Bartók Viola Concerto, Sz. 120 (ed. Serly)
Bela Bartók was born at Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary, now Sînnicolaue Mare, Romania, on 25 March 1881 and died in New York City on 26 September 1945. The Viola Concerto was commissioned by William Primrose (1904-1982) before or in early December 1944. Bartók began sketching the work sometime between April and early August 1945 in New York City. The work remained incomplete at the time of Bartók’s death, along with the Piano Concerto No. 3. Tibor Serly (1901-1978), a composer and violist close to Bartók, was charged by the Bartók family with the responsibility of completing these two works utilizing the sketches left behind by Bartók. Serly’s reconstruction of the Viola Concerto was completed in 1949, and the work was premiered by William Primrose and the Minnesota Orchestra under Antal Dorati on 2 December 1949. This concerto, in its completed form prepared by Serly, is quite possibly the most performed and recorded viola concerto in history, according to Donald Maurice in his book Bartók’s Viola Concerto. The score calls for solo viola, piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets in Bb, two bassoons, three horns in F, three trumpets in Bb, two trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. This evening’s performance utilizes a piano reduction prepared by Tibor Serly and Erwin Stein, former chief editor of Boosey & Hawkes.
Works left incomplete by a great composer generate an air of fascination in both the musicological community as well as among the general concert-going public. Mozart’s Requiem mass K. 626, was left unfinished at his death; its completion by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr is still hotly debated. New “completions” of the Requiem have been attempted by such noted musicologists as Robert Levin, and legend of the events surrounding the piece’s composition have infiltrated popular culture in the form of the movie Amadeus. While there are no such movies in the making having to do with Bartók’s Viola Concerto, the circumstances surrounding its composition and posthumous completion, as well as new attempts at “completions”, are no less fascinating.
A few weeks before his death on 8 September 1945, Bartók wrote to Primrose that a draft of the commissioned concerto was complete:
Dear Mr Primrose
I am very glad to tell you that your viola concerto is ready in draft, so that only the score has to be written which means a purely mechanical work, so to speak. If nothing happens I can be through in 5 or 6 weeks, i.e. I can send you a copy of the orchestra score in the second half of Oct., and a few weeks afterwards a copy (or if you wish more copies) of the piano score.
I had immense externe [sic] difficulties in writing it. I could not do any somposing work in this unfortunate and inadequate apartment of mine in New York. In addition a sequence of various illnesses visited us: not only I was ill but also Mrs. Bartók!… But with the main work – the rather detailed draft – I am through; and the remaining work is a rather mechanical on, I repeat it.
Many interesting problems arose in composing this work. The orchestration will be rather transparent, more transparent than in a violin concerto. Also the somber, more masculine character of your instrument exerted some influence on the general character of the work. The highest note I use is [A’’] but I exploit rather frequently the lower register.
It is conceived in a rather virtuoso style. Most probably some passages will prove to be uncomfortable or unplayable. These we will discuss later, according to your observations…
Primrose, in his autobiography, recalls this letter that Bartók wrote him regarding the concerto, and expresses his regret in not being able to meet with Bartók before his untimely death.
…I found a letter from Bartók awaiting me, in which he said that the concerto was finished in draft and “all” that remained to be done was the orchestration, which was routine work… He wanted to see me, however to discuss the concerto for reasons that he outlined. It was my intention, therefore, to stop on my way north to see Bartók in New York City. But as it was raining heavily on that day and parking was an insoluble problem, I decided to proceed to my destination and see him on my return.
It was a deplorable decision, one which we all experience when we put off until tomorrow… On a beautiful day about two weeks later, on my way back from Maine, I stopped outside New York for lunch, picked up the New York Times, and read that Bartók had died the preceding day.
Tibor Serly first met Bartók in 1923 while studying composition with Zoltan Kodály. During Serly’s tenure as a violist in the Cincinnati Orchestra under Fritz Reiner, Bartók spent about two weeks in Cincinnati in 1927. Since Bartók could not speak English very well at the time and had very few acquaintances in the city, Serly and Bartók spent much time together. This solidified the friendship between the two and whenever Serly returned to Hungary he would visit Bartók. When Bartók and his wife Ditta came to the United States in 1940 as refugees, Serly was “at the boat when he arrived.”
In a tribute to Bartók written by Serly which was published in the New York Times on December 11, 1949, Serly recalls the days before Bartók’s death and his first encounter with the sketches of the Viola Concerto.
On the evening of Sept. 21, 1945, when I last talked with Béla Bartók, he was lying in bed, quite ill. Nevertheless, on and around his bed were sheets of score and sketch manuscript papers. He was working feverishly to complete the scoring of his Third Piano Concerto:
While discussing the concerto with him, my attention was drawn to the night table beside his bed where I noticed, underneath several half-empty medicine bottles, some additional pages of sketches, seemingly not related to the piano concerto. There was a reason for my curiosity, for it was known to several of Bartók’s friends that earlier in the year he had accepted a commission to write a concerto for viola and orchestra for William Primrose…
Pointing to these manuscript sheets, I inquired about the viola concerto. Bartók nodded wearily toward the night table, saying: “Yes, that is the viola concerto.” To my question as to whether it was completed, his reply was, “Yes and no.” He explained that while in sketches the work was by and large finished, the details and scoring had not yet been worked out. The following day he was taken to the hospital, where he died Sept. 26.
Serly’s introductory remarks to the published score of the Viola Concerto outline some of the difficulties he faced in attempting to reconstruct the work from the sketches that Bartók left behind.
What for Bartók would have been “a purely mechanical work” involved a lengthy task that required infinite patience and painstaking labour. For the difficulties that had to be overcome were threefold.
First, there was the problem of deciphering the manuscript itself. Bartók wrote his sketches on odd, loose sheets of music paper that happened to be on hand at the moment, some of which had parts of other sketches on them. Bits of material that came to his mind were jotted down without regard for their sequence. The pages were not numbered nor the seperation of movements indicated. The greatest difficulty encountered was deciphering his correction of notes, for Bartók, instead of erasing, grafted his improvements on to the original notes.
The next problem involved the matter of completing harmonies and other adornments which he has reduced to a form of shorthand. For as Bartók observed in his letter: “Most probably some passages will prove uncomfortable or unplayable.”
Finally, except for Bartók’s statement that “the orchestration will be rather transparent”, there were virtually no indications of the instrumentation. Strangely, this part presented the least difficulty, for the leading voices and contrapuntal lines upon which the background is composed were clearly indicated in the manuscript.
The concerto consists of three movements. As Bartók had not delineated movements in his sketches, where the movements start and stop is subject to debate. The first movement Moderato is the longest of the three and is cast in a classic sonata form. At the end of the first movement is a Lento (parlando) section which serves as a transition between the first movement proper and the second movement Adagio religioso. It should be noted that of all the movements the second movement was the most complete in Bartók’s sketches. At the end of the second movement a reference to the opening theme of the first movement is made followed by a short cadenza-like passage. This is followed by an Allegrettosection which serves as a transition to the third movement Allegro vivace. This movement is in a ternary form, with two fast A sections featuring a Romanian dance rhythm framing a slower B section (A-B-A).
One of the main characteristics of Bartók’s music is his use of folk-music idioms through either direct quotation or invention of themes with a folk character. Peter Bartók, the composer’s son, speculates in his article “The Principle Theme of Bartók’s Viola Concerto” that his father may have used Scottish folk-elements in the concerto in homage to William Primrose. The presence of these elements can be found particularly in the B section of the third movement where a drone which could be interpreted as those of a bagpipe accompanies a theme which bears a resemblance to the Scottish folk tune “Gin a Body Meet a Body, Colmin’ thro’ the Rye”. Peter Bartók states in the article that he does not think that the tune is quoted by his father; rather, he uses it as an example of how Scottich elements are present in the concerto. Donald Maurice also finds Scottish elements near the end of the first movement in the form of a Celtic dotted rhythm.
As mentioned earlier, new “completions” are often made of works left incomplete at the time of a composer’s death due to developments in scholarly research, and the Bartók Viola Concerto is no exception to this trend. To date there are four other versions of the concerto besides Serly’s, prepared by Atar Arad, Csaba Erdélyi, Peter Bartók/Nelson Delmaggiore/Paul Neubauer and Donald Maurice. Due to copyright and licensing issues only the Tibor Serly and Peter Bartók versions are available in the United States.
-Program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña