Béla Bartók Anniversary, by Rubén Amón
Vanguard and tradition,
search for new horizons on the right hand and recovery of the past on the left
.
Béla Bartók shared and musically combined that complicated balance throughout his career.
"Bartók created a harmonic, rhythmic, melodic system, absolutely original as a consequence of his deep ethnomusicological research, combined with a
very powerful sound imagination
. The limitation that the composers before him had is that he only knew
Ron
cultured popular music, those dances and songs of elementary structure that were played and sung so often in the cities, but never had the opportunity to listen to authentic popular music, that which could only be heard in the most distant villages, on the fringes of civilization ".
Who this subscribes is the conductor, musical promoter and also novelist Xavier Güell (Barcelona, 1956), who has just started an ambitious tetralogy,
War quartet
, with which you want to show
how the totalitarianisms of the 20th century affected the careers of Dimitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg and Bartók himself
.
"They are very disparate voices that complement each other by reacting in different ways to the war."
The first installment has already been published, the one dedicated to Bartók,
If you can't, I'll breathe for you
(Gutenberg Galaxy), where he narrates "the voluntary exile of the Hungarian musician to the United States, who will risk his emotional, family and professional stability, to record his radical opposition to the dictatorships of Horthy, Hitler and Mussolini".
In autumn it will be published
No one will get to know each other
, on Richard Strauss, "considered the greatest composer of his time, who decides to remain in Nazi Germany, which makes him appear in the eyes of the world as a collaborator and is therefore subjected to a denazification process once the war is over" says Güell.
"
And Stalin got up and left
It will describe the unfolding of Shostakovich's personality when he was forced to mask his creative freedom, as a result of the brutal pressures he received from the Soviet authorities.
I will break the locks with the wind
will feature Schoenberg, the great reformer of Western music.
Nothing and no one could prevent him from continuing with his revolutionary work and yet, at the same time, everything made it difficult for him.
And it was not the lack of will or the diminution of his talent that was to blame for this, but rather the uneasiness that exile caused him, the feeling of being lost, the anguish that accompanies all the pilgrim's creation ", explains Xavier Güell.
Bartók's arrival in New York in 1940 couldn't have started any worse.
They had
lost its 310 kilos of luggage with its collections of insects and butterflies, its scores, books and, above all, the transcriptions of Arabic, Serbian, Slovak, Turkish, Bulgarian and Romanian music,
which he intended to publish in the United States.
They were vital to Bartók as he had traveled through remote villages in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Arabia and North Africa to record the melodies that the elderly had inherited from their elders.
"For many years, Bartók together with his partner Zoltán Kodály was the first to have access to these melodies, true works of art in miniature, comparable, in a smaller scope, to a Bach fugue or a Mozart sonata. They are melodies exemplary not only for their quality and beauty, but also for the density of thought they express. He collected and recorded thousands of those songs. Furthermore, he wanted to live with the peasants, learn their customs, their languages, and integrate completely into their lives. His work consisted of conquering the spiritual richness of that music, and from it elaborating his own style ".
Bartók (who had Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as his references) is not an easy, complacent musician.
It is the sambenito that is usually hung and it is what the American public perceived in the 40s.
His music was rejected almost unanimously as "strident, brutal, unpleasant.
In fact, the result of his first four years is catastrophic: without concerts, or financial resources, he almost lived in misery.
And what is much harder: his creative capacity is exhausted and he is unable to compose anything new. "This is well narrated in
If you can't, I'll breathe for you
.
He achieved recognition with the premiere of his
Concerto for orchestra
in Boston but it was late because months later he died of leukemia.
This book must be read with music by Bartók in the background, or it must be listened to before or after, and for this Güell suggests
his six string quartets
("along with those of Shostakovich are the best of the twentieth century") of whom he was inflexible with the interpretation of his works, who was feared.
He considered that everything was written in the score, that any deviation was a lack of respect
.
He demanded passion but also humility, which is why the then unknown Yehudi Menuhin amazed him so much.
He hardly had any friends for being "taciturn, impatient, proud, and at times uncompromising - despite his natural goodness - which did not help his integration into American musical life" which he deeply despised.
Asked which musicians Bartók is related to, Güell says that with "Franz Liszt the most radical and avant-garde composer of his time, with Debussy and Stravinski two of his fundamental references, and from another sphere, with that of Leos Janácek, the extraordinary Czech composer. On the other hand, the
Bartók effect
after his death, he made many composers, including the Hungarian Ligeti, Kúrtag and Peter Eötwös, indebted to him ".
Regarding the music that is composed today, Güell considers the following: "If we compare the large number of masterpieces written in the first twenty years of the 20th century (the last symphonies of Gustav Mahler;
Erwartung
from Schoenberg,
Spring consecration
by Stravinski,
Bluebeard's castle
of Bartók,
Wozzeck
by Alban Berg,
Salome
and
Elektra
by Richard Strauss,
Pelleas and Melisande
Debussy) with the best works composed in the first two decades of the 21st century, it is evident that the previous one beats us by far.
There are no longer any rules that can be broken;
there is for the first time total freedom to choose the path that one prefers:
you can go back to tonality, without being called reactionary for it;
starting from sophisticated technological means;
mix sound and visual art;
use diverse popular traditions;
follow mathematical and physical processes;
employ the repetitive patterns of the great icons of minimalism. "
If the reader wants to look back, there it is
The music of memory
and
The prisoners of paradise
(both in Gutenberg Galaxy) by Güell himself;
the first addresses the figures of Beethoven, Schubert, Suchumann, Brahms, Liszt, Wagner and Mahler, a volume that includes a selected discography to which QR codes have been added that will direct the reader to links of the interpretations recommended by Güell existing on YouTube;
The prisoners of paradise
recounts how composer Hans Krasa (along with Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Vicktor Ullmann, as well as other musicians and singers) made the Theresienstadt concentration camp a musical refuge in the sinister shadow of the Nazis for a few months.
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