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Who was the greatest composer of the 20th century? This was the mind-boggling question that the violinist Yehudi Menuhin found himself having to answer one day. It is one that would terrify any educated contemporary but, for Menuhin, it was a particularly delicate situation as the questioner was none other than the great Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius. Menuhin was initially at a loss, unsure whether he should answer the question honestly and undiplomatically or whether he should, rather, be polite and flatter his host. But while he was hesitating, Sibelius rescued him from his predicament by pronouncing his own verdict: "Bartók is our greatest composer." As Menuhin explained in his autobiography: "I could have hugged him – for casting me a lifeline, but more for his generosity and clear-sightedness." It was a reply with which the violinist concurred wholeheartedly.
The question as to "the greatest" and the search for "the best" has long provided the grist for fashionable party games, the results taking the form of a pop chart, a top ten, a ranking or, to use a more elegant expression, a canon. "Mirror, mirror on the wall…" At the same time, the choice of the Classics or Olympians, in subjective and serious variants, remains an indispensable tool of historiography. Whom do we have to know? Whom should we follow? When Pierre Boulez wrote an article on Bartók for the Encyclopédie de la musique in 1958, he too referred to the "great five" contemporary composers: Bartók, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. A good four decades later, in the course of an interview with Der Spiegel, he named the same five composers in response to the question: "Which modern composers will make the leap into the next millennium?"
In 1958, however, Boulez clearly regarded Bartók as markedly inferior to the other four masters of modern music: "His works have neither the profound unity and novelty of Webern nor the rigorous and intellectual focus of Schoenberg nor the multilayered quality of Berg or the emphatic and controlled dynamism of Stravinsky." In particular, Bartók’s use of folk music (or "peasant music", as Bartók himself called it) was something that Boulez viewed with unconcealed scepticism. Whereas Bartók himself believed that research into Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish and Arab folk music and the creative appropriation of that music was "the ideal starting point for a musical rebirth", Boulez saw in this interest only a romantic relic of 19th-century nationalism. "Folk music allowed Bartók to extend his ideas on rhythm and to make those ideas more flexible," Boulez admitted, "but at the same time it appreciably limited the range of his language." But Boulez was able to draw a distinction between the various works, praising the six string quartets and admiring the two violin sonatas. The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, finally, he could not praise highly enough: it was a "great instrumental stroke of luck". By contrast, he felt that Bartók’s final compositions, starting with the Second Violin Concerto, were evidence of an "incipient decline" in the composer’s musical thinking: "The late works tread water and contain too many clichés in terms of their musical style and formal structure."
In the light of all this, it is striking that in his capacity as a conductor Boulez has in recent years devoted far more emphasis to Bartók’s music, suggesting that he has in the meantime undergone a change of heart: is it, perhaps, an example of late repentance and active atonement? During this later period Bartók has rarely been missing from his programmes. At the concerts held in his honour at the 1992 Salzburg Festival, he conducted The Miraculous Mandarin with the Wiener Philharmoniker, and in 1998 he conducted Pina Bausch’s production of the one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, declaring these appearances his farewell to the operatic stage – a resolve that he happily soon abandoned. In the course of a tour that he undertook with the London Symphony Orchestra in 2000 to mark the orchestra’s centenary, The Wooden Prince was a regular part of the programme, and at one of the anniversary concerts marking his eightieth birthday in Berlin in March 2005, he conducted an all-Bartók programme with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Two years earlier, in 2003, he had conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker’s traditional European Concert in the Monastery of St Jerome in Lisbon and included on the programme Bartók’s great orchestral showpiece, the Concerto for Orchestra – one of the composer’s late works! And in a recording project undertaken with Deutsche Grammophon at this same period, he even pursued the goal of a complete survey of Bartók’s orchestral and stage works, documenting the Hungarian composer’s output with encyclopaedic thoroughness, while at the same time complaining about the lack of imagination on the part of those conductors who always performed the same three or four works, an attitude he described as an annoying sin of omission.
Is this a case of the mellowness of old age and the belated acknowledgement of bygone sins? No. Even though Boulez may strike a note of self-irony when conceding that "when one is young, one likes to play at being a wild dog and yaps terribly when let out", he has not changed his opinion about Bartók, certainly not in any fundamental way. In the course of the lectures he gave at the Collège de France in the 1980s, he used the example of Bartók to illustrate the problems that he believes are bound up with the relationship between folk music and art music: "The direct transition from a folk-like form to a composed piece does not take place as directly as all that. Also, one always has the impression of a journey, a visit. The original text becomes a hybrid that finds its true place neither in one world nor in the other. It has lost its raison d’être and its original function, without finding a new one to replace it." In 1992, in the course of a conversation with Josef Häusler, Boulez confirmed yet again that he saw Bartók as "one of the last representatives of the nationalist trends that appeared in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th century."
Boulez continues to stress the contradictions and the dichotomy that exist between Bartók’s musical actions and his theories. And yet it is very much these paradoxes that awaken his curiosity. The first such paradox concerns the fact that throughout his life Bartók was in thrall to Viennese culture, while simultaneously seeking a sense of identity as a Hungarian patriot at odds with the Habsburgs’ central control. A second paradox revolves around Bartók’s desire to reconcile musical cultures in the guise of folk music and art music, two forms which in Boulez’s view have nothing in common. And, finally, there is a third paradox, with Bartók attempting to modernize his own musical idiom with the help of folk music, while at the same time preserving the autochthonous character of peasant music. If we did not know any better, we should have to see Bartók as a tragic failure. But Boulez would never draw such a conclusion: even today, he argues, Bartók continues to stimulate and excite us through the vitality of his music, with its wild impetuousness, "aggressive outbursts" and "brutal violence" and perhaps also its sense of form – and maybe this is a fourth paradox: "He possessed a sense of form far closer to Beethoven than to Schoenberg."
Where does all this leave Boulez’s interpretative approach to Bartók’s music? Does he conduct "his Bartók" with critical reserve and sceptical distance? Boulez himself provided the answer to this question when drawing a distinction between creative and non-creative types of people: "The temperament of a non-creative musician requires complete identification." The creative musician, by contrast, does not have to sacrifice himself but finds himself in a loving, discriminating and subjective dialogue with the history of music, with the "big five" and with other precursors. But he never stands still. "To be creative", says Boulez, "is like riding a bicycle. If you stop going forward, you fall off."
Wolfgang Stähr
