Béla Bartók: Music And Love Poem by Paul Hartal

Music mediates between Heaven and Earth.
It connects the spiritual realm with the mundane world.
But not all music is the same.
And Bartók's bounteous compositions are particularly unique,
yielding abundant melodic, rhythmic and orchestral rewards.
Besides, his oeuvre builds brisk bridges between different nations
and genres through a synthesis of folk music, classicism, modernism,
and his own personal style.

Considered as one of the outstanding musical geniuses
of the 20th century,
Béla Bartók is regarded -along with Franz Liszt—
as the greatest Hungarian composer.

Bartók was born in the year of 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós,
Kingdom of Hungary, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His biographers had recorded that he was a very special child,
an astonishing prodigy. Before he started talking, he was able
to differentiate between diverse tunes and distinct rhythms.
And before he turned 4 years old his piano repertory
already included some 40 pieces.

Educated in Budapest,
Bartók rose to international eminence and fame.
He became not only a leading figure in modern music;
but, arguably though, the greatest musical genius
of the in 20th century.
In addition to being a virtuoso concert pianist,
as well as an outstanding master of composition, he also entered
the pantheon of history as a pioneer of ethnomusicology
who collected thousands of pieces of Hungarian, Slovakian
and Romanian folk songs.

This modern Hungarian composer and pianist shares with Bach
a fascination for mathematics. It finds its expression
within the architecture of his musical masterpieces,
which incorporate such mathematical
elements as symmetry and the golden ratio.

Bartók's compositions teem with uncommon sonorities, fusing
rhythmic and melodic features in traditional tunes with ethnic music.
And all these separate features pour out, exhale and unite
through his individual mannerism. The Concerto for Orchestra,
which Bartók composed in 1943, two years before his death
in New York, might serve to present the fulfilled complexity
of his masterly work.

Bartók's music is innovative, experimental, expressionist
and surrealist. It is superbly original and strange,
while at the same time it also reverberates with tuneful echoes
of past melodies and harmonies. Among the numerous
great composers who had swayed Bartók's work,
the influence of Claude Debussy, for example,
as well as of Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky,
Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg is recognizable, too.

Bartók was in his twenties when he met in Budapest his Muse,
a blond, blue eyed and beautiful woman,
the young and gifted violinist Stefi Geyer.
He fell in love with her madly and composed for her,
during the years 1907 and 1908, his first Violin Concerto.

However, the romantic affair ended in unrequited love and
it made the composer deeply depressed.
In his mental anguish he was unable to sleep
and lost even his appetite.

But then came Márta Ziegler, a teenage girl who became his student.
He taught her not only how to play the piano but also the names of stars. He also took her to art museums and galleries and introduced her to the poetry of Endre Ady and to the novels of such writers
as Maupassant and Flaubert.

On a November day in 1909 Bartók took his 16 year old pupil
for a walk and then he stopped at her mother's house to reveal her
that Márta and he had just gotten married!

The composer's son, Béla Bartók, Jr.
was born in August of the following year.

Bartók had a turbulent marriage. Márta was deeply wounded
because of his extra-marital affairs. Eventually the nuptial union
broke up.The couple divorced in 1923, but two months later
Bartók married his 19 year old piano pupil, Edith Pásztory.
His second son, Péter, was born in 1924.

At the end of the First World War
Bartók composed the music
for the surrealist pantomime ballet,
"The Miraculous Mandarin".
It employs a bizarre tale written by Malchior Lengyel.
The prostitute in this opus lures her clients
by saucy dance into her room where they are robbed
by three vagrants.

After two penniless customers are thrown out,
a wealthy Chinese mandarin arrives.
He embraces the girl but she escapes.
Then the vagrants strip him of his valuables,
stab him with an old sword and hang him from a lamp hook.

Yet the lamp falls, the room becomes dark
and the mandarin's eyes begin to blaze with eerie light
while his body shines with ghostly blue-green radiance.
His tormentors become terrified
and the girl tells the vagrants to free the mandarin,
which they do.

Now the mandarin embraces the girl
and they make passionate love.
However, he is mortally injured.
His wounds open, they start to bleed,
and he suddenly drops dead with
an abrupt puff like a burnt electric light bulb.

But this is not an ordinary tale about sex and crime.
Instead, it serves as a poignant allegory
of urban misery, alienation and depravity.
Moreover, in an oblique manner, the piece concerns
the indispensable human need for hope and for love
as a redeeming force.

Yet performing this ballet was met with cultural resistance.
The German City of Köln banned its staging in the 1920s,
due to the orgasm scene, which the censors found obscene.

During the First World War, Bartók also composed the music
for the pantomime ballet, The Wooden Prince.
It premiered at the Budapest Opera on May 12,1917.
The plot of this work is a romantic fairy tale
with a happy ending.It was based on a libretto
by the eminent Hungarian poet and film theorist Béla Balázs,
who was also a close friend of the composer.

Three years before the outbreak of the First World War,
in 1911, Bartók began to work on The Blue-Bearded Duke's Castle,
a one-act expressionist opera. He expanded this opus towards
the end of the war in 1917.

Based on a true story about a medieval French prince
who tortured and killed his wives, the opera's libretto was
written in Hungarian by Béla Balázs.

It seems that the symbolism embedded in
The Blue-Bearded Duke's Castle gives expression to the pain
of human isolation and loneliness, the sufferings
of our tormented collective soul.

Reflecting on his own life,
the poet, critic and librettist Béla Balázs
said about his friend Béla Bartók:
"Blessed is my life, because he who has seen a genius,
has seen God."