Bartók: Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion

Program Note

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz.110 (bb 115) (1937)

 

In Maxim Gorky’s short story “Song of the Blind,” a peasant woman sings to a pub full of people: “The monotonous melody was now drawn out into a long sob—on two notes of misery—and the two notes alternated throughout the whole song, like the sound of the teeth of a saw, moving back and forth. But in their insistence, there was a deeply sorrowful music that tore one’s soul to pieces.” 

 

Perhaps Béla Bartók recognized this fictional peasant woman in a real one he heard singing to herself in 1904—she sang a popular Transylvanian tune, yet with changes in modality and stanza structure that were unfamiliar to Bartók. It was after hearing this striking performance and reading the short stories of Gorky, a Russian realist famous for his heartfelt depictions of the peasant class as people with hearts and minds of their own, that Bartók decided to make his compositional legacy one of musical realism—he made it his artistic mission to document the folk music of Eastern Europe.  

 

Bartók’s belief that “genuine folk music…[is] a spontaneous expression of the people’s musical instinct” not only shaped his compositional voice, but also placed him at the front of twentieth century ethnomusicology. In 1907, he traveled to the Eastern Carpathian Mountains to gather songs like the one he heard from the peasant girl in 1904. Over the next years he recorded, dictated, and transcribed everything that he heard while travelling. He noticed as he was doing so that the music urbanites were calling “folk” was very different from the music being sung by peasants. While city folk might say that any gypsy Czardas was “folk music,” in reality the music was far more nuanced and complex. As Bartók said, it was “full of characteristic peculiarities deserving of precise annotation, such as, for example, the vocal portamento, irregular rhythm, and so forth, none of which can be recorded with the aid of conventional music signs.” He ended up dividing folk music into the categories of parlando rubato, or music that imitates the spoken voice, and tempo giusto, music that imitates dance.

 

In Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, one can certainly hear the pains he took to accurately notate the folk. However, the influence of what Bartók called the “ancient” Western composers, and in particular the first movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata, is apparent throughout the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Both “Waldstein” and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion are focused in the key of C, are written in sonata form with similar key areas, and most notably, the second themes share a similar melodic contour. The first movement of the “Waldstein” Sonata grew as a creative departure from a finger exercise for young pianists. In Bartók’s Sonata, too, there is something obsessive and harping. Known for his book for young pianists, Mikrokosmos, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is in many ways the last entry in Bartók’s exercise book. Rather than focusing on pianistic techniques, Bartók’s emphasis seems to be on the evolution of the instrument; in some places the piano becomes solely a percussion instrument with banging and hard consonant sounds, where in other places the percussion instruments become melodic, adding color to the pianist’s chords. 

 

Bartók liked to think of himself as an “evolutionary” rather than a “revolutionary.” He thought that he should prove to Schoenberg that one could write tonal music even with equal emphasis on all twelve notes. He thought one should not “reject any influence, be it Slovakian, Rumanian, Arabic or from any other source. The source must only be clean and fresh and healthy!”

 

—Annie Jacobs-Perkins