moment of crisis came when he played his new ballet score La Valse for Diaghilev in 1920. “Ravel, it’s a masterpiece, but it isn’t a ballet,” the impresario told him. “It’s a portrait of a ballet, a painting of a ballet.” Evidently, Diaghilev was saying that Ravel’s score lacked the pitiless spirit that the postwar era required.
The verdict was bizarre, for La Valse is both a dazzling incarnation of the twenties and a dazzling satire of it. It begins as a nostalgic journey in three-quarter time, Old Europe waltzing in the twilight. A stepwise intensification of dissonance and dynamics suggests the fury of the war just past, the wedding of aristocratic pride to the machinery of destruction. In the last moments, with trombones snarling and percussion rattling, the music becomes brassy, sassy, and fierce. Suddenly we seem to be in the middle of a flapper gin party—and there is no reason to feel any jolt of transition, since the Roaring Twenties were underwritten by the same fortunes that had financed the prewar balls. This is a society spinning out of control, reeling from the horrors of the recent past toward those of the near future.
Bartók’s confusion went deeper than matters of style: his personal history had been largely obliterated by the cartographic fiats of the peace treaties. The reduction of Hungarian territory after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant that Nagyszentmiklós, the composer’s birthplace, went to Romania, and that Pozsony, where his mother still lived, became Czechoslovak.
Nonetheless, Bartók remained loyal to the landscape of his dreams—that hidden empire of peasant music, which stretched as far as Turkey and North Africa. As Hungary moved toward fascism under the authoritarian government of Miklós Horthy, such multi-culturalism attracted suspicion; nationalists perceived Bartók as lacking in true Hungarian spirit. At the same time, his allegiance to folklore made him a quaint, anachronistic figure on the international new-music circuit. He was too cosmopolitan at home, too nationalist abroad. He was, however, finding the balance he had always sought, between the local and the universal. Less concerned with policing the boundaries between genres, he stopped agitating against the supposed contaminations of Gypsy music; Hungarian Gypsy fiddling appears all over his two Rhapsodies for violin and his Second Violin Concerto. Occasionally, he even indulged in a bit of jazz. As Julie Brown has pointed out, Bartók responded to the rise of genocidal racism by extolling “racial impurity”—the migration of styles, the intermingling of cultures.
In the first years of the postwar period Bartók strove to establish his modernist credentials. When the Danish composer Carl Nielsen came to Budapest in 1920, Bartók asked him whether he thought his Second Quartet was “sufficiently modern.” The ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, finished the previous year, matched the polytonal violence of the Rite, with a hint of Futurism in the honking cityscape of the prelude (“ ‘stylized’ noise,” Bartók called it). The strutting harshness of the two violin sonatas, the Piano Sonata, the piano suite Out of Doors, the First Piano Concerto, and the Third Quartet, all composed in the early and mid-twenties, won respect from the Schoenberg camp. But Bartók’s melodies retained a folkish shape, and the harmony again stopped short of full atonality. These works use symmetrical scales that revolve around a “tonal center,” a single pitch that sounds somehow “right” whenever it appears. In the wide-ranging Fourth Quartet, written in 1928, dissonant dances frame an ethereal slow movement that glides around the key of E major without quite touching it. In the final tranquillo section, the violin plays a sweet folkish melody, akin to the “Peacock Melody” of Magyar tradition. The composer has returned to first principles.
In several masterpieces of Bartók’s last years—the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), the Second Violin Concerto (1937–38), and the Concerto for Orchestra (1943)—the ceremony of homecoming is repeated. The final movement of each work brings a palpable feeling of release, as if the composer, who had observed peasants with shy detachment, were finally throwing away his notebook and entering the fray. Strings whip up dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Brass play secular chorales, as if seated on the dented steps of a tilting little church. Winds squawk like excited children. Drums bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd. There are no sacrificial victims in these neoprimitive scenes, even if some walk away with bruises. The ritual of return is most poignant in the Concerto for Orchestra, which Bartók wrote in American exile. Transylvania was by then a purely mental space that he could dance across from end to end, even as his final illness immobilized him.
Bartók and Janáček met twice in the twenties. The second time, in 1927, Janáček is said to have grabbed Bartók by the shoulders and dragged him into a quiet corner. Posterity would love to have a precise record of that conversation, but the eyewitness report is frustratingly impressionistic: “fascinating exchange … a fireworks of personalities …” Did Janáček urge Bartók to be true to his national, folkish self, as Debussy had urged Stravinsky?
By now well into his seventies, the Moravian master was more bemused than intimidated by the culture of the festivals; he liked to tell the story that when he tried to find his way to the stage to take a bow at the ISCM festival of 1925, he opened the wrong door and found himself out on the street. The belated international success of Jenůfa gave him the confidence to stay on the path that he had marked out before the turn of the century.
Janáček’s creative Indian summer is often attributed to his infatuation with Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman whom he met in 1917. Richly imagined female characters populate his last works: the “dark-skinned Gypsy girl” who seduces a farmer’s son in the song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared; Katerina, the tragic heroine of the opera Katya Kabanova, who throws herself into the Volga River to escape the tormenting rectitude of her mother-in-law; the female fox at the heart of the animal fable The Cunning Little Vixen, who finds love in the forest and then falls to the gun of a poacher; and the unlikely protagonist of The Makropoulos Affair, a 337-year-old opera singer who has achieved immortality at the price of being “cold as ice.”
Janáček’s late style is lean and strong. Melodies are whittled down but do not lose their grace. Rhythms move like a needle on a gramo-phone, skipping as if stuck in a rut or slowing down as if someone were fiddling with the speed. One signature sound is a raw pealing of trumpets, which ushers in both the rustic military Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass, a setting of the Old Slavonic liturgy. In the mass, liturgical phrases such as “Lord have mercy,” “Crucified for us,” “I believe,” and “Lamb of God” are linked to changing phases of rural weather: lashing rain, lightning, a clearing sky, a spell of moonlight, a pale sun the following day. Christianity and paganism are reconciled.
The Cunning Little Vixen, at once a charming children’s tale and a profound allegory of modern life, may be Janáček’s greatest achievement. It begins innocuously, as a folksy old forester—as a child Janáček dreamed of being a forester—captures a fox cub and brings her to his home. She runs amok, slaughters the chickens, and is banished to the woods. There she finds a handsome lover and woos him to music that parodies post-Wagnerian opera, notably Strauss in his kitschier moods. In Act III, the vixen is felled by a rifle shot, and the opera takes on an altogether different tone. In the final scene the forester steps out of his folk-tale role and meditates on the passage of time. He seems to be musing about the very opera that he’s in: “Is this fairy tale or reality? Reality or fairy tale?” The forester falls asleep, and when he wakes the animals of the woods surround him. He sees fox cubs at play and realizes that they are the vixen’s children. He then catches a little frog in his hand, thinking he’s seeing the same “clammy little monster” whom he met in the first scene of the opera:
FORESTER: Where have you come from?
FROG: That wasn’t me, that was grandpa! They told me all about you.
In other words, the animals of the forest have been telling stories about the forester over the course of their brief lives, as if he were a hero from long ago. In the disjuncture between human and animal time we see him—and ourselves—across
