The Life and Music of Bela Bartok

Abstract

First published in 1953, Halsey Stevens's The Life and Music of Bela Bartok was hailed as a triumph of musicology and quickly established itself as the classic text. Stevens combined an authoritiative, balanced account of the Hungarian composer's life with candid insightful analyses of his numerous works. To Stevens, the high point of Bartok's genius was the chamber music, which he assessed was of a quality unrivalled by any other composer of the early twentieth century. But he evaluated Bartok's entire output with mastery, picking out the composer's strengths and weaknesses and conveying the essence of his compositional techniques. Stevens's views have greatly influenced the study of Bartok and Hungarian music over the last four decades. Issued in a revised edition in 1964, Stevens's work now appears in a third edition, prepared by the Bartok scholar, Malcolm Gillies. A comprehensive chronological list of works is added, together with a select bibliography and discography. Minor revisions to the text are suggested in a new Introduction, and the text is enhanced by eight pages of photgraphs, some of them little known.