The Hungarian Student, 1958 (2. évfolyam, 1-7. szám)

1958 / 3. szám

the Hungarian student

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BÉLA BARTÓK— A Genius of Our Times

An interview with Mrs. Elizabeth Láng Kecskeméti, the pianist, a former student of Béla Bartók.

EVERY BIG CITY gives one the feeling of a jungle. New York is possibly the biggest jungle in the world, built from stones and people. In a real jungle, however, the native learns to track footprints while he is still a child; in a city it is much more complicated to detect the marks of a human being.

Béla Bartók, the great contemporary composer lived and worked here in this city for almost five years. With his birthday approaching on March twenty-fifth, let us try to find his track in the jungle, using a more refined method of detection.

We call on his former student of piano, Mrs. Elizabeth Kecskeméti, and ask her to tell us about some of her memories of her master.

“Following the advice of my piano teacher, my father took me to perform before Bartók, who at that time held the chair

by J. B.

of piano at the Academy of Music of Budapest. I was then about thirteen years of age. That was the first time I met him. I played a few pieces of Bach’s “Well-tempered Clavier,” and if I remember correctly, the second movement of the Sonata in E flat major, Opus 7 by Beethoven.”

“He listened to my performance, and for the time being accepted me as a private student. Later on after I finished school and entered the Academy, he became my professor for six years. When I graduated as a piano teacher, it was he who put his signature on my diploma.”

“In later years, did you play his works as a pianist?”

“I played them for the first time in the United States. 1 emigrated to the United States in 1942, with my husband. Back in Hungary and in earlier days, I used to play the harpsichord, mainly the works of eighteenth-century masters—mostly Bach. 1 got to like this instrument so much that I am almost sure it was under my influence that Bartók wrote on a few of his Microcosmos pieces, ‘eventually for harpsichord.’ ”

“Would you mind answering a typical, but important question? How about Bartók, the man?”

“The answer does not come easily. People have written so much about him . .. You could best compare him to a friar. He lived only for his work, although he was greatly interested in many fields, such as literature, philosophy, languages. It used to be his habit in Budapest not to be called from his room upstairs except when dinner was ready. After dinner, he immediately went back to work. It was only on Christmas, Eve, that he stayed—once a year. But this was not a rigidity in his character; it was an awareness of the importance of the job to which he sacrificed himself.”

“What do you know about his tragic sickness?”

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“Considerably, by chance. Namely that from October 1944, until his death, he lived in this house, just a few flights below our apartment. We used to spend the afternoons or the evenings together. Once at a Philharmonic concert, I went down to his lounge; it was the first time I had seen him for a long time and I noticed how pale and slender he was. He smoked, I sat down at his side, and we began to talk. He told me then he did not feel well, that from time to time he had a fever. After that he had to go to a hospital, and again I did not see him for a long time.”

“Did they know by then that he had leukemia ?”

“No. At first the doctors suspected tuberculosis. He was performing in Boston, when some of his friends at Harvard examined him, and burst out into joy, because tuberculosis then was already curable. But he, with his dry humor—which was not known by many—wrote us: T am less gay about it.’ ”

“Was he a success in the United States?”

“In the spring of 1943, he was visited in the hospital by Koussevitzky, who had given him three thousand dollars to compose a concerto for orchestra. It was then that he composed the work which bears the title of Concerto for Orchestra, which has since been recognized as one of his most important works. At that time he was alreadly ill. He used to earn his living by teaching piano, and by receiving royalties (Continued on page 6.)

Portrait of Béla Bartók, the Hungarian composer, a few years before his death in 1945.