Béla Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3

We have devoted a season of our ‘Understandable Music’ series to the memory of great Hungarian musicians. This performance we dedicate to Annie Fischer,1 who would have turned a hundred in the year of this concert. Annie Fischer was one of the most significant, world-renowned pianists of the 1950s and 1960s. Her performance of Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 left a lasting impression on me, and her Mozart is unforgettable too. Yet perhaps it was in Bartók’s piano concerto that she was truly unbeatable. In the past, one often read reviews of Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 calling it, in many respects, a feminine work. Of course, there is no such thing as feminine or masculine composition, but it is a fact that this is a lighter piece, since he wrote it for his wife, Ditta Pásztory,2 and he never lets us forget it for a moment. Bartók often worked to commission.

Throughout his life the practice of composing for a particular person or occasion was always present, yet it was never apparent in the works themselves. If we compare this work with the Piano Concerto No. 2, we can see that the latter is noticeably more demanding for both the pianist and the orchestra; it is hard to play really well. In the third concerto, by contrast, we meet a sense of freedom and a simpler phrasing. This piece is Bartók’s swan song.3 Swan songs always raise fascinating questions. We love to explore them; a good example is Bach’s The Art of Fugue, which raises the question of whether Bach truly ‘died’ on that particular four-part fugue, or simply could not finish it, or whether the relevant pages of the manuscript were lost. In Mozart’s case, we know why he did not finish the Requiem.

So the last completed or nearly completed works always raise the great ¹ Annie Fischer (1914–1995), three-time Kossuth Prize-winning pianist, a legendary and outstanding figure of Hungarian and international performance. She played with the greatest conductors in the world. ‘Every concert by Annie Fischer is extraordinary. For when she plays, the work itself comes to life, and this is an unprecedented revelation. The personality of this great artist is indefinable, precisely because she is infinitely sensitive and changeable… We can discover ever new facets in her, and it is then that it becomes clear that this personality is almost infinite.’ (András Pernye) ² Edith (Ditta) Pásztory (1903–1982), Béla Bartók’s second wife, was a pianist.

After Bartók’s death she played almost exclusively her husband’s works; her playing is preserved in the Hungaroton complete Bartók edition and in numerous recordings made with Béla Bartók. ³ The piano concerto was composed in 1945 and premiered on 8 February 1946, performed by György Sándor with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy. The orchestration of the final 17 bars was completed by Tibor Serly (1901–1978, Hungarian-American composer). question of what might have happened had the composer lived longer, and whether he himself would have meant the work to be a swan song. To what extent is it true that artists—creative artists above all—are helped by their incredible sensitivity to sense the limits of life’s fullness, and somehow to leave this behind and express it in their works? We are strongly inclined to believe that Bartók’s Piano Concerto No.

3 is just such a legacy. He perhaps knew he would never again write or finish a work, and so in this piano concerto, with the wisdom and clarity of a man taking his leave, he set down—as if drawing up his last will—everything for which he had fought all his life, and he expressed it all simply, clearly and tangibly. To show just how true this is, and what actually lies behind it, we’d like to give a few examples. Let us examine how the most important building blocks of Bartók’s output are present in the work—indeed, whether they are present at all. I’m thinking here of the presence of folklore, the intonations, the bridge form, and classical musical structure. What will become of what is perhaps the most important feature of Bartók’s output? The very first thing we always say is that Bartók’s output is rooted in folk music.

In the marvellous realisation that true Hungarian folk music—ancient Hungarian folk music—has stayed with us even after a thousand years, since urbanisation came about more slowly in Hungary. What becomes of folk music in this work? At first glance it seems to vanish almost entirely, yet there are still folk-music gestures within it. In fact it is not really folk music we are talking about here, but rather the way folk-musical thinking seeps into Bartók’s art—in the shaping of his works, his melody-making and much else; it is just that here, in this piece, it is far less obvious. Or is it? After all, we can already sense something distinctly Hungarian in the pianist’s opening melody. For the sharp, verbunkos-like rhythm is characteristically Hungarian. Yes, indeed—but this is not Hungarian folk music with its centuries-old tradition; it is the rhythm of urbanised folk music!

It is the same rhythm in which the Szózat (Hungary’s second anthem) was born, in which Liszt wrote his rhapsodies, and the same one nineteenth-century Hungarians believed in. This was the music played at the time by Roma bands, whom we may regard as the custodians of folk music. The verbunkos became a central part of the output of great Hungarian and international composers. Yet even so, this is not the Hungarian music that stands for our thousand-year-old culture, the music by which the world came to know us! Let’s play the beginning of the piece!