of the work represents—apart from the jesting second movement—a gradual transition of the first movement and the lugubrious death song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one."

What Bartók did not state in his program note, but did confide to various Hungarian associates, is that the Concerto for Orchestra was conceived and created as a personal expression "of homesickness and hope for his country, and of peace and brotherhood for the world." Vilmos Juhász, in his study Bartók's Years in America, remarked that the Concerto for Orchestra "is the portrayal of Hungary's tragic fate, as Bartók himself has said. In this work the nation finally rises above the chaos of destruction. Bartók always believed that even a people's outward fate can change for the better only through inner purification."

What the composer described as "sternness" in the first movement, with its prominent passages for brass, is modified by lyric episodes. The conspicuously Hungarian style of the first two movements has been cited by various commentators as an expression of homesickness on Bartók's part, and this feeling is reinforced and expanded upon in subsequent sections. Another compatriot, the musicologist György Kroó, wrote that the "atmosphere of the opening movement … is evoked by a fanfare-like theme resembling a call for battle, a broader Hungarian-style continuation of the same, and a contrasting infinitely sensitive, shy, quiet dolce melody lyrically orchestrated."

The second movement, the first of the two scherzos, is labeled Giuocco delle coppie ("Game of Pairs") in the printed score, but Bartók's original title for it was Presentando le coppie ("Presenting the Couples"), which reflects the folk tradition known in parts of Hungary as the "Sunday order of dances."

Feelings of nostalgia and loss define the central Elegia, which is dominated, according to István Csicsery-Rónay (a writer and publisher, whose Occidental Press published the Juhász book quoted above), by a Székely threnody which may have been connected in Bartók's mind with the loss of Transylvania, a region he especially loved and in which, as a collector or Hungarian folk songs, he found his oldest specimens. The Székelys were the oldest Hungarian tribe in Transylvania, and there are thousands of such laments in their music. Material from the first movement, as the composer noted, also appears here in slightly altered form.

The fourth movement, Intermezzo interrotto, returns us to a lighter form of homesickness, its playfulness on a more robust level than in the Giuocco delle coppie. The second theme is Bartók's somewhat idealized quotation of an operetta song by Zsigmond Vincze that was popular in the 1930s: its text includes the line, "You are lovely, you are beautiful, my Hungary." The burlesque section of this movement struck some listeners as a parody of Danilo's song about the girls at Maxim's in the Hungarian-born Franz Lehár's famous operetta The Merry Widow, but Bartók advised that it was actually a reaction to an insistently repeated motif in the first movement of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, which he had heard on the radio in his hospital room.

Apart from the matter of parody, listeners familiar with Bartók's Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano (composed in 1938 for Joseph Szigeti and Benny Goodman, and performed and recorded by them with Bartók at the piano) may notice here a recollection of a fleeting gesture in that work's final movement. György Kroó quotes the pianist György Sándor as having had Bartók spell out his source of inspiration and the descriptive of this "only programmatic portion" of the Concerto: "The artist declares his love for his native land in a serenade which is suddenly interrupted in a crude and violent manner; he is seized by rough, booted men who even break his instrument."

The Concerto's final movement is based largely on bagpipe tunes Bartók collected on his field trips in Transylvania about a hundred years ago. Early in the movement is a brisk, unrepeated phrase that seems to echo the first of Grieg's four Norwegian Dances (originally for piano duet, better known in Hans Sitt's orchestration)—possibly an unconscious reminiscence of the time Bartók spent immersed in Grieg's works in an attempt at tracing his inspiration in Norwegian folk music. It fits in seamlessly amid the rumbustious and exuberant proceedings. The entire movement is dancelike, open-hearted and close to the earth in feeling, and is said to represent, in Bartók's words, "the brotherhood of all nations, in spite of wars and conflicts . . . a whirling paroxysm of dance in which all the peoples of the world join hands." The coda, one of the happiest of musical afterthoughts, brings the work to a brilliant and resoundingly affirmative conclusion.