PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Béla Bartók Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (now part of Romania). Died September 26, 1945, .

Two Pictures, Op. 10

Bartók completed the Two Pictures in August 1910. The first performance was given on February 25, 1913, in . The score calls for three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bells, cymbals, bass drum, celesta, two harps, and strings. Performance time is approximately eighteen minutes.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performance of Bartók’s Two Pictures was given at Orchestra Hall on December 13, 1962, with Fritz Reiner conducting.

Béla Bartók discovered the music of in 1907, thanks to Zoltán Kodály, the composer with whom he would later make history exploring the music of their own . Bartók took the scores Kodály brought back from and read through them with growing fascination, finding not only music of exotic color and texture, but many similarities to Hungarian peasant music as well.

Bartók himself went to Paris in 1909; , the great Italian pianist and often neglected composer, gave him a letter of introduction to Vincent d’Indy, describing Bartók as “the Hungarian composer of various interesting and original compositions, especially for the .” Neither Bartók nor d’Indy was of any concern to the other, however. According to Virgil Thomson, Bartók declined to meet Saint-Saëns, but asked about Debussy. “But he is a horrid man,” replied Isidor Philipp, who was arranging Bartók’s itinerary. “He hates everybody and will certainly be rude to you. Do you want to be insulted by Debussy?” “Yes,” was Bartók’s reply.

The two composers didn’t meet, but the impact of Debussy’s music couldn’t have been greater. “It was your Debussy,” Bartók told his French biographer Serge Moreux thirty years later,

whose music had just begun to reach us, who showed us the path we must follow. . . . Debussy’s great service to music was to reawaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its possibilities.

In Full Flower, the first of the Two Pictures Bartók composed in 1910, the year after his trip to Paris, is perhaps the most obvious product of his obsession with Debussy’s language. In addition to his use of the whole-tone scale, the most outward sign of Debussy’s influence, Bartók’s way with gesture and color shows how he had begun to absorb, rather than borrow, the essence of his French colleague’s music. The extraordinarily rich use of the orchestra not only recalls the lush French scores Bartók admired, but also anticipates the sound world of Bartók’s own opera, Bluebeard's Castle, completed the following year. (It also reminds us that Bartók’s discovery of Strauss’s super-charged Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902 was one of the decisive moments in his musical education.)

Several of Bartók’s most characteristic scores are designed as sharply contrasting pairs of movements, a slow-fast pattern he inherited from Liszt. That’s particularly true here, where the gentle perfume of In Full Flower gives way to the strong rhythms of the Village Dance—music of air and light followed by music of the earth. Although the melody and some of the harmonic language of the first picture are kept alive in the second, the Village Dance, with its sharply defined rhythmic profile and obvious affection for folk music, is unmistakably stamped with Bartók’s own name.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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