Béla Bartók

This work holds his love for Stefi Geyer exactly as it was. After she ended the relationship, the score lay asleep in her drawer for half a century.

• The first movement opens with the solo violin alone, climbing note by note like a staircase (ascending) through D–F♯–A–C♯. This is the very figure Bartók called Geyer's 'motif' in his letters.
• Bartók described the first movement as the 'idealized Stefi' and the second as the 'cheerful Stefi.' Listen and compare how different a face the same theme wears in the two movements.
• In the first movement, the other violins enter one by one behind the soloist with the same melody, weaving together like threads. It is a rare concerto in which soloist and orchestra sing together rather than compete.
• The second movement is lively, almost dancing, but the love theme returns twisted and made comic. It sounds as though the bitterness of youth were being hidden behind laughter.

Though the newly married Bartók dedicated it to his wife, the opera is about the rooms of the heart that cannot be opened even to the one we love. It reached the stage only 7 years after it was written.

• Before the curtain rises comes a spoken prologue by a bard. He asks, 'Where is this castle? Is it outside, or within?', making clear from the outset that the castle is the human heart.
• The dark, slow pentatonic melody in the low strings at the opening is the darkness of the castle. When the fifth door opens, the full orchestra, organ included, bursts into dazzling C major, and Judith cries out a high C. This scene is counted among the passages that measure a soprano's skill.
• At the sixth door, the 'lake of tears,' harp and woodwinds produce chords that ripple like waves. It is a still scene, yet the most chilling of all.
• The text follows the speech inflections of Hungarian and the rhythms of folk song. Listen for the passages where the singers, rather than spinning out brilliant lines, sing as if speaking, and you will hear what Bartók learned from folk song.

In the year war cut off his collecting trips, he turned violin and pipe tunes he had transcribed in Transylvanian villages into six short piano pieces. They are the most widely loved of all Bartók's works.

• The six pieces are a stick dance, a sash dance, a dance in one spot, a dance from Bucsum, a Romanian polka and a fast dance. Each lasts only about 1 to 2 minutes, making them an ideal first taste of Bartók.
• The third, the 'dance in one spot,' was originally a tune played on a peasant's pipe. Its melody, circling in a high register through strange, Eastern-sounding intervals, has a mysterious air.
• The original is for piano, but the small-orchestra version Bartók made himself and the violin version by the violinist Zoltán Székely are performed more often. Compare the same piece in all three forms.
• The last two pieces run on without a break, growing ever faster. They sound like the moment a village festival dance races to its climax.

His most violent work, written in years of revolution, counterrevolution and lost borders. It caused such a shock that performances were banned right after the Cologne premiere.

• It opens with the din of a big-city street. The curtain rises amid chaos, the strings seething at speed and the brass blaring like car horns.
• Three times a girl held captive by thugs lures passersby from the window, and each time the clarinet takes a seductively curling solo. Listen to how the three clarinet solos gradually change.
• When the Mandarin appears, the trombones slide their notes upward (glissando), announcing his grotesque presence.
• The chase near the end is woven in fugal style, one theme pursued by instrument after instrument, and it drives on breathlessly. The concert suite ends with this chase; the complete version adds a wordless chorus at the close.

Written on a commission from the patron Paul Sacher, this is the work in which Bartók's technique was most finely honed, in the years when Europe was growing dark.

• The first movement is a fugue that begins very softly with a theme on muted violas, writhing by semitones. Passing from voice to voice, the theme grows steadily until it peaks on 'E♭', the note farthest from 'A', then folds back on itself and returns.
• The Hungarian musicologist Ernő Lendvai famously argued that this climax falls at the golden section of the whole piece, but scholars disagree over whether Bartók calculated it deliberately.
• The orchestra seats two groups of strings to the left and right. In the second and fourth movements, follow by ear as left and right call back and forth.
• The third movement is Bartók's 'night music.' The xylophone strikes a single note faster and faster, then slower again; the timpani glide in pitch; the celesta glitters coldly. Its use in the film 「The Shining」 made it all the more famous.

Amid illness, poverty and the loneliness of exile, this piece was written on a commission that colleagues arranged for him. Bartók described its course as leading 'from a grave beginning and a song of death to the affirmation of life.'

• The second movement, 'Game of the pairs,' begins on the snare drum, after which bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes and muted trumpets enter two by two. Listen to how the color shifts, since each pair plays at a different interval.
• The third movement, 'Elegia,' is the one Bartók himself called a 'lugubrious death-song'; through it flow rippling harps and the woodwinds' 'night music.'
• In the fourth movement, 'Interrupted intermezzo,' the violas sing a warm, Hungarian-flavored melody as if longing for home, until a flippant march suddenly cuts in. The trombones slide mockingly and the woodwinds cackle.
• In the fifth movement, after a call from the horns, the strings race on without rest. After the premiere Bartók rewrote the ending to make it longer, and today it is usually played with this extended close.

Bartók, facing death, wrote this as a birthday present for his wife Ditta and laid down his pen with the last 17 bars unfinished. In place of the vehemence of the two earlier concertos, a clear, warm light suffuses it.

• The first movement opens over a rustling carpet of strings as the piano sings a Hungarian folk-like melody with both hands on the same notes (in octaves).
• The second movement is a slow movement marked 'religioso.' The piano quietly answers the strings' hymnlike chords, and it is often compared with the 'song of thanksgiving' in Beethoven's 「String Quartet No. 15」.
• Birdsong is scattered through the middle section of the second movement. It is said to be birdsong that Bartók took down while convalescing in North Carolina.
• The third movement is a fast, lively dance followed by a fugal section in which voice after voice pursues the theme. The final 17 bars were orchestrated by his friend Tibor Serly.