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Petite Suite for piano is the last among Béla Bartók's many settings of authentic folk melodies. A rarely played hidden gem derived from 44 Violin Duos, it is within reach of the intermediate/advanced pianist.' In addition to providing engaging performance repertory, it provides also a microcosmos of Bartók's work with peasant music.
This article offers an opportunity to compare directly Bartók's research, composition and performance inspired by the peasant music that shaped his musical thinking. Here his notations of authentic folk melodies appear alongside the scores of his piano arrangements thereof. Here his field recordings of peasants singing and playing appear alongside the Violin Duos and his own piano performance of Petite Suite. The author provides background context along with brief discussion of each movement. Juxtaposing the sound recordings of these folk melody "jewels," as Bartók called them,2 brings them to life as no verbal description can.
Background
Bartók's musical training was entirely classical and took place at the Budapest Academy of Music where he was known as, in his words, "only a first-class pianist,"3 although he studied composition as well. He was a passionately nationalistic young man. He wrote a letter to his mother in 1903, shortly after graduation, saying "For my own part, all my life, in every sphere, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation."4
Influenced by the great composer Franz Liszst's Hungarian Rhapsodies, Bartók was in the midst of composing his own flamboyant, virtuosic, Hungarian Rhapsody Op. I5 in the summer of 1904 at a country villa when a life-changing event occurred. He overheard a servant girl singing.6 He says "I listened by way of experiment... and wrote down some 5-6 songs as she sang them, all entirely unknown melodies which were completely different from the known urban Hungarian popular song types. This first experiment pointed the way to unlimited possibilities: I decided I would follow this path."7
When his former student Emma Gruber saw his interest in folk music she introduced him to her friend and future husband, Zoltán Kodály. Although Bartók and Kodály had both been students at the Budapest Academy at the same time, they had never met. While pursuing research for his doctoral thesis on...