Violin Concerto No. 2

Just over a decade after his death in 1945, it came to light that Béla Bartók had composed a violin concerto in 1907–08 for a young violinist, Stefi Geyer, with whom he had been in love. He had given her the manuscript, but she did not play it — and it remained unknown until her death in 1956.

Until that revelation, the only known Bartók violin concerto was a mature masterpiece written for the great Hungarian violinist Zoltán Székely in 1937–38, and now designated as No. 2. The friendship between these two musicians is one of the most fascinating partnerships of 20th-century music. It began in 1921, when Bartok’s colleague Zoltán Kodály arranged a meeting between the 39-year-old composer and the 17-year-old violinist. Even after Bartók’s death, Szekeiy continued to interpret and promote the composer’s music until his own death in 2001, at the age of 97.

The Second Violin Concerto is just one of the remarkable pieces produced by this collaboration and came as a direct request from Székely. Bartók was at first reluctant — wary of his friend’s request for exclusive performance rights in exchange for a set honorarium — but he eventually agreed. Having finished his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta in 1936, Bartók turned his attention to creating the concerto. At first, he had in mind merely a set of variations, but it soon grew into a conventional three-movement work.

Living in his villa in Budapest, Bartók was thoroughly disturbed throughout this time by the deterioration of the political situation, wondering when and how he should emigrate, and where. He was also negotiating to replace his Austrian publisher (Universal Edition) with a London one (Boosey & Hawkes). “Neither while I am alive nor after my death,” he wrote, “do I want any German publisher to have any of my work, even if it means that no work of mine will ever be published again. This is fixed and final.”

The concerto was finished at the end of 1938 and quickly scheduled into the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s season. Composer and soloist met in Paris to work through it together, then parted, not knowing whether they would meet again. Bartók and his wife had an engagement in Budapest on the day of the premiere, March 23, and although the concerto was repeated that year in a number of Dutch cities, he never heard Székely play it.

Bartók eventually emigrated to America in 1940, and the arrangements for the exclusive rights to the concerto had to be abandoned so that other violinists could play it. Thus it was that Tossy Spivakovsky, Concertmaster of The Cleveland Orchestra, gave the concerto its US debut at Severance under Music Director Artur Rodzińki’s baton in January 1943. When Spivakovsky played it at Carnegie Hall later that year with the New York Philharmonic, Bartók heard his concerto for the first and only time. “The performance was really marvelous,” he wrote (in English). “All the three factors (soloist, conductor, orchestra) were the best a composer could wish for his work.”

The most striking feature of this concerto is the kaleidoscopic range of moods and language it encompasses. The pure, puslating chords laid down by the harp at the opening of the first movement prepare us perhaps for the lovely, wide-ranging theme with which the soloist opens, but not for the squealing and snorting that occasionally intrude. Yet the mood is predominantly lyrical, alternating with the vigorous brilliance that marks Bartók’s music. There are some remarkable sounds, including glissandi, quarter-tones, and wild chromaticism. But the harp’s quiet chords keep returning to remind us of a gentler mood. The violinist’s solo cadenza precedes a forceful ending, as in the great concertos of Beethoven and Brahms.

The central second movement is a set of six variations on a short, beautiful theme, each variation clearly distinguishable from the next. The orchestra’s closing echo at the end of the first statement of the theme is vintage Bartók, a preview of the kind of haunting phrases that will recur in his final works. The theme is restated at the end in the soloist’s upper register, and this time the closing echo is quiet and enclosed.

The finale contains a sprightly version of the theme from the very beginning of the concerto. The brisk pace is broken by a central slow section in which the soloist alternates between its upper and lower registers.

As in the Concerto for Orchestra, Bartók’s last major work, the printed score includes two versions of the closing measures. Székely described the ending, as he first saw it, as a “big fortissimo orchestral apotheosis, more like the conclusion of a symphony” than of a solo concerto. He wrote to Bartók about this and was astonished when the composer capitulated, rewriting the end of the concerto with a more favorable role for the soloist, while still incorporating the orchestral effects he didn’t want to lose. “Now everyone plays it in the version he corrected,” said Székely, with some satisfaction.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.