Robert Rauschenberg: Phaidon Focus

Description

Hungarian composer B谷la Bart車k declared his
, composed in 1930 and premi豕red in London in 1934, his “credo,” the composition of which was inseparable from the history of his involvement with folklore. Not only was Bart車k one of the twentieth century’s most important composers, he was also one of the founders of comparative musicology, the precursor to the field of ethnomusicology. His collection and analytical studies of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak folk musics shaped his distinctive musical style, as well as complex scholarly publications. In this volume of the Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation series, L芍szl車 Vik芍rius, a leading authority on Bart車k, uncovers the many layers of ethnographic, historical, and personal meaning embedded in the
.
The work’s libretto was based on a Romanian folk ballad from his collection, and the mystical story of a hunter’s nine sons who turn into stags–never to return home–was close to the composer’s heart. Vik芍rius analyzes the origins of the piece, rooted in one of Bart車k’s most intensive periods of collecting activities in Transylvania just before the outbreak of World War I. The multi-ethnic folkloric landscape of “historic” Hungary (part of Austro-Hungary at the time) is embodied by the source materials for
that survive in full to be analyzed, from the sketches to the various translations of the libretto. As Vik芍rius demonstrates, the choice of a Romanian winter solstice ceremonial text as libretto for
combines Bart車k’s folklorism with a markedly neoclassical allusion to J. S. Bach’s
and is necessarily underpinned by the severe criticism Bart車k faced because of his interest in and work on Romanian folklore. Throughout the book, Vik芍rius reveals numerous hidden details that prove crucial to the concept of the work and explores how its ideologically charged text underlines the aesthetic concept behind the musical decisions.