Bővebb ismertető
PREFACEI am honoured to be asked to preface this English translation of Bartok's collected letters, which János Demény has so excellently edited. I am no Bartók scholar, either bibhographicaUy or even musically. But I certainly feel a particular sensibility to his genius and to what I imagine to have been his temperament. I never met him and saw him only once. He came with his second wife to England just before the last war and played with her, for the BBC, the Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion. After the concert he was daw-dhng by the piano and our eyes accidentally met as I watched him from among the seats. I remember the sense of being for a second the object of an acute spiritual vision, which seemed to look at once right inside me from right inside himself. I am certain he had no consciousness of the extreme subjective impression this moment made on me, and which I can recall to this day with eidetie accuracy. But I am also certain I saw something of the real Bartók, if only by intimation.Sometime after the war, in a radio talk at Schoenberg's death, I spoke of Bartók when discussing the relation of creative artists to movements and cliques. I said: 'So universal in our time seems this experience of collectivities, parties, groups, that the really strange figures are those who do the dedicated, difficult work, who face the crises alone, Bartók, for example. He had as tough a struggle in Budapest, as Schoenberg in Vienna. What gave him the strength to stand so alone? And is that strength a value of his music? Personally I believe so.' And of course I still believe so. The letters cannot truly confirm this judgment, but they make it credible. In an early letter Bartók writes: ' . . . yet there are times when I suddenly become aware of the fact that I am absolutely alone. And I prophesy, I have a foreknowledge, that this spiritual loneliness is to be my destiny.' Admittedly this may have been 'prophecy' out of a momentary mood, but one suspects it rings deeper.Bartók did not enjoy writing letters. He cries (1. 201): 'But letter