Bartók's Late Adventures with Kontrapunkt

Vikárius, László (2006) Bartók's Late Adventures with Kontrapunkt. Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 47 (3-4). pp. 395-416. ISSN 0039-3266

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Abstract

It is thus probably not by chance that Zoltán Kodály, writing in 1950 about Bartók “the folklorist,” recalled his own friend's belated study of Palestrina and Jeppesen's counterpoint treatise. Whereas Bach had a prominent role in Bartók's musical training, his interest in contrapuntal writing in his early compositions followed the lead of music from Beethoven to Richard Strauss. It was undoubtedly Stravinsky's neoclassicism that inspired his own - as Tibor Tallián put in, lonely - “retour à Bach” from 1926 on. And Bartók's journey into the realm of counterpoint did not end there. Works like the first movement of Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta or the “Fuga” of the Solo Violin Sonata testify to the challenges counterpoint posed to him up to the final years of his career. In the study, the author will consider Bartók's own compositional autographs, some of which reveal a tendency to lend a particular status to contrapuntal writing. He will further discuss possible documentary evidence related to Bartók's actual late interest in counterpoint and earlier polyphony.

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