Béla Bartók. Autograph field-book of Hungarian folksong transcriptions, 1906-1918, and later, UNPUBLISHED

Béla Bartók

Extraordinary autograph field-book of Hungarian folksong transcriptions, UNPUBLISHED

documenting some of earliest and latest of Bartók's Hungarian folksong researches, containing upward of 425 individual transcriptions, the first nine leaves with folksongs collected by Bartók in 1906, the remaining leaves usually initially for transcriptions dating from summer 1918, with some pages (pp.1a, 2a, 3a, 4a. 5a, 6a, and 7a) containing seemingly later transcriptions from the phonograph recordings of folksongs collected by Béla Vikár apparently in 1902, the folksong melodies and accompanying folksong texts written in black ink and pencil, with extensive autograph annotations, additions, deletions and revisions in pencil, blue and red crayon ("...nincs szövege, nem kell transzponálni [it does not have a text, it does not have to be transposed]...meg van [we have it]..."), the first eight leaves recording in detail the folksong texts, the remaining leaves on the whole with much less text, mostly the refrain lines or problematic words, some folksong melodies written on hand-drawn staves in the margins, some contributors and singers named by the composer (e.g. János Balla, Róza Bak, Bernát Dobóczi, Panna Pető, Róza Ökrös, Ilka Dóka, Ferencné Simon), a number of the 1906 folksongs annotated by Bartók in blue crayon with numbers relating to the numbering of the relevant phonographic cylinder in the Budapest Ethnographic Museum and to the numbering in his own phonograph notebook ("m.F.960a) [Ethnographic Museum number] / F.38a) [notebook number]...m.F.866a) / F.44a)), the transcriptions of folksongs collected by Béla Vikár provided with an Ethnographic Museum number ("51766...Fehér László...51.797...Néköm szeretőmnek..."), with a number of doodles in pencil and ink

70 pages, small 4to (c.17.3 x 26.5cm), 10 staves, cut down from larger 20-stave leaves, the first nine leaves paginated on the recto in pencil 'I'-'XVII', the verso of the ninth leaf and the verso of the following seven leaves foliated in ink and pencil '1'-'8', the following leaves paginated '9'-'44', one leaf not paginated or foliated (possibly preceding the first numbered leaf), some later manuscript annotations to the folksong Három krajcár a Kaszafény on the penultimate leaf ("MNT IV. [A Magyar Népzene Tára - Corpus Musicae Popularis Hungaricae, vol.iv (1959)] 790. / [Újszász] 1918"), ties, Békés County, Pest County and elsewhere, 1906-1918, and later, three leaves detached, a few small tears, dust-staining to a few leaves, small tear with paper loss to lower outer corner of one leaf

THE MOST IMPORTANT BARTÓK AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT TO BE OFFERED AT AUCTION IN MODERN TIMES.

THIS IS A RICH AND MULTI-LAYERED DOCUMENT, RECORDING SOME OF BARTÓK'S EARLIEST AND LATEST HUNGARIAN FOLKSONG COLLECTING ACTIVITIES. IT HAS NOT BEEN STUDIED BY MODERN BARTÓK SCHOLARSHIP AND REMAINS UNPUBLISHED.

Although he was not the first to study the folk music of his native Hungary, Bartók can rightly be considered the father of ethnomusicology. It is no exaggeration to say that a preoccupation with folksong was the guiding compass behind all his activities as a teacher, researcher, and composer.

Beginning in 1904, after hearing the eighteen-year-old Lidi Dósa singing an authentic Transylvanian folk tune (when it became apparent that ethnic Hungarian music was not just confined to gypsy tunes), and developing in the following year after meeting fellow folksong enthusiast Zoltán Kodály, Bartók's folksong researches took on a new intensity in 1906 with the collection of over a thousand Hungarian songs from the Southern Great Plain, Transdanubia, and Pest County, as well as of some 300 Slovak songs in Gömör-Kishont County. It is from this seminal year that the earliest entries in the present manuscript date.

An appointment as professor at the Hungarian Academy of Music in 1907 gave Bartók the means to pursue his folksong studies, and during the spring of that year he collected around 700 Hungarian melodies from the Transdanubian village Felsőireg (for a number of the so-called master-sheet transcriptions of folksongs collected in the spring of 1907, see the following lot). Yearly collecting trips followed, up to 1914, when field-studies became impossible, though from Easter 1915 he resumed his researches mainly in Slovak regions, venturing into Transylvania in 1916 (for some important documents relating to this period, see lots 69-73). With the exception of an expedition to Turkey in November 1936 (in connection with this, see the following lot), Bartók's folksong fieldwork ended in 1918, the bulk of the present manuscript indeed containing transcriptions from that year. By this date he had amassed a collection of around 10,000 melodies (including 3,404 Romanian, 3223 Slovak and 2,771 Hungarian), which he spent the rest of his life analyzing and ordering, and to a limited extent publishing, for instance, in A magyar népdal [Hungarian Folk Music] (1924).

But the composer's greatest achievement in this field was undoubtedly the incorporation of folk music styles into his own works. Indeed, it is the extraordinary interpermeation of Bartók's musical thought by his native Hungarian folksong that gives his music its unparalleled expressive power, depth and vitality, unique among the great composers of the twentieth century.

Bartók's usual modus operandi in the field, as he himself described it in a 1914 essay, was to spend around five to eight minutes transcribing a song in situ, which he then recorded with a phonograph. Sometimes a recording could be omitted if he considered the field transcription to be sufficient and did not make a recording: in these cases, the field notation is the only source for the melody’s further manifestations. Some sixteen other field-books are known today, in private hands, all of a similar size and dimension as the present manuscript and bearing ten staves per page. The present manuscript, however, would appear to be a 'home-made' notebook, formed by gathering together leaves of 20-stave paper that have been cut in half. And unlike the above-mentioned field-books, which are numbered by Bartók (i.e. 'M. [Magyar = Hungarian] I, M.II, M.III, M.IV, M.V, M.VI; R. [Román = Romanian] I, R.II; T. [Tót = Slovak] I, T.II, T.III; IV, V, VI, VII and VIII), the present manuscript has no discernible autograph numbering.

For Bartók's own phonograph-recording notebook with entries relating to folksongs in the present manuscript, see lot 67.

We are very grateful to Professor László Vikárius for his assistance in our cataloguing of this and the following ten lots.

LITERATURE:

József Ujfalussy, Béla Bartók, trans. Ruth Pataki (1972), p.80; TNG, ii (2001), pp.787ff.; Vera Lampert, Folk Music in Bartók's Compositions (2008), passim; David Taylor Nelson, 'Béla Bartók: The Father of Ethnomusicology', Musical Offerings, vol.3 no.2 (2012), pp.75-91

PROVENANCE:

Formerly in the collection of the composer's son, Peter Bartók (1924-2020)