Romanian Folk Dances
Béla Bartók
About the Composer
Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, and pianist, Béla Bartók was born on March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentmiklòs, Hungary (now present day Romania). Bartók’s musical output and his life-long devotion to folk music cemented him as a founding figure of twentieth-century Hungarian musical culture, and today he is regarded, along with his compatriot Franz Liszt, as Hungary’s greatest composer. While Bartók is recognized mainly as a composer, during his lifetime he earned his living mainly from teaching and playing the piano and was a relentless collector of folk music. It was his dedication to Central European folk music and his innovative integration of its texture, harmonies, structures, and colors into his personal style that cemented his musical legacy and paved the way for generations to come.
Bartók showed an affinity for music early on in life. His parents, both amateur musicians, encouraged his musical development, and his mother was his first formal piano teacher. Despite a childhood wrought with frequent moves and sickness, Bartók’s musical talents rapidly developed, which resulted in the young pianist and composer auditioning, and gaining acceptance to both the Vienna Conservatory and the Budapest Academy of Music at the age of seventeen. Bartók ultimately chose to pursue his advanced studies in Budapest and from 1899-1903 studied with the same professors who had taught Ernő Dohnányi.
In 1905 Bartók worked with Zoltán Kodály to pursue his interest in Hungarian folk music. The pair spent the majority of their time collecting, cataloging, and arranging Hungarian, Sloviakian, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Ruthenian folk songs. They traveled around with an Edison cylinder machine to record samples of thousands of folk songs and Bartók, in particular, spent countless hours analyzing their scales, harmonies, and rhythms. It was during this period that Bartók began to integrate various characteristics of the found folk songs into his compositional foundation, which is immediately evident when examining his output of music including his works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, and solo piano. While the events of World War I prevented him from traveling to collect his samples, he resumed his work with folk melodies after the war had ended.
The outbreak of World War II severely disrupted his life in Europe. Bartók strongly opposed Hungary’s sympathy with Germany and the Nazi Party, and after his anti-fascist views caused him a great deal of trouble in Hungary, he was reluctantly forced to immigrate to the United States in 1940. Bartók’s health was poor for most of his time in the United States, leading to little compositional output. However, in 1944 his close friend Serge Koussevitzky, then Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned what would become one of Bartók’s most famous works, his Concerto for Orchestra. Not only was the premiere a huge success, but it also rejuvenated a creative period that produced some of Bartók’s most memorable works, including the Sonata for Solo Violin, written for Yehudi Menuhin, and the Concerto for Viola, before his death in 1945.
About the Music
Bartók wrote his Romanian Folk Dances in 1915 for solo piano, during the interwar period. Two years later (1917), he transcribed the six brief movements for small orchestra. The work comprises six short dances, “Stick Dance,” “Sash Dance,” “In One Spot,” “Horn Dance,” “Romanian Polka,” and “Fast Dance,” and the melodies find their origins in the Transylvanian region of Romania. It is one of the purest examples in Bartók’s musical output of his integration of found folk materials into his compositional style and beautifully captures the vivacious rhythms and intricate musical building blocks of the Central European folk traditions.
Note by Christina Dioguardi