Béla Bartók
Dance Suite
Influenced by musical masters as wide-ranging as Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Stravinsky, and especially by the dense orchestral textures of Richard Strauss, Béla Bartók is still best known for his broad knowledge and extensive use of eastern European folk music. Trained first as a pianist, Bartók studied composition at the Academy of Music in Budapest, graduating in 1901. In 1904 he met fellow composer and Hungarian Zoltan Kodály. Together the two embarked on a years-long project to find and catalogue authentic Hungarian folk music. The project soon expanded to include the roots of that music, beyond the “gypsy” strains quoted by Liszt and Brahms to the music of Slovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Bartók embraced these divergent influences wholeheartedly, and his compositions reflect all of them.
In November 1923, Budapest city fathers held a 50th-anniversary celebration of the unification of the two Hungarian cities on either side of the banks of the Danube river: the ancient Buda and the cosmopolitan Pest. Kodály produced his Psalmus Hungaricus for the event, and Bartók his Dance Suite.
The suite is a musical tour through the various folk styles that Bartók studied. It opens with a Moderato movement showcasing the lower instruments, in a grumbling, sometimes fierce, Arab-inspired theme. This evolves to a graceful, Hungarian-inspired ritornello that serves as the transitional ‘glue’ between the various dances. The Allegro molto is indeed that, taken at a brisk stride and with raucous trombone slides. The danceable rhythms belie their complexity. Hungarian, Rumanian, and Arab folk dances all contribute to the Allegro vivace. Brilliant woodwinds and plenty of percussion, including four-hand piano and harp, contribute to the variety of musical textures. The molto tranquillo contrasts string and celeste against an Arabic tune in various woodwind pairs, primarily the double-reeds. The ritornello leads us again into the fifth movement, Comodo. Bartók described the motif in this movement as “so primitive that one can only speak of a primitive peasant character.” Various brass sections clash and contend, with punctuations by the strings. The finale, Allegro, recapitulates a number of the earlier themes in a brisk summary of our musical travelogue.