Béla Bartók and national style

Extract

[...] Béla Bartók and national style At the turn of the century, in the midst of Hungary's so-called “Golden Budapest and the country at large were going through monumental changes. Since the Compromise of 1867 Hungary had been succeeding in shedding its image as a backward, under-developed and unsophisticated borderland and was becoming recognized as a significant international player. Budapest's population was growing astronomically, and the size and influence of the artistic elite in the city grew with it. Nationalism had come to Hungary, but, while proclaiming “Hungarianness” had become a source of pride, defining exactly what that meant would prove to be a problem with no easy solution. [...]

[...] Before these trips Bartók had become a composer of limited renown in Hungary, his music highly impressionistic and obviously influenced by French composer Claude Debussy. But from 1907 on peasant material became central to his compositions. At first he would transcribe folk melodies directly into his work: works such as the Sonatina, Romanian Folkdances, and the Romanian Christmas Carols (all from 1915) greatly exploited his Romanian recordings. But eventually Bartók's works gradually began to assimilate the peasant material so smoothly that it became “impossible to tell where folk melodies end and original compositions begins,” writes Paul Banks, author of The Stage Works of Bartók Bartók had forged his own style, one that was highly palatable to the sophisticated classical music listeners of Western Europe and at the same time drawn heavily, but unselfconsciously, from Hungary's grassroots music tradition. [...]