‘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. A brief flirtation with revolutionary nationalism, embodied in the composer’s early symphonic poem Kossuth, might have persisted for a lifetime, had Bartók not encountered the composer Zoltán Kodály (‘the best Hungarian musician,’ Bartók wrote, ‘with unmatched knowledge of Hungarian peasant music’). It was Kodály who revealed to Bartók the ‘cliché elevated to orthodoxy’ of traditional Hungarian verbunkos gypsy music, exposing it as a mass-produced musical fiction, an urban phenomenon destroying and essentialising rural truths and traditions even as it claimed to celebrate them.
This began a lifetime’s study of folk music. Bartók all but invented the discipline of ethnomusicology as he gathered and notated melodies on collecting expeditions not just to Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, but also Serbia, Croatia, Turkey and even North Africa — an astonishing feat during decades of military and political conflict, and one whose human encounters, successes and frustrations make for some of the most colourful episodes in Cooper’s study.
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