MUSIC CHRONICLE
647
strength, as well as bravura tone-production reaching to the most ex–
treme qualities of the instrument. His music does not allow a general–
ized tone, the vibrato-legato of romantic virtuosity. The sound of each
composition, like its rhythm, insists upon a precise definition, the piano
frictive or percussive, the violin or wind tone pointed and exact. Even in
the many little piano pieces
For Children,
the collection of forty-four
Duos for two violins, and the beginning books of
Mikrokosmos
there are
no concessions to easy, careless playing, habitual finger-patterns, tonal
laxity, rhythmic carelessness.
Bartok had been for many years a piano pedagogue at the Royal
Conservatory in Budapest and a widely admired pianist of very indivi–
dual quality. His interest in the many technical problems and the pos–
sibilities of his instrument never flagged. During the 1930's he summar–
ized his knowledge of folk music and his art of writing for the piano in
a series of one hundred and fifty-six progressive piano pieces, intended
for the student. This collection, called
Mikrokosmos,
to show that it
includes his art in microcosm, stands with the
Orders
by Couperin and
the
Well-Tempered Clavier
by Bach as a landmark of keyboard writing.
Like the keyboard music by Couperin and Bach it is written to be read
rather than memorized, and it is full of
tr~s
for the careless or indif–
ferent reader.
During these years also Bartok finally accepted for his own use in
his own manner the general plan of the twelve-tone technic. His first
great formal accomplishment in the use of this technic is the Music for
Strings, Percussion, Celesta, and Piano, beginning with a fugal movement
of extraordinary dark beauty, the first of many whole or partial fugues
that distinguish the consistently polyphonic organization of his final
works.
In
the darkness of this music may be discerned the nature of the
composer's attitude, the theme of unrelenting darkness that pervades
Blue–
beard's Castle.
Bartok was now at the crest of his art. From this time
until his death he produced a series of major compositions that as a
whole possibly surpass the best music by other composers of our cen–
tury.
In
adtlition to the three last Concertos, these are the Violin Con–
certo, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, the Fifth and Sixth
Quartets, Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano, and the ethereal
Suite for Unaccompanied Violin.
Bartok's compositions after the early Rhapsody for piano and
orchestra and the symphonic poem
Kossuth
are with few exceptions
soloistic or concertante in style, combining as Mozart did a baroque
sense of offsetting linear textures with a classic-romantic structure of
dynamic contrasts. What had been given up in repetitive melodic con-
