Bela Bartók

Bela Bartók ... dedicated to his wife, Márta. After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission prize, Bartók wrote very little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music (in Central Europe, the Balkans, Algeria, and Turkey). However, the outbreak of World War I forced him to stop these expeditions, and he returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince in 1914–16 and the String Quartet No. 2 in 1915–17, both influenced by Debussy. It was The Wooden Prince which gave him some degree of international fame. He subsequently worked on another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss, following this up with his two violin sonatas (written in 1921 and 1922 respectively) which are harmonically and structurally some of the most complex pieces he wrote. The Miraculous Mandarin was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content, a sordid modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder. He wrote his third and fourth string quartets in 1927–28, after which he finally found his true voice, starting broadly incorporating folk music in his compositions. Notable examples of this period are Divertimento for strings (1939) and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). The String Quartet No. 5 (1934) is written in somewhat more traditional style. Bartók wrote his sixth and last string quartet in 1939. Bartók did not feel comfortable in the USA, and found it very difficult to write. He was also not very well known in America, and there was little interest in his music. He and his wife Ditta would give concerts, and for a while, they had a research grant to work on a collection of Yugoslav folk songs. While their finances were always precarious, it is a myth that he lived and died in poverty. There were enough supporters to see to it that there was enough money and work available for him to live on. Bartók's health began to deteriorate in 1944, making composing difficult for him. His last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6, were it not for Serge Koussevitsky commissioning him to write the Concerto for Orchestra, at the behest of the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner (who had been Bartók's friend and champion since his days as Bartók's student at the Royal Academy). This quickly became Bartók's most popular work, and one which would ease his financial burdens. He was also commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin to write a Sonata for Solo Violin. This seemed to reawaken his interest in composing, and he went on to write his Piano Concerto No. 3, an airy and almost neo-classical work, and begin work on his Viola Concerto.