Bartók's Late Adventures with Kontrapunkt

Abstract

It is thus probably not by chance that Zoltan Kodaly, writing in 1950 about Bartok “the folklorist,” recalled his own friend's belated study of Palestrina and Jeppesen's counterpoint treatise. Whereas Bach had a prominent role in Bartok'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 Tallian put in, lonely - “retour a Bach” from 1926 on. And Bartok'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 Bartok'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 B...