Bartók Béla, ifj.: Chronicles of Béla Bartók's Life (Budapest, 2021)
Foreword
FOREWORD FOREWORD I have the honour of being a family member of Béla Bartok Jnr., the author of this book. He was the husband of my paternal aunt and my Godfather. Of our yearly summer vacations spent together, I remember well that summer when one and a half rooms of the two-room-living-room cottage were occupied by the scraps of paper big and small, letters, notes, railway tickets, and other documents necessary for the compilation of this book. Although a teenager, not only was I not bothered by this, I rather admired that exacting precision which he always strove for in his work as an engineer, but evidenced most when writing or saying something about his Father. He was able to communicate about Béla Bartok in only one way, he always wrote the truth, the reality based on his own knowledge, exactitude, and all the credible documentation to be found, all from the purest source. His aim in writing those books of his that got published around the centenary of Béla Bartoks birth (The Chronicles of my Fathers Life; Béla Bartoks Family Letters; In Béla Bartoks Workshop) was mainly to correct the countless pieces of false, mistaken or mendacious information published about his father during the preceding decades, and in so doing he - one of his nearest family members then still alive - hoped to refute the lies and restore the truth. All this happened almost exactly 40 years ago, but unfortunately I see day in day out that these mistaken or directly malicious statements, far from disappearing, seem rather to have strengthened nowadays, and we are at the point where even workshops labelled scientific are distributing statements concerning Béla Bartok that, 7
