Bartók Performance Practice through Correspondence

Author(s): Malcolm Gillies

Source: Studia Musicologica, Vol. 53, No. 1/3, SCHOLARLY RESEARCH AND PERFORMANCE
PRACTICE IN BARTÓK STUDIES: THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DIALOGUE INTERNATIONAL
COLLOQUIUM, BUDAPEST AND SZOMBATHELY, 2011 (March 2012), pp. 103-111
Published by: Akadémiai Kiadó
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23488445
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 Bartok Performance Practice
through Correspondence

Malcolm Gillies
London Metropolitan University
166-220 Holloway Road, N7 8DB London, United Kingdom
E-mail: malcolm.gillies@pobox.com

(Received: October 2011; accepted: August 2012)

Abstract: Questions of source, style and interpretation have been central to the work
of the Budapest Bartok Archives over its first half-century. The author looks at various
issues of work genesis, structure, and interpretation, in works by Mahler and Riley,
before considering the "definitive" state of Bartók's Viola Concerto and the Sonata for
Solo Violin, and the current availability of different editions of Bartók's late works. He
then outlines ways in which correspondence, both to and from Bartók, illuminates the
rich and varied path from sketch to score to work première, and on to the earliest
stages of performing interpretation. The paper concludes with seven examples where
performance practice is enlightened by observations in Bartók's correspondence: inno
vative work combination, comparative work quality or difficulty, compositional arche
types and models, processes of work revision, song-text translations, section or move
ment timings, and issues of correction versus revision.

Keywords: Bartok, Viola Concerto, Sonata for Solo Violin, performance practice,
Mahler, Terry Riley

The Budapest Bartok Archives were founded fifty years ago. Despite the incred
ible changes in political, legal, and economic environments over the last half-ce
tury, the Archives have pursued a remarkably consistent line of musical schola
ship. Under the authority since 1961 of just three directors - Denijs Dille, Lászl
Somfai, and László Vikárius - the interest in scholarly editions, and their relatio
to better informed performance practice, has never wavered. How works cam
into being, how notation and style evolved, and, in consequence, how interpreta
tive traditions have arisen, have been questions never far from the Archives' ce
tral purpose.

Studia Musicologica 53/1-3, 2012, pp. 103-112

DOI: 10.1556/SMus.53.2012.1-3.8
1788-6244/$ 20.00 © 2012 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

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104 Malcolm Gillies

My starting point is Oxford Un

Structure series, which I inheri
editor, in 1997. The ambit of th
works" in the Western tradition
a work may be in dispute - th
of parentage - but this end of th
the other end: the moment of birt
of the twentieth century, thatc
of thematic ideas or formal sch
in the mountains, or a throw-away
evidence of a work plan. The end
tion debate, centres on the ques
when the work-fetus stops being
autonomous entity, a work in it
in her article of 1995, "Operatin
to the Interpretation of the
Studies in Musical Genesis and St
in Musical Genesis, Structure, an
the different stages at which th
some works, it ever does. Many
pended" genesis, and nothing is
of the composer's death, as with
with a work that does come to
end? When the composer signs
score? When it first comes to p
authorized, or even unauthorized
say on the work (after which som
legacy determines a final state e
simple effluxion of time, such as
Studies in Musical Genesis and
servative approach to interpretatio
"Appassionato " Sonata2 as an ex
final version of the score, then we
autograph, and finally considere
wood's own personal interests, a
Sketches and Autographs: Some
The purpose of the exercise was
ened about how the final produc

1. Studia Musicologica 36/3-4 (1995), 461

2. Martha Frohlich, Beethoven's "Appassio
3. Acta Musicologica 42/1-2 (1970), 32-4

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 Bartok Performance Practice through Correspondence 105

often slides awkwardly into initial stages of interpretation, both by the composer
and by others. Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation, as a
revised and expanded series plan, recognized that a work may - or may not - con
tinue to evolve after reaching a stable state of score or edition, or first perform
ance, and may even continue to evolve after its first, even fully authorized, edi
tion. James L. Zychowicz's study in the series, Mahler's Fourth Symphony, ended
up with an appendix of fifteen pages detailing Mahler's revisions from eight
years after the work's first edition had been published. In my Editor's Preface I
highlighted that Zychowicz had rejected "the notion that Mahler's final revisions
necessarily lead to an edition of the greatest authority since even they can be
'transitional and untested'. Rather, he [Zychowicz] asserts that each source of
revision has its own particular historical context."4 And, of course, there were no
further revisions, because Mahler soon died. Mahler's intention, even a decade
after writing the work, was very serious: to realize better, as Zychowicz describes,
the "almost pointillistic colour that he intended for the work."5 The composer's
late revisions were not a matter of random changes or occasional improvements,
but a coordinated thinning of the texture, with adjustments to instrumentation,
dynamics and rhythm.6
Of course, I am still talking here about highly notated - you could even say,
ultra-notated - music, where the score, with its notational profusion and aspiration
to exactitude, in one manner of speaking is substantially the work. The Genesis
series has moved on, however, in 2009 reaching into improvised music with
Robert Carl's Riley In C,1 investigating the proto-work of musical minimalism.
Here, the correspondence among and interviews with the work's earliest per
formers are perhaps of greater importance than the one page of musical notation,
which was, is, and always will be, the actual score. That is, such an improvised
work deliberately lacks a definitive form; it is effectively reborn at each new per
formance.8 It is not surprising that some of the recent volumes in the Oxford
Genesis series play on this boundary of birth. One example is Donald Maurice's
Bartók's Viola Concerto,9 which plots a process of genesis started by the com
poser, but continued by half a dozen others - including the composer's son Peter,
his colleague Tibor Serly, and a brace of enthusiastic viola soloists - across legal
time and space, as the world still tries to find the "best" answer to the work's
genetic processes, so cruelly arrested on 26 September 1945, and to bring those
many different answers to performing fruition.

4. James L. Zychowicz, Mahler's Fourth Symphony (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), v.
5. Ibid., 167.
6. Ibid., 167-181.
7. Robert Carl, Terry Riley s In C (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
8. See, further, in Carl, Riley, v-vi.
9. Donald Maurice, Bartok s Fióla Concerto (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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106 Malcolm Gillies

Not as problematic, but still not

Violin from 1944. Or was it? The r
here, especially as the work did no
Bartok was alive. The corresponden
missioner is most important in ad
work's genesis. Although Bartok o
autograph on 14 March 1944, he w
that after hearing Menuhin play th
were many things to be corrected
over it. Now it seems all is in order
smoothly."10 But many months later
"However, somewhere we must try
winter; fortunately it is not so ur
could say, with Bartok's own autho
poser in a definitive state.
This question of the "definitive s
particularly important when work
tailored to the need, even the perfor
the composer is less than totally se
for instance, with Bartok in writin
sublime string quartets. It is, of co
definitive editions. How much w
case, the first editor of the work f
in establishing the "definitive stat
reviewing the 1994 new "Urtext" o
own good."12 In producing this "Ur
autograph score, obliterating the sev
not just in refining Bartók's own a
in preparing the work as a practic
ambit of this evidence for the "de
cal evidence of its early interpreta
who commissioned, premièred or
Somfai in his essay of 1996, "Idea,
Transmission in Bartók's Works fo
In coming to this broadened view
ing on Bartók's letters in the 1980
correspondence - and I mean th

10. Letter, Bartok to Peter Bartok, 31 Octob

Florida: Bartok Records, 2002), 293.
11. Letter, 6 June 1945, in Béla Bartok Lette
12. Bartók editions review, Notes 52/4 (Jun
13. Studia Musicologica 37/1 (1996), 31-49.

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 Bartok Performance Practice through Correspondence 107

Bartok - there was a wealth of information that had a direct bearing on the "best
state" of the score, and often on that harder question, the "definitive state" of the
work. The correspondence was also of considerable importance in addressing
fundamental questions about the interpretation of the work formally, stylistical
ly, and technically. The volume, still unpublished, of Bartok Letters: The Musical
Mind, jointly edited with Adrienne Gombocz,14 was our attempt to bring more of
that correspondence into the purview of scholars and performers, especially
those who, for reasons of language, only had access to under ten per cent of the
correspondence, namely that available in English. That limited access is still the
case, now 130 years after the composer's birth. The Musical Mind's, contents were
deliberately chosen to highlight the record of Bartok as a pragmatic, profession
al musician: a man not given, beyond his early adulthood, to lengthy theorizing,
but rather to dealing swiftly and efficiently with the musical matters of the
moment: concerts to be played, scores to be published, students to be taught, folk
songs to be transcribed. Not being one of the world's prominent socialites or
raconteurs, Bartok wrote his letters, in the main, to fellow professional musi
cians: performers, (ethno)musicologists, critics, concert organizers, publishers,
fellow composers. Much, if not most, of his correspondence - even that with his
wives - focussed on the multiplicity of musical tasks and challenges at hand, and
only occasionally loosened up into domestic or social chit-chat.
The interrelationship of Bartók's work on composition, arrangement, and
folk-song annotation is graphically seen in a letter of 5 September 1918 to his
first wife and elder son.15 He moves, paragraph by paragraph, from discussion of
"harmonizing" (his term) of seven tunes that ended up in either the Fifteen
Hungarian Peasant Songs (1914/1918) or Three Hungarian Folk Tunes
(1914/1918), to a description of his early work on The Miraculous Mandarin (but
waiting still for Sándor Bródy to provide the text of a puppet play entitled Vitéz
László), and then on to the "rather soporific pastime" of arranging his Slovak
folk materials (and hoping for an assignment to the National Museum in Buda
pest to continue that work). What correspondence such as this reminds us is that
the preparation of individual editions of musical works did not occur in some
idealized textual isolation or, as we often represent it, according to the engineer's
flow diagram of production from sketch to score. Rather, the work harbours and
imprints its time and its place: that harmonizing work of folksongs, conceptual
planning for Mandarin, and reworking of Slovak folk materials were all happen
ing at the same time in September 1918. And all of it would be put on hold in the
following month because of another non-musical circumstance: Bartók would be

14. Bartok Letters: The Musical Mind, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Adrienne Gombocz. A copy of the manu
script of this unpublished volume, commissioned by Oxford University Press, is located in the Bartok Archives
in Budapest.
15. Bartok Béla családi levelei, ed. Béla Bartók, Jr. (Budapest: Zenemükiadó, 1981), 281-282, translated
and annotated in Bartók Letters: The Musical Mind.

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 108 Malcolm Gillies

confined to bed with Spanish infl

First World War.16
The correspondence also reminds
notational personality, between hi
tion preparing roles. Even where t
cal transcription are not honoured
tinctions between embellishing not
resented by different sizes of not
interpretative message are still prese
The notation of the variations in the second movement of the Second Violin
Concerto provides an excellent case in point. For Bartok, as he wrote in a letter
of intense personal irritation to Boosey & Hawkes (London), just weeks before
he died, editing is "a great art, and it is in the interest of both the composer and
the publisher to obtain as perfect results as possible in this connection".17
Clearly, the notational distinctions mattered intensely to him.
I return to the issue of definitive editions raised by Carl Leafstedt's review.
The question is elegantly reformulated by László Vikárius in his article of 1996
entitled "Corrections versus Revision: In Search of the Meaning of Alterations to
the 'Text' in Bartók's Compositional Sources."18 Vikárius asks the vital question:
when are we correcting a mistake in the past or when are we reverting to an ear
lier stage in the compositional process? That is, when is it a mistake in penman
ship or notation (a true correction), or when are we grappling with the evolution
of the idea (a genuine revision)? More difficult, although not to be avoided, is the
instance where the inescapable conclusion is that Bartók would have made that
revision (for instance, because he had made it in all previous similar cases, or
without the editorial revision a fundamental unit of identity within a section
might be destroyed). The classic example is the evolution of the fourth movement
of the Fourth String Quartet, now well recognized, despite its beautiful symmetry
with the second movement, as a last-minute outgrowth from Bartók's quandary
over how to connect the third and finale movements, a moment the correspon
dence helps to illuminate so well. Bartók's letter to Imre Waldbauer of 4 November
1928 makes clear that, despite the dates of composition, confidently written in
the autograph at the end of the last movement, "July-September 1928," he had
not even started his eventual fourth movement by 4 November 1928.19 He was still
expecting to add in a few joining bars, indeed even specified that the copyist
should leave just "a few (say 3) lines blank in each instrumental part."

16. See Béla Bartok, Jr., "Béla Bartók's Diseases," Studia Musicologica 23/1-4 Centenario Belae Bartók
Sacrum (1981), 427-441, here 433.
17. Letter, Bartók to Erwin Stein, 4 August 1945, Budapest Bartók Archives, B 186/20.
18. Studia Musicologica 37/1 (1996), 69-91.
19. Bartók Béla levelei, ed. János Demény (Budapest: Zenemükiadó, 1976), 356, translated and annotated
in Bartók Letters: The Musical Mind.

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 Bartok Performance Practice through Correspondence 109

This issue of what is definitive, correct, suitably revised, or just passably accu
rate, came to haunt me in 2007 when supervising the worklists for my promotion
al monograph for Boosey & Hawkes entitled Bartok Connections: A Guide for
Performers and Programmers,20 Were only the variously called "revised," "Urtext,"
"new" or "new definitive" editions coming from the Bartok Estate to be included?
And especially when these editions sometimes raised as many questions as they
"solved," through their interpretation of the "living performance tradition," the edi
torial track, the distinctions between corrections and revisions, or through their
maintenance of errors, especially when originally perpetrated by Bartok himself.
The problem of over-literalism (our musicological equivalent of "black-letter law"),
of winding back the creative clock to an earlier stage than one fully definitive, was
worrying.21 Fortunately, Boosey & Hawkes did see the sense, where earlier editions
were still available, of providing various versions. So, you do find reference both
to the so-called "original version" of the Sonata for Solo Violin, edited by Yehudi
Menuhin, and the "revised 'Urtext'" edition, edited by Peter Bartok. The publisher
went one stage further with the Viola Concerto, to recognize the full score, edited
by Tibor Serly, the full score edited by Peter Bartók and Nelson Dellamaggiore,
and, most helpfully for all aspiring edition makers, the full score in facsimile edi
tion, with commentary by László Somfai and fair transcription by Nelson Della
maggiore.22 The same was not true, however, for Third Piano Concerto, where only
the Peter Bartók edition of the full score was able to be listed.
While neat and consistently compiled lists of revisions sometimes exist - such
as Zychowicz's listings for Mahler's Fourth Symphony - it was often the corre
spondence between the key actors in the genetic drama - composer, copyist, pub
lisher, performers - that shows the rich and varied path from sketch to score to
première, and on to a work's earliest stages of interpretation; that is, how the
"definitive state" of the work was negotiated, and rehearsed, and became fixed.
I conclude with some suggestions of how the correspondence can illuminate
Bartók's scores more broadly, and even provide answers to precise questions about
how his music might be performed. Bartók was notoriously tight-lipped about the
alchemical aspects of the "creative act" itself. He would often not say much about
the work at all until most of it was at least drafted, as with his Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta during the summer of 1936,23 or his Concerto for Orchestra
during August-September of 1943.24 Once the work was effectively laid down,

20. Malcolm Gillies, Bartok Connections: A Guide for Performers and Programmers (London: Boosey &
Hawkes, 2007), 8-19.
21. Bartok's metronome markings are an instructive case. While Bartok realized a good quarter of a cen
tury before he died that he had a "faulty metronome," corrections only occurred to the scores of his earlier
works when there was need to reprint them, in some cases as late as the 1970s.
22. Gillies, Bartok Connections, 19.
23. Letter, Bartok to Max Adam, 31 August 1936, Paul Sacher Foundation (Basle), translated and annotat
ed in Bartok Letters: The Musical Mind.
24. Letter, Bartok to Peter Bartok, 26 September 1943, in Peter Bartok, My Father, 276—278, here 278.

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 110 Malcolm Gillies

however, he became more commu

times passionate, or occasionally e
of the work. Seven examples are g
the performance or programming
1. An innovative work combinati
November 1943, to a request for a
course, exist as far as Spivakovsky
but did suggest a novel combinati
the Portrait [the First Portrait], a
(1928), dedicated to Székely]."25 So,
Two Portraits Op. 5 and the First V
2. A statement of comparative qua
for Duke Bluebeard '$ Castle over T
Philip Heseltine, written between 2
blamed Béla Balázs's "padding" in th
a statement of comparative diffic
Orchestra about which he wrote to h
tain reasons,"27 probably referring
3. Archetype and model: I think
mento's genesis about it being, in
with concertino."28 Or the eviden
tional models by Bartók's side wer
sitions from Universal Edition's sta
mentioning Schoenberg, Schreker
the 1940s were more standard clas
American years all of Beethoven,
4. Hearing before publishing: Th
ment of hearing a major work befo
any "mistakes." Of course, this wa
as with most simpler folksong sett
ever, was intense when, four-and-
Violin Concerto, in the hands of Zo
Concerto live in concert (indeed, n
repeat concerts, with Spivakovsk
Creel that December is instructive:

25. Budapest Bartok Archives, B 196/5, 2183, t

26. Held in Szathmáry Family Archives, Chi
27. Letter, 26 September 1943, in Peter Bartok
28. Letter, Bartok to Paul Sacher, 1 June 19
in Bartok Letters: The Musical Mind.
29. 23 March 1939, in Amsterdam, with Willem Mengelberg conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Bartok was not able to be present, but he had worked with Székely on the work in Paris earlier in the month.
30. During 14-17 October 1943, at the Carnegie Hall, with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra con
ducted by Artur Rodzinski.

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 Bartok Performance Practice through Correspondence 111

So this was a happy event."31 Equally illuminating is Spivakovsky's impression

at around this time: "you, like Mozart, consider the moulding of the melody the
primary and decisive factor of a composition."32
5. The translation of song texts: This issue arises constantly in Bartok's letters
during the 1926 to 1939 period.33 It helps to illustrate the acute tension to Bartók's
ear and brain between distinctive linguistic rhythms and idiomatic translations,
and so to address the mysterious inconsistencies, anomalies and lacunae in the
song translations.
6. Bartók's very precise timings: These are a distinctive by-product, I suggest,
of his ethnomusicological precision, but need the kind of explanation he provided
in a letter of 29 May 1939 to Ralph Hawkes: "these timings are the results of a
given authentic performance; they don't mean that every performance should have
exactly the same duration.... These, as well as the MM indications, are intended
only to serve as directing hints to the performers."34 Similar statements, although
not necessarily with this clarity, appear in some of his scores.
7. Correction versus revision: A final example from Bartók's own mouth
of exactly this distinction is found in a letter draft to Boosey & Hawkes of 14
June 1945. After a long list of corrections to the draft score of the Concerto for
Orchestra, Bartók recognizes a needed revision to the instrumental balance: rein
forcing the trumpets by changes to the three trombone parts. He acknowledges
very fairly: "Of course, this is quite an extensive change and I take over the respon
sibilities for the expenses involved."35
These are just scattered reminders of how the details found in correspondence
can aid our understanding of the way in which great musical works came into being:
in terms of their concept, style, notation, form, instrumental or vocal detail, and
interpretation. They reinforce the role of correspondence in encouraging a creative,
appropriate, and informed performance practice. These examples - and hundreds of
other detailed examples of articulatory or technical detail - evidence the ultimate
impress of composer and performer personality upon the final performed artefact.
They demonstrate the necessity of a constant dialogue between scholarly research
and performance practice. Much has been achieved in the last fifty years in the
case of Bartók, with the Budapest Bartók Archives and its staff at the forefront of
that achievement. May the next fifty years take the fruits of that dialogue to a
wider public, with fewer constraints than have been the case in the last fifty years.

31. In BB-CREEL, Peter Bartok Collection (Homosassa, Florida), transcribed and annotated in Bartok
Letters: The Musical Mind.
32. Letter, Spivakovsky to Bartok, 6 December 1943, in Documenta Bartókiana vol. 3, ed. Denijs Dille
(Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1968), 259.
33. See, for instance, the exchange of letters between Bartók and Rudolf Stephan Hoffmann, found in Tibor
Tallián, "Der Briefwechsel Bartók's mit R. St. Hoffmann," Studia Musicologica 18/1—4 (1976), 339-365.
34. BB-B&H I, in Peter Bartok Collection (Homosassa, Florida), transcribed and annotated in Bartok
Letters: The Musical Mind.
35. BB-B&H I, ibid.

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