The Eighth Tribe, 1981 (8. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1981-05-01 / 5. szám
bleeding. Would it be too fanciful to suggest that his death within two years from leukemia was as though his very life’s blood was trickling away? A very dear friend of my family, Carolyn “Aunt Kitty” Pereira—herself a violinist and a close friend of Toscanini—agreed that Bailer, myself, and Bartók should meet at her apartment. When Bailer and I arrived toward the close of a wintry afternoon, Bartók was already there, seated in an armchair placed uncompromisingly straight on to the piano score laid open before him, pencil in hand: an attitude both chilling, and in my experience, characteristically Hungarian. There were absolutely no civilities, not a word exchanged. Bailer went over to the piano; I, frozen with apprehension, put my violin case on a low table, unpacked and tuned my violin, nodded at Bailer as though he were an effigy, and in that strange, strict silence launched into the first movement of Bartők’s Sonata for Piano and Violin No 1. At the end of that movement, Bartók stirred, got to hisfeetand said: “I did not think music could be played like that until long after the composer was dead.” I hope I will be forgiven the immodesty, but I offer it not as a muchprized tribute, but to record an experience of such j oy, such relief that perhaps only another musician who was playing for the first time to a composer who had invaded his whole being, and on whose approval or acceptance almost unwittingly he had placed his hope and faith in the future, could comprehend. I had found his voice, he had told me so. The ice was broken and Bailer and I played the remaining movements. Knowing that I had just performed his great concerto, Bartók, still not willing to make things too easy for me, probed to see how well I’d really-grasped it. He asked particularly my opinion of a passage in the first movement. “It’s actually rather chromatic,” I suggested. “Yes, it ischromatic.”Thennudgingme toward the point he wanted to make: “You see that it comes very often?” (I had indeed, and counted some 32 times, but never in exactly the same guise.) “Well, I wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all 12 tones and still remain tonal.” Here I had met one of BartÖk’s typical barbs: Any one of those repeated sequences would supply a devoted dodecaphonist with sufficient material for an entire opera; from Bartók they poured out with a lavishness of invention that the 12-toner, Page 14______________________________ slaving away with his slide rule, will never know. Like other geniuses, his was that kind of profligate exuberance that can afford to throw ideas away never to be used again, secure in the fund within him. Can you wonder that such a man made short shrift of words—albeit I do recall one evening at table when he and I, rudely ignoring the others, talked long and excitingly. But I have not described the man physically and this, particularly with Bartók, is of extreme importance, for his spirit and his physique were one and the same. Small, spare, trim, with a parchment skin and thinning white hair—he would have looked almost like the negative of a photograph had it not been for the terrifying brilliance of those vast dark eyes. Everything that was in him spoke through them; he needed no gestures. One look was sufTHE EIGHTH TRIBE________ Bartok offered no civilities. Frozen with apprehension, I began to play. ficient for admission or dismissal, scorn or interest, to convey a passionate conviction or to stay a patent stupidity. “The eye was in itself a soul” as Byron said. Dt was after the vast relief of that first “audition” at Aunt Kitty’s, on that swell of warmth and empathy, that I dared ask him if he could consider writing a work for me. I knew he was inordinately proud and would accept no money unless he earned it; I knew he was already condemned by an illness that forced him to count his time, so I suggested he might accept the idea of a solo sonata. He agreed. Little did I foresee that he would write me one of the violin masterpieces of all time. I must admit that when I first laid eyes on it in March 1944, I was aghast. It seemed at first sight to be almost unplayable. But that first impression was ill-judged, hasty, and the subsequent correspondence, the willingness to exchange ideas over the score, to be allowed to suggest changes (I only once got a flat “No”) was yet another revelation of a truly great composer. Alas! That our dialogue should have had to be mainly by letter. He had mailed me the score from Asheville, North Carolina, where he had been sent by his doctors, already under sentence of death. He was to have spent that summer of 1944 in my house in the Santa Cruz mountains of California— a place he would have loved and that would have recalled the long treks he, Zoltán and Emma Kodály used to take regularly in his beloved Hungarian mountains. (Once in Budapest, Emma, approaching her 100th year and I suppose freed from all inhibitions— although I doubt she ever had any— showed me a yellowed old snapshot of the three of them intrepidly attacking a steep and stony slope, stark naked.) But it was not to be and will forever remain one of the greatest losses of my life. For him it must have seemed “the neverending flight of future days.” Perhaps Bartók’s unique contribution to music can best be summed up in Leonardo da Vinci’s contemplation on “The Lesson of Nature”: “Where and when artists find their creative source in other artists rather than in nature, the state of their art declines.” Not so with Bartók, for if he employed a jazz motif as in the last movement of the Concerto for Orchestra, or if he expressed himself with such searing nostalgia as in the Viola Concerto, it was not in an attempt to comply with his alien surroundings but rather because he listened, with the ears of an animal and the soul of a man, to the stirrings of New York, to its mysteries, its dynamic qualities, its rhythms, with the same rapt attention he had given the villagers. His quartets trace an evolution that parallels Beethoven’s and provide the eternal milestones of a life reaching all the way from innocence through passion, to serenity toward greater selfexpression and simplicity at the same time. Perhaps New York accentuated that underlying nostalgia which is part and parcel of life itself, of its yearning for origin as for the beyond. Yet he would have liked to live on and give more, and to have savored the universal recognition he was due to receive within so short a time. In his own last words: “I am taking so much baggage with me.” I like to feel with Milton, that: Heaven open’d wide Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound On golden hinges moving. ■ World-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin has recently published The Music ot Man. SATURDAY REVIEW __________________________May, 1981
