These are three words I would never have expected to see united, but a friend recently recommended an 8-LP box, released in 1981 by Hungaroton (LPX 12326-33) to celebrate the centenary of Béla Bartók’s birth. They contain every traceable recording of the composer at the piano. The A-side of the second disc has Bartók playing four sonatas by the Italo-Iberian master.
The group starts with K 427, which bears the dangerous tempo indication Presto, quanto sia possibile. The greatest composer of the 20th century ( pace admirers of Debussy, Ravel, Schönberg, Stravinsky and Shostakovich) takes these words quite literally. I doubt if it would have been possible even for a speed maniac like Glenn Gould to have ripped the victim to shreds more efficiently.
The trick seems to have inspired him with regard to the other three sonatas (K 212, 527 and 70). Only in the middle section of K 212 does he relax and respond to the musical content. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that he has cut his tempo approximately in half. The rest of the sonata and the other two are as rushed as if their tempo indications were the same as the first.
The astonishing thing is the evidence Bartók’s analytic mind in every work. Building blocks are carefully delineated, and, as breathless as the tempi are, everything… breathes. It’s like listening to the dialog on an old video cassette playing at two notches of fast forward. Actors are speaking as if they had inhaled helium, but you can tell what they are saying.
The next thing I listened to was his First Rhapsody for violin and piano. That showed some wonderfully lyrical, rubato playing, side by side with crazed speed, which in this case fit the composer’s own music to a T. The sheer numbers of notes involved which I observed following the score on IMSLP was staggering. The “listening experience” brought me to three conclusions regarding Bartók’s Scarlatti:
1) The old problem of note inflation is at work. This student of the music of his countryman Liszt felt called upon to add to the overburdened textures he found there, in order to expand the overtone-poor, metal-framed piano sound to an even greater extent than he found on that well-prepared plate. The load with which every note is charged in Scarlatti’s music stands in a ratio of something like 100 to 1 compared to the Rhapsody, and a zillion to one compared to “Bluebeard’s Castle”.
2) Scarlatti’s frequently-employed two-part textures, perfectly adequate to the brilliant tone of the harpsichords he employed, presented a kind of vacuum to a musical mind used to working near the speed of light, which had to be filled – “as fast as possible”.
3) Bartók thought of the piano as a percussion instrument. He certainly knew how to make the instrument sing when necessary, but it wasn’t really what he was most interested in. The harpsichordist’s task – and if you will, the pianist’s too – with a Scarlatti sonata is to take what are often very thin strands of melody and make them float and dance, on instruments whose tone formation is indeed primarily percussive. It can be done, in fact more easily on the piano (even on the early Florentine ones that Scarlatti knew) than on the harpsichord. The challenge is what makes it interesting to those willing to take it up.
The absence in a tremendous master like Bartók of any sense of Domenico’s oddly personal, transitional style, which combines the High Baroque and Pre-Classical with idiomatic harpsichord writing and flamenco elements, can be excused. This late master of the Great Western Tradition was steeped from youth in other worlds altogether. Then the trauma of World War I thoroughly disposed of the smiling grace of the 18th century. Stravinsky and “Les Six” turned it into a travesty. Bartók took another road altogether.
And kindly lament with me how Scarlatti is misunderstood even by present-day harpsichordists, who think tempo is always, but I mean always elastic. I can’t think of another composer where careful control of meter is more important than Scarlatti. Not to mention other aspects lost in translation over the intervening two centuries.
Case in point: what does possibile actually mean in the case of K 427? It can never admit to anything outside the realm of good taste; i.e., there has to be an intelligible Tonsprache. A big hurry, fine – but not insanity. One factor which stakes out limits is the repeated trumpet flourish. There is no justification for suddenly jamming on the brakes in order to make the leap and execute the figure at a speed resembling the original idea. The maximum speed for repetition of the 16th-notes can be taken as a rough guideline for the rest.
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An interesting relic of a bygone era appeared underneath the eighth LP in the Bartók box: an invoice from the kunstsalon am altmarkt (all lower case) in Dresden, 27 August 1982. Price: “96.80 M.” Not “DM”, for “Deutsche Mark”? Then I realized with a shock that in Dresden in 1982, a Mark was an Ostmark, the defunct East German currency, of which I still possess a few tattered notes and zinc coins.
The Altmarkt, Dresden’s old market square next to the venerable Kreuzkirche, was refashioned after the firestorm of 1945 into a Marxist desert. The Kulturpalast with its Socialist Realist wall decoration still stands. It’s always a shock to see, coming from the Neumarkt, where the rebuilt Frauenkirche now proudly soars, blackened original stones mixed with pale replacements. The case of the organ which J. S. Bach played has been copied; the instrument itself, not. Too impractical for modern needs, it was decided – over protests led by Nobel Prizewinners, Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and other Prominente.
The kunstsalon designated itself a volksbuchhandlung – a “people’s bookstore”. The GDR equivalent of “Inc.” was VEB: Volkseigener Betrieb, i.e., a company owned by the people. Such were the lies that camouflaged a puppet Russian dictatorship, whose very name – “German Democratic Republic”– could not have been conceived in fouler cynicism.
The invoice was made out to the Dresden Hochschule für Musik. It had somehow escaped the Chancellor’s office, and the discs were at some point “deacquisitioned” – who could possibly have any use for this dead technology? The box is pristine, without the annoying sticky labels and protective plastic usually found on such items purchased on the web, so it must have been conjoined with the five LPs of Volume II (Private and Family Recordings / Fragments) of the collection in a slipcase. What a splendid example of what state support can do for the arts, even under as repressive a regime as that in Hungary in 1981!
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I first encountered Bartók when my father took me to a concert by the St. Louis Symphony where the “Concerto for Orchestra” was on the program. I must have been about ten years old, and couldn’t understand a note of it. My father said that I should open my ears to new sonorities. Wise words, but – how? A few years later I was at the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan; Thor Johnson was conducting the “Suite for Orchestra No. 2”. I listened to him work with the bass clarinetist on the wonderful solo during their lunch break, and something began to dawn. I asked Mr. Johnson what else I could do to understand Bartók. He looked at me for a long moment, sighed deeply, said, “There’s so much…”, and went off for something to eat.
Many more years later still, after a concert with Marie Leonhardt for the Schola Cantorum in Basel, I was invited to supper with the director and a few colleagues. To the table in general I said how happy I was to be appearing for the institution whose founder, Paul Sacher, had commissioned the “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta”, which I adored, and in which I had played the celesta part so often with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. An elderly lady next to me who had been silent until then piped up, saying, “I played the celesta for the premiere under Bartók”. Dumbfounded, all I could manage to ask was: what it was like? “He didn’t like the pianist, and said, ‘Why doesn’t the celesta play the piano part?’”
In fact, in the closing bars of the work, the celesta player moves over to the bass side of the piano to reinforce the Magyar dance rhythms. I seldom had such fun onstage as when I helped pound out those three big final chords after the fermata collapses under its own weight.
September 3, 2024
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