Dance Suite

In the 1920s, Béla Bartók’s music reached a peak of modernity and dissonance, which bestowed on him a reputation for aggressive ugliness that neither Schoenberg nor Stravinsky ever matched. With hindsight, we can understand that the horrified critics of the time were faced with sounds they had never expected to hear in their lives, but also that this music is far from ugly or formless. It may not display the soaring lines that many love in Mozart and Schubert, but it is full of lyrical feeling, youthful energy, and highly inventive rhythms and harmonies, and displays a shapeliness that can quite reasonably be seen as a legacy of these Classical masters. 

The two violin sonatas, which most clearly exhibit this extreme style, were followed in 1923 by a work that reached in a different direction and won the hearts of the public. This was the Dance Suite, composed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the formal linking of the two capitals of Hungary, Buda and Pest, into a single city. Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus was commissioned for the same occasion, and the senior Hungarian composer, Ernő Dohnányi (grandfather of The Cleveland Orchestra’s late Music Director Laureate Christoph von Dohnányi) conducted both works in a festival in November 1923. 

Bartók’s name was rapidly gaining recognition outside of Hungary in those years, partly through the efforts of his publisher, Universal Edition, and partly because of a much-publicized performance at the 1925 International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Prague, which catapulted Bartók’s music onto the international stage. Over the following two years, the Dance Suite received over 60 performances in major European and American centers. 

Bartók regarded himself equally as a composer and an ethnographer, for he had devoted much of his life up to that point to the study of folk music from many regions of Eastern Europe and beyond. He collected thousands of tunes and devoted long hours to cataloging and analyzing them. Most of his works display the influence of folk song in some shape or form. The Dance Suite was a deliberate announcement of the composer’s dedication to the study of folk music and his creative approach to incorporating this resource into modern orchestral music. 

This is not music to dance to, however, even if dance movements lie at its origin. The melodies are recognizably folklike, but Bartók treats them freely in his orchestration and varies the tempo with accelerations and interruptions, all of which proclaim a highly sophisticated musician handling raw materials in a way that never deprives them of their distinctive character. 

The six movements run continuously, the last being a Finale that recalls snatches from the earlier dances. The fifth dance is the only one to maintain a regular 4/4 beat (almost) throughout. The rest play with alternating time signatures that break up the rhythms, create hiccups, and insert a certain drama into the action. The fourth dance is the only one to sustain a gentle pace, with dense string chords as background to wandering melodic phrases in the woodwinds. 

Most remarkable is Bartók’s gift for apt and pointed orchestration, whether in the tinkling of piano or celesta, the extreme range of the bassoon, or the intrusion of the trombones. And although the tunes are strictly his invention, he composes as if they came straight from the little villages and hamlets where he collected folk songs. In so many ways, the Dance Suite was the perfect answer to all those who despaired of modern music and lamented that it could never be tuneful. 

— 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.