Béla Bartók

Books about Béla Bartók and his music

David Cooper, Julian Rushton Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra (Cambridge Music Handbooks) Cambridge University Press, 1996; ISBN 0521485053; 111 pages Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra has proven to be one of the most popularly successful concert works of the twentieth century. It is seen by its champions as an example of Bartók's seamless blend of Eastern European folk music and Western art music, and by its detractors as indicative of the composer's artistic compromise. This book contains a discussion of the historical and musical contexts of the piece, its early performance history and critical reception. It also includes the first complete movement-by-movement synopsis of the Concerto, as well as detailed technical information about the work. Price indication: $ 23.76

Erno Lendvai Bela Bartok: An Analysis of His Music Kahn & Averill Publishers, 2005-08-01; ISBN 1871082757 This text analyzes the major aspects of Bartok's music - his harmonies, melodies, forms and rhythms. Price indication: $ 79.83

Elliott Antokoletz The Music of Bela Bartok: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music University of California Press, 1989; ISBN 0520067479; 472 pages The basic principles of progression and the means by which tonality is established in Bartk's music remain problematical to many theorists. Elliott Antokoletz here demonstrates that the remarkable continuity of style in Bartk's evolution is founded upon an all-encompassing system of pitch relations in which one can draw together the diverse pitch formations in his music under one unified set of principles. Price indication: $ 23.14

Laszlo Somfai Bela Bartok: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (Ernest Bloch Lectures in Music) University of California Press, 1996; ISBN 0520084853; 334 pages This long-awaited, authoritative account of Bartk's compositional processes stresses the composer's position as one of the masters of Western music history and avoids a purely theoretical approach or one that emphasizes him as an enthusiast for Hungarian folk music. For Bla Bartk, composition often began with improvisation at the piano. Lszl Somfai maintains that Bartk composed without preconceived musical theories and refused to teach composition precisely for this reason. He was not an analytical composer but a musical creator for whom intuition played a central role. These conclusions are the result of Somfai's three decades of work with Bartk's oeuvre; of careful analysis of some 3,600 pages of sketches, drafts, and autograph manuscripts; and of the study of documents reflecting the development of Bartk's compositions. Included as well are corrections preserved only on recordings of Bartk's performances of his own works. Somfai also provides the first comprehensive catalog of every known work of Bartk, published and unpublished, and of all extant draft, sketch, and preparatory material. His book will be basic to all future scholarly work on Bartk and will assist performers in clarifying the problems of Bartk notation. Moreover, it will be a model for future work on other major composers. Price indication: $ 75.00

Kenneth Chalmers Bela Bartok (20th Century Composers) Phaidon Press Inc., 2008-04-23; ISBN 0714847704 This biography covers the full range of the work of Béla Bartók (1881-1945), from his early explorations of Hungarian folklore to his Third Piano Concerto, composed on his deathbed in the United States. Illustrated throughout with contemporary photographs of people and events, the book brings a reclusive creator strikingly to life and explores inextricable links between Bartók's life, his music, and the turbulence of two world wars. Béla Bartók is part of Phaidon s successful 20th Century Composers series, which presents authoritative and engaging biographies of the great creative musicians of our time, augmented by striking visual material and essential reference information. This edition of the book features a whimsical new cover by Jean-Jacques Sempé, the world-renowned illustrator and cartoonist. Price indication: $ 7.27

Judit Frigyesi Bela Bartok and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest University of California Press, 2000; ISBN 0520222547; 429 pages Bartók's music is greatly prized by concertgoers, yet we know little about the intellectual milieu that gave rise to his artistry. Bartók is often seen as a lonely genius emerging from a gray background of an "underdeveloped country." Now Judit Frigyesi offers a broader perspective on Bartók's art by grounding it in the social and cultural life of turn-of-the-century Hungary and the intense creativity of its modernist movement. Bartók spent most of his life in Budapest, an exceptional man living in a remarkable milieu. Frigyesi argues that Hungarian modernism in general and Bartók's aesthetic in particular should be understood in terms of a collective search for wholeness in life and art and for a definition of identity in a rapidly changing world. Is it still possible, Bartók's generation of artists asked, to create coherent art in a world that is no longer whole? Bartók and others were preoccupied with this question and developed their aesthetics in response to it. In a discussion of Bartók and of Endre Ady, the most influential Hungarian poet of the time, Frigyesi demonstrates how different branches of art and different personalities responded to the same set of problems, creating oeuvres that appear as reflections of one another. She also examines Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle , exploring philosophical and poetic ideas of Hungarian modernism and linking Bartók's stylistic innovations to these concepts. Price indication: $ 26.34

Peter Laki Bartok and His World Princeton University Press, 1995; ISBN 0691006334; 250 pages Béla Bartók, who died in New York fifty years ago this September, is one of the most frequently performed twentieth-century composers. He is also the subject of a rapidly growing critical and analytical literature. Bartók was born in Hungary and made his home there for all but his last five years, when he resided in the United States. As a result, many aspects of his life and work have been accessible only to readers of Hungarian. The main goal of this volume is to provide English-speaking audiences with new insights into the life and reception of this musician, especially in Hungary. Part I begins with an essay by Leon Botstein that places Bartók in a large historical and cultural context. László Somfai reports on the catalog of Bartók's works that is currently in progress. Peter Laki shows the extremes of the composer's reception in Hungary, while Tibor Tallián surveys the often mixed reviews from the American years. The essays of Carl Leafstedt and Vera Lampert deal with his librettists Béla Balázs and Melchior Lengyel respectively. David Schneider addresses the artistic relationship between Bartók and Stravinsky. Most of the letters and interviews in Part II concern Bartók's travels and emigration as they reflected on his personal life and artistic evolution. Part III presents early critical assessments of Bartók's work as well as literary and poetic responses to his music and personality. Price indication: $ 25.99

Hamish Milne Bartok (The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers) Omnibus Press, 1984-06; ISBN 0711902607 This series of biographies presents the great composers against the background of their times. Each draws on personal letters and recollections, engravings, paintings and, when they exist, photographs, to present a complete picture of the composer’s life. Price indication: $ 151.47

Amanda Bayley, Jonathan Cross The Cambridge Companion to Bartok (Cambridge Companions to Music) Cambridge University Press, 2001; ISBN 0521669588; 285 pages This comprehensive, accessible guide to Bartók and his music contains up-to-date research by a new generation of Bartók scholars. Part I sets the cultural, social and political background in Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century, and considers Bartók's research into folk music. Part II surveys his compositional output in all genres, relating changes in style to broad aesthetic issues, his folk music studies, and his activities as a pianist, music editor and teacher. The final part considers various aspects of reception and the variety of responses to Bartók's music in Europe and the United States. Price indication: $ 35.48

Hamish Milne Bartok: His Life and Times ([Composers, their lives and times]) Hippocrene Books, 1983; ISBN 0882546597; 112 pages Price indication: $ 61.87

Elliott Antokoletz, Juana Canabal Antokoletz Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding Unconscious Oxford University Press, 2004; ISBN 0195103831; 360 pages Two early twentieth-century operas -- Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande (1902) and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) -- transformed the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language. This new language was based almost exclusively on interactions between folk modalities and their more abstract symmetrical transformations. Elliott Antokoletz reveals not only the new musical language of these operas, but also the way in which they share a profound correspondence with the growing symbolist literary movement as reflected in their libretti. In the symbolist literary movement, authors reacted to the realism of nineteenth-century theatre by conveying meaning by suggestion, rather than direct statement. The symbolist conception included a new interest in psychological motivation and consciousness manifested itself in metaphor, ambiguity, and symbol. In this groundbreaking study, Antokoletz links the new musical language of these two operas with this symbolist conception and reveals a direct connection between the Debussy and Bartok operas. He shows how the opposing harmonic extremes serve as a basis for the dramatic polarity between real-life beings and symbols of fate. He also explores how the libretti by Franco-Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck ( Pelleas et Melisande ) and his Hungarian disciple Bela Balazs ( Duke Bluebeard's Castle ) transform the internal concept of subconscious motivation into an external one, one in which fate controls human emotions and actions. Using a pioneering approach to theoretical analysis, Antokoletz, explores the new musico-dramatic relations within their larger historical, social psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts. Price indication: $ 66.60

David Yeomans Bartok for Piano: A Survey of His Solo Literature Indiana University Press, 2000; ISBN 0253213835; 176 pages "... detailed and thorough... a wealth of information... David Yeomans deserves our thanks for a job exceedingly well done." -- American Music Teacher "... a must for pianists... " -- American Reference Book Annual "David Yeomans's study is certainly to be recommended for all good music libraries, pianists and students of Bartók." -- The Music Review "Although there are currently more than 15 books in print about composer Béla Bartók, this short volume is unique in its focus on his complete oeuvre for solo piano.... Recommended for pianists, piano teachers, and students from lower-division undergraduate level and above." -- Choice "... the entire book is indispensable for any of us before we play another Bartók piece." -- Clavier "This work collects in one place an enormous number of 'facts' about the piano music of Bartók... for planning concerts and student repertoire, and as a survey of an important body of 20th-century music, this listing is valuable." -- Library Journal This chronological listing of more than 400 pieces and movements presents in convenient form essential information about each of Bartók's solo piano works, including its various editions, timing, level of difficulty, pertinent remarks by the composer, and bibliographical references to it. Price indication: $ 13.03

Halsey Stevens and Malcolm Gillies The Life and Music of Bela Bartok Oxford University Press, 1993; ISBN 0198163495; 384 pages First published in 1953, and again in 1964, Stevens's study is a classic text, combining an authoritative, balanced account of the Hungarian composer's life with candid, insightful analyses of his numerous works, particularly the chamber works. The work now appears in a third edition, prepared by the Bartok scholar Malcolm Gillies. A comprehensive chronological list of works is added, together with a select bibliography and discography. Minor revisions to the text are suggested and a new collection of rare photographs is included. Price indication: $ 48.21

Kenneth Chalmers Bela Bartok (20th-Century Composers) Phaidon Press, 1995; ISBN 0714831646; 238 pages This biography of Bela Bartok includes a contextual study of his work. Illustrated with contemporary photographs of people and events, it show the links between his life, his music and the turbulence of two world wars. Born into the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bartok became a fervent nationalist, setting off with his friend Zoltan Kodaly to record the folklore of his native Hungary before it was destroyed by the march of progress. He ventured further into Romania and North Africa in pursuit of original cultures. These sounds and experiences helped Bartok find his voice as a composer. Despite his nationalism, his distaste for authoritarian rule brought him into conflict with a crypto-fascist government in Hungary and with the Germany of Adolf Hitler. While composing some of his works, he felt increasingly pressured and in 1940, after the death of his mother, Bartok left Hungary for the United States. Homesick, short of money and stricken with leukaemia, he composed the "Concerto for Orchestra" and, on his deathbed in 1945, was completing a "Third Piano Concerto". This text is part of the 20th-century composers series, examining composers in a biographical context, and offering a comprehensive study of key figures in the creation of 20th-century music. None of the books in the series presume a knowledge of specialized terms or musical notation. Each book in the series features a list of works, a bibliography, and a discography. Price indication: $ 16.95

Bela Bartok, Benjamin Suchoff Bela Bartok Essays University of Nebraska Press, 1992; ISBN 080326108X; 583 pages The world knows Béla Bartók as a composer. The essays contained in this voluminous compilation disclose a side of the great Hungarian previously known to relatively few persons: Bartók the man of letters. Theorist, performer, collector, scholar, and composer, Béla Bartók is internationally renowned as one of the most important and influential musicians of the twentieth century. Throughout his life he wrote lectures and essays that dealt with virtually every aspect of European music. These essays, previously scattered in specialized journals, deal with the wide range of interests and expertise: folk music and musical folklore, the music of his contemporaries and great predecessors, a brief autobiography, the structure and performance of his own music, the sale of sound recordings, and music education. Price indication: $ 135.38

Claude Kenneson Szekely and Bartok: The Story of a Friendship Amadeus Pr, 1994; ISBN 0931340705; 491 pages Price indication: $ 75.00

Donald Maurice Bartok's Viola Concerto: The Remarkable Story of His Swansong Oxford University Press, 2004; ISBN 0195156900; 240 pages When Bela Bartók died in September of 1945, he left a partially completed viola concerto commissioned by the virtuoso violist William Primrose. Yet, while no definitive version of the work exists, this concerto has become arguably the most-performed viola concerto in the world. The story of how the concerto came to be, from its commissioning by Primrose to its first performance to the several completions that are performed today is told here in Bartók's Viola Concerto:The Remarkable Story of His Swansong. After Bartók's death, his family asked the composer's friend Tibor Serly to look over the sketches of the concerto and to prepare it for publication. While a draft was ready, it took Serly years to assemble the sketches into a complete piece. In 1949, Primrose finally unveiled it, at a premiere performance with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. For almost half a century, the Serly version enjoyed great popularity among the viola community, even while it faced charges of inauthenticity. In the 1990s, several revisions appeared and, in 1995, the composer's son, Peter Bartók, released a revision, opening the way or an intensified debate on the authenticity of the multiple versions. This debate continues as violists and Bartók scholars seek the definitive version of this final work of Hungary's greatest composer. Bartók's Viola Concerto tells the story of the genesis and completion of Bartók's viola concerto, its reception over the second half of the twentieth century, its revisions, and future possibilities. Price indication: $ 83.41

Carl S. Leafstedt Inside Bluebeard's Castle: Music and Drama in Bela Bartok's Opera Oxford University Press, USA, 2005; ISBN 0195181964 The first full-length examination of Bartok's 1911 opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, this is an authoritative study of one of the twentieth century's enduring operatic works. Leafstedt adopts a broad approach to the study of opera by introducing, in addition to the expected music-dramatic analysis, topics of a more interdisciplinary nature that are new to the field of Bartok studies. Price indication: $ 27.36

Benjamin Suchoff Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra: Understanding Bartok's World Wadsworth Publishing, 1995; ISBN 002872495X; 266 pages Bela Bartok's compositions feature among the major artistic achievements of the 20th century. This accessible text discusses the music of the "Concerto for Orchestra" in detail, and provides the background in which Bartok created this major composition. Arranged in two parts, the book provides an extensive discussion of Bartok's musical language, and highlights the influence of folk and art music sources on his compositions. Suchoff traces Bartok's development as a composer from his early days at the Budapest Academy of Music to his later life, including a discussion of his influence on modern composition. Secondly, the author discusses the specific influences which led to the creation of the concerto. He examines each of the piece's five movements, closely analyzing numerous musical examples. Finally, Suchoff relates the significance of the composition to the whole of Bartok's oeuvre. Price indication: $ 445.00

Paul Wilson The Music of Bela Bartok (Composers of the Twentieth Century Serie) Yale University Press, 1992; ISBN 0300051115; 224 pages Presents a theoretical and analytical approach to Bartok's music. Wilson begins by discussing a number of fundamental musical materials that Bartok employed, and using these he describes a series of flexible, behaviourally defined harmonic functions and a model of pitch hierarchy. Price indication: $ 251.71

Sheet music, libretti, etc.

Bartok 10 Easy Pieces - Warner Bros Pubns

Bartok Album (Piano Solos) - Warner Bros Pubns

Bartok First Term PA - Warner Bros Pubns

Bartok Romanian Folk Dances: For the Piano - Alfred Pub Co

Bartok: 44 Duets Volume I (No. 1-25) for Two Violins - Boosey & Hawkes

Bartok: Piano Pieces for Children, Volume 1 - Warner Bros Pubns

Bela Bartok Concerto for Orchestra (Hawkes Pocket Scores, 79) - Boosey & Hawkes

Bela Bartok Mikrokosmos Piano Solo ~ Volume 2 (Vol. II) - Hawkes & Son

Bela Bartok Mikrokosmos Piano Solo Vol. 2 - Boosey & Hawkes

Bela Bartok Mikrokosmos Piano Solo, Vol 1 - Boosey & Hawkes

Bela Bartok Mikrokosmos Piano Solo, Vol. III - Boosey & Hawkes

Bela Bartok Mikrokosmos Volume 1 - HAL LEONARD + MUSIC BOOKS

Bela Bartok Mikrokosmos Volume 1.... Nos. 1-36 - Boosey & Hawkes

Bela Bartok Piano Pieces for Children - Warner Bros Pubns

Bela Bartok Roumanian Folk Dances for Violin and Piano - Boosey & Hawkes

Bela Bartok: Mikrokosmos Progressive Piano Pieces Vol. VI Piano Solo (Winthrop Rogers Edition, Vol. VI) - Boosey & Hawkes

Bluebeard's Castle Vocal Score - Dover Publications

Compositions for Piano: Piano Solo - G. Schirmer, Inc.

Concerto For Orchestra (full orchestral score) M060105357 -

Mikrokosmos - Piano (153 Progressive Piano Pieces, Volume 3) - Boosey & Hawkes

Mikrokosmos - Piano Solo (Volume 4) - Boosey & Hawkes

Mikrokosmos (153 Progressive Piano Pieces, Volume 1) - Boosey & Hawkes

Mikrokosmos (BH Piano, Blue, Volumes 1-6) - Boosey & Hawkes

Mikrokosmos (BH Piano, Pink, Volumes 1-6) - Boosey & Hawkes

Mikrokosmos Book 2 (BLUE, Level 2) - Boosey & Hawkes

Mikrokosmos Volume 2 (Pink) (Mikrokosmos (Boosey & Hawkes)) - Boosey and Hawkes

Mikrokosmos Volume 4 (Pink) (Mikrokosmos (Boosey & Hawkes)) - Boosey and Hawkes

Mikrokosmos Volume 6 (Pink) (Piano Solo) - Boosey & Hawkes

Piano Concerto No. 1 - Universal Edition