Bartók Béla, ifj.: Chronicles of Béla Bartók's Life (Budapest, 2021)

World War II. Second and Third American Tour (1939–1945)

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CHRONICLES OF BÉLA

BARTOK'S

LIFE

his letter mailed to Panama he answers his son Péter

’s question

concerning the possibility of going home: “Oh, but how can you think that?! Obviously there will be nothing suitable to take one home. To wait, wait, wait and - cry, cry, cry, cry - that’s all we can do. ... In my estimation there will not be circumstances fit for decent human life at home, not even in 5 years. ... Looting and other acts of violence on the Russians’ part are of common occurrence”.

11 June - In his New York letter he gives Boosey & Hawkes of London detailed instruction regarding the publication of Concerto.

22 June

- He is complaining about Hungarian circumstances in a long letter to his son Péter.

23 June

- He writes Ágnes

Butcher

in Toronto. This is how he writes regarding the situation with a lack of prospects at home: “Heaven knows when and how there will be regular elections and with what results. I think that the Russians will organise [let’s say within 6 months] that people would ‘freely’ (!) vote for the country’s sovietization and integration into the great U.S.S.R. ... One of the papers published the list of war criminals’. Dohnányi

is

also on it! So you play the compositions of a war criminal! ... For the moment it seems they want me to go back. For the moment -. What will happen in half a year or a year, nobody knows. Maybe by that time I will also be declared a war criminal, Heaven knows why. Nobody can tell. - I don’t yet know what to do.”

He also gave an account of the early, uncertain newspaper reports about the destruction of the Hungarian folk music collection, and added: “What are those elections compared to this painful event! That collection was unique in the whole world, it can not be replaced. And 40 years of work [in addition, the whole collection of objects of folk art was also destroyed, an art that has not existed, does not exist nor will ever exist anywhere else]. Verily, these are not days of joy, but of mourning, tears and sobbing. To quote Ady’s famous lines: ‘To cry, cry, cry - .’

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