On the path of Béla Bartók [antikvár]

FOREWORD Since the beginning of the 1980s I've been thinking about a comprehensive Bartok portrait. With the passing of time and the ever quickening pace of change and commercialization in the world and the media, I felt the increasingly urgent need for an authentic picture of Bartok to be drawn up and preserved on film, for a résumé of Bartók's legacy existing on several levels and plains. Hearing the turn of the century, in 1997, at almost the last possible moment, István Gaál and I got down to work on a documentary film on Bartók's libe. it was obvious that it would be unworthy of Bartók to use spectacular elements alien to his personality, manipulated, sensational turns. On the other hand a very rich and well-elaborated heritage was available for research into Bartók. In the course of the years since his death - especially since the setting up of the Bartók Archive in 1961 - a great deal of valuable, analytic work has been done on his oeuvre. All this provided excellent basic material for our undertaking. The Starting point for the screenplay were the documents (letters, his writings, lectures, photographs) which illustrate the life history and the musical works, and these provided the basis for the aim of the film: to examine the interdependence between Bartók's personality and his works, to demonstrate the path of his development from his initial attempts at romanticism, and his later characteristically Hungarian style to his most dedicated masterpieces. The only trouble is that at the most one can produce a scientific study from these elements, it is very difficult to create a living figure on the screen. First of all we had to find a viewpoint for the subject of the portrait, and, since we were dealing with someone not living, the outsider's viewpoint wasn't feasible. The only solution was to see with his eyes; to see the world around him. Having realized this we set out to trace Béla Bartók's life right from Nagyszentmiklós to New York, from the Kossuth Symphonic Poem to the Third Piano Concerto. The film is the result of three and a half years' work - research, collecting motifs, later filming and editing. In the course of this long period we visited all the important places of his life and the scenes of his fieldwork. We met a tremendous amount of people -witnesses - who preserve something of him or carry on the tradition, people who are familiar with that treasure trove of folksongs which interested him so passionately. We came across his relatives or the descendants of his performers (folk singers) who preserve memories from the family chronicles or can sing the Kolinda we know from Bartók's Cantata Profana. It would have been a pity not to record all these experiences of immense value - part of which exceeded the limits of the film and so were only included as a flash or not at all. So they have been included in this book, an unusual biography of Bartók written by Sándor Kovács, the film's musicologist, and illustrated by the artistic photographs of the film's director István Gaál. Várbíró Judit