PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

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

Four Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 12

Bartók composed these four pieces in 1912, but he didn’t orchestrate them until 1921. The first performance was given on January 9, 1922, in Budapest. The score calls for four flutes and piccolo, three oboes and english horn, three clarinets, two E-flat clarinets and two bass clarinets, four bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, four trombones and tuba, two harps, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tam-tam, triangle, piano, celesta, and strings. Performance time is approximately twenty-four minutes.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performance of Bartók’s Four Pieces for Orchestra was given at the Ravinia Festival on July 13, 1991, with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting. The Orchestra has performed this work on subscription concerts at Orchestra Hall only once, on December 10, 11, 12, and 15, 1992, with Pierre Boulez conducting.

Béla Bartók wrote relatively little for symphony orchestra. He was never a prolific composer, not even in his youth, before he was beaten down by life’s setbacks and the repeated sting of professional failure. An early symphonic poem, Kossuth, the evidence of his discovery of Richard Strauss, is little known. There are two suites—for large and small orchestra—and two brief orchestral sets of pictures and portraits, all composed during the first decade of the twentieth century, and they too are rarely performed. Later there are, of course, the brilliant ballet scores—The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin, theater works that have found success in the concert hall—and the concertos, three for piano, two for violin, and one for viola (unfinished at Bartók’s death).

But after 1912, when he began these Four Pieces, Bartók didn’t compose purely orchestral music unless he was assured of a performance. (“I have resigned myself to write for my writing-desk only,” he wrote to a colleague in 1913.) And those occasions were very few, even in the remaining thirty-three years of his life—just the Dance Suite, written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest; the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, commissioned by Paul Sacher; and the Concerto for Orchestra, for Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony. They are all landmarks—highlights in a career that was always marked by the significance, not the frequency of output.

In 1912, Bartók was still entranced by his discovery of Debussy’s music; that’s apparent on nearly every page of this score. Bartók first learned about Debussy from his friend and collaborator Zoltán Kodály, who spent two months in Paris and came home with a suitcase full of scores, including La mer and the first book of Images for piano. For Bartók, the discovery of Debussy, like that of his native Hungarian folk music, meant that there were other scales and harmonies, other ways of writing music that didn’t go by the rules. It was a great liberation. Many years later, Bartók told his French biographer, Serge Moreux:

. . . it was your Debussy, 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 that, he was just as important as Beethoven, who revealed to us the meaning of progressive form, and Bach, who showed us the transcendent significance of counterpoint. Now, what I am always asking myself is this: Is it possible to make a synthesis of three great masters, a living synthesis valid for our own time?

In 1912, Bartók was too excited by this unexpected freedom and the promise of a new direction to worry over a greater synthesis. He was so intoxicated, in fact, that he temporarily ignored that other potent new force in his development, the exploration of his native Hungarian folk music. Ultimately that was a synthesis that would set Bartók’s music apart: merging the great Western classical tradition, from Bach and Beethoven through Debussy, with the essence of peasant song.

The Four Pieces of 1912 are Bartók’s greatest essay in what has come to be known as impressionism, a term too far removed from its source in French painting of an earlier day to carry real significance here. This is simply Bartók absorbing—rather than imitating—Debussy, and he reveals a mastery of orchestral color that’s different from, but no less entrancing than Debussy’s. (Bartók didn’t actually orchestrate these pieces until 1921, and in those nine years he gained an even greater assurance in writing for the orchestra.) The Preludio overflows with imaginative sonic effects; later, with restraint and subtlety, this same instinct will lead Bartók to his famous night music. The Scherzo is violent and tough, like the street music in The Miraculous Mandarin. The waltzlike Intermezzo is, in comparison, soft-spoken—only once do the dynamics rise above a discreet mezzo-forte—and radiant, with the strings subdivided into rich, shimmering chords. The final funeral march is short but epic in nature. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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