Bartók's Quartets, Folk Music, and the Anxiety of Influence

Abstract

Bartók's influence as a composer and ethnomusicologist on post-war Hungarian composers was profound. In the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes of Rákosi and Kádár, Bartók's legacy became increasingly complex, as his role as “internationalist” composer and ethnomusicologist became a primary pillar of the new musical ideologies. Within this socialist reality, younger composers reacted to this ideology either by integrating, emphasizing or denying the modernist and folkloristic tendencies that are found both in Bartók's music and in the socialist appropriation thereof. This chapter investigates sections of György Kurtág's String Quartet op. 1 and of György Ligeti's String Quartet no. 2, underscoring both composers’ relationship to Bartók's string quartet oeuvre. By analyzing these works in terms of topical, tonal and rhythmic structure, I demonstrate how these works either refer back to or re-contextualize similar topical and tonal structures found in Bartók's String Quartet no. 1, String Quartet no. 3, String Quartet no. 4 and String Quartet no. 6. I go on to show how elements of folk music became methodologically reinterpreted, restructured and deconstructed in the course of twentieth-century Hungarian compositional practice.