‘All my life, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation.’ Ask any musician for a one-sentence summary of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and they will probably tell you that he is Hungary’s national composer — a musical modernist who passionately championed his nation’s folk music tradition. David Cooper’s new biography seeks both to enrich and complicate that statement, questioning the definition of musical ‘nationalism’ in a country of such pronounced ethnic heterogeneity, at a time when borders were being drawn and redrawn, peoples created and destroyed, across Europe.
The portrait that emerges is of no mindless patriot, celebrating his nation in primary-coloured musical rhetoric, but of a man whose instincts and allegiances were as plural as his heritage: a true Hungarian composer, certainly — but not as we might hitherto have understood.
Born in Nagyszentmiklós (Great St Nicholas), a provincial town on Hungary’s south eastern border (and what would later become the borders of Yugoslavia, Romania and Hungary after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon), Bartók grew up among Magyars, Romanians, Serbians and Germans in a polyglot culture united only by a collective desire to escape Austrian rule.
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