Music: Bart

Worldwide festivals celebrate a century after his birth

Béla BartÓk was an orphan of the 20th century. NagyszentmiklÓs, the Hungarian town in which he was born a century ago, was ceded to Rumania in 1920. Nagyszöllös, where he wrote his first compositions at the age of nine, is now part of the Soviet Union. Pozsony, where he spent his teen-age years, has become Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. He died of leukemia in New York City in 1945, a refugee from the war, living at the end in a cramped apartment on West 57th Street.

Today, the music of this small, frail man with the burning eyes of a visionary has found a home in the world's concert halls. If it has proved less popular than Igor Stravinsky's and less influential than Arnold Schoenberg's, it is no less important. BartÓk wrote music of irresistible power and drive, music that in its uncompromising frankness and depth of expression discomfited audiences used to the prettifications of romanticism. Like other great musical figures — Beethoven and Wagner come immediately to mind — BartÓk was a destroyer as well as a creator. Emerging from the 19th century Western European tradition, he changed it irrevocably.

Unlike Schoenberg, whose twelve-tone system dominated the postwar period, BartÓk founded no school and left behind only a handful of disciples. But his effect on the music of this century has been significant. It was BartÓk, for example, who brought the percussion section to prominence in works such as the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, liberating drums, cymbals and gongs from their traditional role as accompanists and inspiring his successors to use percussion instruments in bolder and more imaginative ways. In his six String Quartets, generally acknowledged as the most important works in the genre since Beethoven's, the dense, intricate writing challenged the minds, ears and fingers of string players and set a new standard of formal complexity that opened the way for such works as the quartets of Elliott Carter. The Mikrokosmos, 153 short piano studies of increasing difficulty, is an indispensable introduction to 20th century compositional and pianistic techniques.

In honor of his 100th birthday, which fell last week, New York has become a yearlong BartÓk festival, with many major works—including his only opera, the troubling, allegorical Bluebeard's Castle, in a concert version—being done several times over. The Boston Symphony performed the Concerto for Orchestra, the piece it premiered in 1944. The biggest American celebration, though, was in Detroit, where 52 guest artists recently joined Conductor Antal Dorati, 74, a BartÓk pupil, for a twelve-day marathon.

Things are no less active in Europe. The Budapest Spring Festival in March was primarily devoted to BartÓk. Many of the masterpieces will be heard in Vienna this summer, while West Germany this year is staging what is billed as the largest festival ever devoted to a modern composer—146 concerts in such cities as Duisburg, Cologne and Essen. In Italy, thanks to the efforts of a national committee, BartÓk will resound from Sicily to the Swiss border.