Bartok: Dance Suite

Dance Suite (1923)

Bela Bartok
(1881-1945)

Apart from Gustav Mahler, most of the major 20^th century composers who continued to contribute to the tradition of the full-scale symphony came from countries outside Central Europe: the Scandinavians, the English, the Americans and the Soviets. Most of the other major 20^th century composers---Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern Varese---turned away from that tradition. Bela Bartok was such a composer. Indeed, Bartok's catalogue of large orchestral compositions is surprisingly short, barely twenty major works, including two ballet scores, and nine works (rhapsodies and concertos) for piano, violin and viola and orchestra. At the time of the premiere of the Dance Suite in 1923 only a single orchestral work of the composer's maturity had yet been performed, the Four Pieces for Orchestra of 1912, first heard only a year earlier. The Dance Suite was something of a break-through for Bartok, following a performance in Prague in 1925 which caught the public imagination Bartok. Within a year the composition had received sixty performances, Bartok's international reputation began to prosper, and the compositions by which he is best known began to appear.

The Dance Suite is a vivid reminder of Bartok's profound relationship with the folk culture of not only his native land, but of Eastern Europe and the Middle East as well. Unique among composers, he was a serious student of folk music, a veritable "Ethno-musicologist," to use a word which did not exist in the early years of the 20 century when he and his friend Zoltan Kodaly went on field expeditions to collect ofolksongs, making use of the primitive cylinder recording apparatus which had just been developed. (Interestingly, in the first decade of the 20^th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger in England, and Cecil Sharp in the American Appalachian region, were also engaged the study of folk music---in the nick of time, as it happened, for the development of radio and recorded music would soon snuff out the surviving folk culture in those regions.)

Bartok"s "native land" was Hungary, of course. But a quite different Hungary from the independent nation which came into existence with the dissolution of the "Austro-Hungarian Empire" in 1918. Until that date Hungarian culture remained cloaked in obscurity. Among many composers and music-lovers (especially in Vienna), there was a sentimental fondness for "Hungarian" music, as is famously known from Brahms' Hungarian Dances, and many of the

popular late 19^th century Viennese operettas. And, of course, the whole world celebrated Franz Liszt as the essence of Hungarian music, most of all for his brilliant Hungarian Rhapsodies. But Liszt spent little time in his native land after his teens, and as an older man struggled to speak the language. Like Brahms, and many other musicians of the day, Liszt believed that the music of the Hungarian gypsies was indeed the authentic Hungarian music---he even took time to write a wonderfully misinformed book! It was only 20 years after the death of Liszt that Bartok and Kodaly were able to establish that genuine Hungarian music was quite another matter from the music heard in restaurants in Vienna and Budapest, for the most part played and created by Gypsies, who belonged to a distinct tradition of their own. Bartok's scholarly approach to the subject (in contrast to the enthusiasms of Liszt and Brahms) not only clarified the true nature of Hungarian folk music, but also began to reveal the enormous range and vitality of the music of Rumania, Bulgaria and other hitherto unknown regions of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian empire as well.

When Bartok fled Hungary at the beginning of World War II to take refuge in the United State, unlike Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith, he refused to accept offers from universities to earn a secure living as a teacher of composition--he insisted that it could not be taught! However he quite willingly took a position at Columbia University studying and organizing a large collection of folksong materials, forty years after his expeditions into rural Hungary returning to his early activity as an "ethno-musicologist."

Ritornello

Although strongly devoted to the goal of Hungarian political and cultural independence, Bartok's involvement with folk music was remarkably open-minded and internationalist, as is exemplified in his Dance Suite. For all its folk music influences, this work was actually composed for a uniquely 'urban" occasion: the celebration in 1923 of the 50^th anniversary of the union of three sister cities on the banks of the Danube---Buda, Obuda and Pest---to form the capital city of"Budapest." That Bartok was commissioned to compose a work by the conservative authorites of Budapest was rather curious, considering the composer's own left-wing leanings in the early years of independence. The early 1920s were a period of great political unrest, the newly independent nation having flirted briefly with Communism in 1919, then swinging into extreme right-wing political unrest, inflation and falling living standards. At the time Bartok himself was attacked by some nationalists as "unpatriotic" due to his work with the Rumanian and Slovak folk music, as well as his own political views. The suite was first heard on 19 November, 1923, on a concert conducted by Ernst yon Dohnanyi, which also included commissioned works by Dohnanyi himself, and the sensation of the evening, Zoltan Kodaly's brilliant "Psalmus Hungaricus."

The Dance Suite consists of six dance movements (mostly in quick tempo), several of which are linked by a RITORNELLO, a gentle, lyrical passage which Bartok, rather pleased with himself, described as "such a faithful imitation of a certain kind of Hungarian folk melody that its derivation might puzzle even the most knowledgeable of musical folklorists." That said, Bartok went on to point out that no actual folk material was employed in the composition.

The opening movement, marked MODERATO is described by Bartok as having links with Arab music. The initial melodic pattern in the bassoon is the sort of "compressed" figure common to much of Bartok's music, circling around a tightly-knit sequence of close intervals (half steps, seconds and thirds), heard against a heavily-accented, irregular rhythmic background (another typical Bartokian mannerism.) The strings play in choppy down-bow strokes joined by the percussive interjections in the piano. The bassoon figure is passed on to English horn, clarinet and oboe, often played in seconds (anticipating the famous "Game of the Couples" movement from the Concerto for Orchestra written 20 years later). Swooping GLISSANDO figures appear in the strings, the orchestral texture thickens,

chugging forward in heavy accents. (There is even a charming moment when the bassoon melody is heard in the tuba.) Then the RITORNELLO steals in, comfortably set in G Minor (Aeolian mode), a sweetly nostalgic moment forming a link to the next movement.

The Second Movement, ALLEGRO MOLTO, said to be derived from the Hungarian tradition, stomps into view in B-flat minor, loud, heavily weighted with the brass, obsessively centering upon the interval of the minor third. The rhythms become ever more irregular, displaying a wildness reminiscent of similar passages in the composer’s "Miraculous Mandarin." The RITORNELLO reappears, a bit less sweet this time, now set in E-flat.

In the Third Movement "Hungarian, Rumanian and even Hungarian influences alternate," according to the composer. Marked ALLEGRO VIVACE, this is effectively the work's "Scherzo," set in a strongly pentatonic key of B, making much use of the so-called “Hungarian interval”: the perfect fourth. Laid out in a Rondo-like scheme (ABACA), the opening "bagpipe" tune introduced by the bassooon moves around the orchestra, rising in intensity, followed by the “B” section in which a drone-like tune is punched out in the strings. The second appearance of the "A" tune creates a "music-box" effect in a magical passage with the piano (played by two performers, four-hands) circling around in a four-part canon, laid out against a background of harp and harmonics in the strings. The "C" section is another heavy-footed passage in the strings over a drone figure, soon joined by shrill, skirling high winds, bringing back the A theme for a brilliant finish.

At this point there is no RITORNELLO; the slow Fourth Movement (MOLTO TRANQUILLO) emerging PIANISSIMO from a moment of silence. Characterized by Bartok as "entirely Oriental (Arab) in character," this is an example of the hushed, haunted slow music which is so memorable in the composer's later works. Opening with richly-textured sonorities in the strings alternating with chant-like melodic figures in the winds, here the fluid, unaccented rhythmic flow of the music creates an atmosphere of mysterious stillness. Malcolm Gillies has described this as "a music that just IS rather than one that progresses. It exists in time rather than moves through time."

Introduced by the briefest of the RITORNELLO passages, the short Fifth Movement (COMMODO) is described by Bartok as having "a primitive peasant character." Little more than an introduction to the final movement, here a pulsating repeated-note figure is heard in the violas, then reiterated with added sonorities of the ("Hungarian") perfect fourths, rising in tension to a couple outbursts in the winds and brass, then striding without a break into the finale.

The Sixth Movement, ALLEGRO, extends the repeated-note figure from the previous section, with another "pile-up" of fourths rising from the cellos and basses into the upper strings and winds. This finale is sometimes described as a "medley," with quotations from the earlier movements passing in review and in various combinations, reaching a grand climax, only to settle back into a last recollection of the RITORNELLO. The coda begins with a simply peasant-like tune in solo strings, soon builds to another towering sonority, with the "bagpipe" tune of the third movement returning to bring the proceedings to a resounding conclusion.