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This chapter examines Béla Bartók's polemics relevant to nineteenth-century Hungarian musical inheritance. It discusses Bartók's synthesis of foreign and native traditions into a national style. It suggests that it was the gentry's popular musical culture that Bartók and his composer and folklorist friend Zoltán Kodály tried to write out of their musical heritage because they believed that that music was at once more artificial than the traditional music of the peasants, and less artful than art music.

In the postwar era, the problem of identity in Hungarian music became even more complex. This chapter notes that the Communist regime in Hungary had to balance its desire for a specifically Hungarian art music, in which Bartók's legacy would certainly play a role against its desire to root out modernism. It shows how, as a result of conflicting aims, Bartók became central to the debates about musical style that accompanied Hungary's transition to Soviet-style socialism between 1945 and 1950.

This chapter looks at Door V, Bluebeard's Domain, which represents the culminating point for the polarity of darkness and light, based on large-scale and local use of geometrically expanding proportional structure. An aphorism of Nietzsche on independence is also presented, which pertains to Bluebeard's strength and loneliness. The chapter discusses isometric text-verse of ancient Hungarian folk music as structural framework for the final phase of character development and transformation. It also includes an aphorism of Nietzsche on women and its reflection in the dual illusion of Balázs's Judith.

This introductory chapter explains the objective of this volume, which is to examine the works of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók in relation to modernity and nationalism. It explores aspects of Bartók's oeuvre that exemplify connections to the earlier traditions of Hungarian art music and evaluates the strength of his creative involvement of these traditions in his early works. It shows how Bartók thoroughly and productively transformed traditional Hungarian music in his mature compositions. It also re-examines long-held beliefs about Bartók's relationship to his past and the relationship of authentic folk music to Hungarian popular music.

This chapter focuses on Béla Bartók's compositions written between 1903 and 1904. It considers Bartók's earliest attempts to forge a musical language to express Hungarian national identity and his own nationalism. In particular, it discusses the verbunkos tradition and its early history and provides an overview of Hungarian music. It also explores the connection between the gentry and Gypsy-performed music on one hand, and the process of Magyarisation that developed in Hungary after the Ausgleich of 1867. Finally, it analyses some of Bartók's works, including the song “Est” (Evening) and the symphonic poem Kossuth, Piano Quintet, and Rhapsody.

This chapter focuses on Béla Bartók's musical activities between 1905 and 1906. It first considers Bartók's shift of allegiance to the music of the rural peasantry that allowed him to abrogate the music of the “Magyar people”. It then examines how Bartók exploited the codes of what he understood to be the most ancient and “authentic” strand of Hungarian music, but within the context of a developing modernist style. It also looks at some of Bartók's compositions, including Kossuth and the Scherzo (Burlesque) op. 2 for piano and orchestra. Finally, it describes Bartók's tour as a concert pianist and his search for material for the folk music collection he was planning in collaboration with Zoltán Kodály.

Bartók's influence as a composer and ethnomusicologist on post-war Hungarian composers was profound. In the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes of Rákosi and Kádár, Bartók's legacy became increasingly complex, as his role as “internationalist” composer and ethnomusicologist became a primary pillar of the new musical ideologies. Within this socialist reality, younger composers reacted to this ideology either by integrating, emphasizing or denying the modernist and folkloristic tendencies that are found both in Bartók's music and in the socialist appropriation thereof. This chapter investigates sections of György Kurtág's String Quartet op. 1 and of György Ligeti's String Quartet no. 2, underscoring both composers’ relationship to Bartók's string quartet oeuvre. By analyzing these works in terms of topical, tonal and rhythmic structure, I demonstrate how these works either refer back to or re-contextualize similar topical and tonal structures found in Bartók's String Quartet no. 1, String Quartet no. 3, String Quartet no. 4 and String Quartet no. 6. I go on to show how elements of folk music became methodologically reinterpreted, restructured and deconstructed in the course of twentieth-century Hungarian compositional practice.