The Eighth Tribe, 1981 (8. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1981-05-01 / 5. szám
May, 1981 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page 13 Bartók at 100: A Titan Remembered by \bhudi Menuhin To write about those one knew simply as past fond friends, who left no tangible mark other than as human beings,is far easieratask than to write about an artist, be he painter, sculptor, writer, or composer. For the artist lives within the mind’s eye and the soul’s ear both as the lost physical being and as the creator whose work continues palpable and alive, thus challenging the seachange of memory that, washing over facts, sometimes distorts them, remolding their shape and significance. To write about such a man as Béla Bartók on the centenary of his birth is the highest kind of challenge, for such was his burning honesty, so shorn was he of all that was meaningless and inorganic, that by the time I met him— alas, in the last few years of his extraordinary life—I felt at once that I was facing someone pared down to the essential core, a man who would scorn anything but the direct and the true. I owe my first knowledge of his work to Antal Dorati, the great conductor. In 1942 he invited me to an evening of chamber music at his home in New York. Sensing perhaps that I would share his recognition of the greatness of his fellow-Hungarian, Dorati played some excerpts from various works of Bartók on the piano, spoke of what Bartók had meant to Hungarian music, and begged me to study the violin and piano sonatas and the concerto. I shall be forever grateful to him, for it proved to be one of those immediate revelations that happen so rarely and that seem,as Milton said, suddenly “untwisting all the chains that tie the hidden soul of harmony.” I’d always searched every season for some contemporary work to include in my programs, and here was not merely an isolated and interesting piece or two, but a world, part of the cosmos of music containing all that is of value in the emotions: passion, humor, anger, serenity; all that is endemic to life on earth, it seemed to me. Nature, climate, soil, and sea in all their cruelties and ugliness, their calamities and beauties, untrammeled; the experience of all times spoken in today’s words. Bartók’s music was also profoundly intellectual and highly complex, brooking no casual studying, no glancing at the pages, in the hope that the sound they held in the code of their notes would be quickly deciphered. I took a deep breath, decided to include both the first Sonata for Violin and Piano and what is now known as the Second Violin Concerto in the 1943 season. It was my great fortune to have Mitropoulos and the Minneapolis Symphony to help me in this plunge— Mitropoulos both rehearsing and conducting the concerto by heart—adding to my own courage and transmuting somehow my fear into awe and delight. A few days later I was to play the sonata at Carnegie Hall with my sensitive and gifted accompanist, Adolph Bailer. By that time, of course, Bartók was himself living in New York, a sacrifice which no amount of kindness and welcome could assuage. For such a man, steeped in his Hungary’s music, with his lifework of traveling through the remotest villages of Transylvania, Turkey, the Balkans, recording on the most primitive of recording devices every note he could glean from the cracked voices of ancient peasants—for such a man an uprooting of this dimension left those roots (continued)
