Somfai László

”Romlott testëm” and the “Peacock Melody”
Notes on a Theme of Bartók’s First String Quartet
László Somfai

In the Allegro vivace finale of the First Quartet there twice appears an Adagio theme (bars. 94-105, 320-329), significantly different from the other themes of the movement, and which is often referred as Bartók's „peacock melody” because of its resemblance to the emblematic Hungarian old-style folksong that Kodály arranged in several of his later compositions (including the „Peacock” Variations for orchestra). Since Kárpáti's book on the quartets (1967) Bartók studies have pointed out that he did not know the peacock melody before 1935. Bartók collected, however, „Romlott testëm,” another old-style parlando song with a similar melodic line during his first collecting trip in Transylvania among the Székelys in the summer of 1907. This essay opens the case, and on the basis of data taken from the composer's field notations in Transylvania, as well as his letters to Stefi Geyer, demonstrates that, although collected during the first days, „Romlott testëm” was not among the tunes he selected for composition (arrangement) in 1907; that his melody in the First Quartet is not a quotation but rather an abstraction inspired by the newly discovered pentatonic scale of the old Székely folksongs.

”Staccato Stroke?” – Sign and Subtext
László Somfai

Speculating on the intended meaning of stroke and/or dot in the articulation of 18th-century notation (cf. Ex. 1: 1-2, 5, 11), the study focuses not on the often-discussed treatises but on autograph notation and its presumed message for the musician of the time. The combined use of the word staccato plus strokes indicated above the notes in J. Haydn’s and W. A. Mozart’s string parts (Ex. 2) is a meaningful starting point: it suggests that the word indicated the so-called staccato bow stroke whereas the strokes not so much shortness but an equal accentuation of notes, in spite of the 18th-century traditions of Betonung. In general in J. S. Bach’s notation a series of dots also indicate equal accentuation (Ex. 2: 2-3, 5, 7-8). Occasionally, in an ouverture, its meaning is: play the rhythm as written (4); or an individual dot: don’t embellish the note (6). The modern typography of notation (according to which the stroke belongs to the note side, not the stem side) weakens the clear meaning of a stroke in the autograph given above the staves of two hands as an overall accent (Ex. 4). Mozart’s differentiation between stroke and dots (Ex. 5) in a string part may represent a refined notation of the two detached bow strokes (described among others by Quantz): the one lifting the bow, the other executed on the string. Finally, thirty-three examples taken from J. Michael Haydn’s autographs show a surprisingly conscious differentiation between stroke and dot (Ex. 6). Among others he used the stroke to point to the accented measure in two-bar or four-bar phrases (14, 17-18, 20-22).

The "Classical" Last Scores of Béla Bartók
László Somfai

The success of Bartók's last compositions written in the USA (Concerto for Orchestra 1943, Sonata for Solo Violin 1944, Third Piano Concerto 1945) irritated the progressive music scene in the 1950s. According to post-war leaders of new music (Leibowitz, Scherchen, Boulez, etc.), these scores represented a "path of compromise" for the USA listener. This study demonstrates that Bartók's method in composition radically changed in America, which influenced the general impression of the new works. He missed the perfect isolation of his studio for improvisation at the piano, a precondition for composition in Budapest. In America he could best work on new scores during his holidays in Saranac Lake, NY, or in Ashville, NC (see the table). Writing the draft notation, now Bartók switched from ink to pencil, outlined his new compositions in shorter thematic blocks (see examples 1-4). Besides, Bartók's anxiety about the fate of the people in Hungary and Europe was an important motivation when he adopted folklore imaginaire themes, stylistic references, and created the narrative of the major wartime compositions while a stylistic compromise for the American audience was not. The characteristic titles of the movements, however, can be marked as an aide to the listener. Incidentally, each of the three late scores has its own motivation and this crucially influenced the concept and the style: after a long period he wrote a large-scale symphonic work, made a violin solo inspired by Menuhin's Bach rendition, elaborated a concerto not for the pianist-composer himself but for his wife Ditta.

A Tribute to Kornél Bárdos 1921-1993
László Somfai

According to Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (2nd rev. Ed., Personenteil Bd. 2, 1999):

Bárdos gilt als bedeutendster Forscher der Musikgeschichte der ungarischen Städte des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts. Seine Forschungsmethode beruhte auf vollständiger Erschließung archivalischer Daten.

This is a precisely formulated summary of the central research topic and the method of Musikhistoriker Kornél Bárdos whose entry in the MGG - perhaps surprisingly for some – exceeds the entry of the internationally recognized Hungarian Musikwissenschaftler Dénes Bartha. On the other hand, the fact that the 2001 edition of New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians sets a somewhat shorter space for the Bárdos entry may be the result of the recognition that his work is a typically central-European approach deeply rooted in the German musicological tradition. By all means, in both encyclopedias the “Hungarian music” entries repeatedly refer to Bárdos’s fundamental researches.
Kornél Bárdos’s posthumous recognition is a great satisfaction to the Hungarian musicology. In 1989, when he was honored with the grand prize of the Hungarian Art Foundation Mûvészeti Alap - although at this point Bárdos got hold of two higher degrees (kandidátus and Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), already produced five of his six monographs on the musical life in Hungarian towns, and the majority of his thirty-some scholarly essays –, the major part of the Hungarian musical life had but insufficient information about the scope and significance of the accomplishment of this modest man. They did not know that being a Cistercian priest Bárdos worked in a manifold disadvantageous position. For decades, as a fulltime music teacher, Bárdos had to work in his spare hours in archives in Hungary and neighboring countrie; that only at the age of 57 got a research job in the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. (The best narration of the chronicle of his life and his views on musical scholarship can be read in three interviews in Muzsika 1984/2, 1989/5, 1993/2, made by Péter Király and András Borgó, resp.)
The most valuable part of his achievement is represented by six large volumes dedicated to the musical life of Pécs, Tata, Gyõr, Sopron, Eger, and Székesfehérvár in the 16th-18th centuries, based on documentary evidences (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1976-1993). Bárdos’s philosophy was that all existing archival sources must be detected, even bills and lists among financial papers of an episcopate or school, an aristocratic realm or the administration of the town. He successfully differentiated the structure of the musical life in Hungarian market towns vs. royal boroughs. Each volume includes a thematic catalogue of the musical sources located in the town, a useful part even for those who cannot read Hungarian.
Probably less successful was Bárdos as an editor of the second volume of Magyarország zene-története [The history of music in Hungary 1541-1686], 1990, a thankless job inherited from another scholar. Indeed, he was not the type of a commanding chief in teamwork. Bárdos, even in his late years, preferred to work individually as a gentleman scholar. Fortunately, his favourite volume, the Third, is in good hands today. His one-time team in the institute (Á. Gupcsó, Z. Farkas, K. Renner, Á. Sas, and others) takes care of the scholarly foundation as well as the careful presentation of the immense work. They even open new vistas with the style analysis of the 18th and early 19th-century music in Hungary, an approach that Kornél Bárdos – with a typical understatement of his personal capabilities, although in his earlier essays he embarked on analytical work successfully (e.g. in the Volksmusikartige Variierungstechnik in den ungarischen Passionen 15. bis 18. Jahrhundert, 1975) – cultivated less and less in his mature books. Thus calling him in the MGG as Kornél Bárdos, Musikhistoriker, in the final analysis is a fair classification.

Dénes Bartha 1908-1993
A Hungarian Musicologist in Amerika

The opening address of the conference focuses on Dénes Bartha's legendary appearance at the 1961 New York congress of the International Musicological Society, and his last active teaching period between 1964 and 1981 in the USA, the least known chapter of his scholarly activity in Hungary.

Bartók's 2nd String Quartet and Kodály's "Critical Faculty"
László Somfai

Between 1906 and the end of the 1910s Bartók often discussed his new works with Kodály. Scattered penciled notes in manuscripts and proofs, or comments in Kodály's letters document some of the suggestions. The most important and extensive part, however, took place in their private discussions. In a deleted section in the draft of his article on Kodály, in 1921 Bartók intended to mention three scores in which his friend's "critical faculty" helped him finding a form that was more perfect than the original, as his manuscripts prove it, he added. Bartók referred to the insertion of mm. 38-84 in "Bear Dance", the revision of an unspecified section in the second movement of String Quartet no. 1, and in the second movement of String Quartet no. 2. The present study for the first time identifies these improvements in the quartets: the insertion of 17 new measures (instead of 27) after 17 in Mov. II of the First Quartet, and the recomposed last 197 mm. of Mov. II of the Second Quartet, a ¾ (in the coda 6/4) version of the original 2/4 music. In addition I demonstrate some of Kodály's critical comments in the autograph manuscripts of Mov. I of the First, and Mov. III of the Second Quartet.

Donald F. Tovey’s Analyses and the „Précis-Writing”
László Somfai

In Hungary Tovey’s writings are all but unknown. This paper, originally presented at a conference saluting to the outstanding Hungarian music theorist József Ujfalussy, campaigns to incorporate Tovey’s essays into the canon of analytical reading in this country. An introduction, discussing the controversial reception of his approach in recent American and British literature, is followed by critical comments on the editions and texts by Tovey.

Haydn’s “Gypsy” Adagio
László Somfai

The second movement of Haydn’s C major String Quartet op. 54 no. 2 (Hob. III:57) offers a fascinating case study: can we reconstruct significant characteristics of gypsy performance in late 18th-century in Hungary? The basic theme of this uniquely “exotic” slow piece in ¾ is not Hungarian, but the embellished first violin part documents the inspiration of a style, which Haydn could only hear in the performance of gypsy bands in the Esterházy realm in Hungary. Previously marked as bold per figuram retardationis cases (Tovey, Rosen), more recently characterized as primas style, rhapsody is gypsy style, gypsy ornaments (Landon, Webster, Finscher), the present study discusses the otherwise atypical specific rhythmic features, dissonances beyond retardatio, and the irregularities in articulation and dynamics.

Joseph Haydn’s Two “London” Sonatas Dedicated to Mrs. Bartolozzi: Inconsistent Notation or Doctored Contemporary Editions?
László Somfai

Up to the 1960s the different source situation of the two “London” sonatas dedicated to Mrs. Bartolozzi – from the E-flat (Hob.XVI:52) the autograph and two reliable editions exist, from the C major (Hob:XVI:50) only a belated English print with strange features – led to dissimilar reception. I argue that the missing printer’s copy of the 1800 Caulfield first edition of the C major could have been Haydn’s autograph, the dedication copy to Mrs. Bartolozzi, but in an edited form by turning hairpins into dim. instruction, possibly adding dynamics, etc., according to Mrs. Bartolozzi’s performance. However, as far as the finale is concerned, this is a better presentation and a more reliable text of the piece than the Henle critical edition or the Wiener Urtext, with slightly different performing signs in the written-out repeats. I also discuss the question of page turning in the E-flat autograph and the first edition of both sonatas that reveal practical as well as rhetorical considerations, even at the expense of leaving a page blank in the printed edition (E-flat, Longman & Clementi ed.) or blank half pages in the autograph at Cornell University on the occasion of Malcolm Bilson’s 70s birthday.

Two Compositional Essays in the Erdõdy-Quartets Op. 76
László Somfai

The paper revisits the Erdõdy- Quartets with the premise that the choice for copying score of three from the six quartets (D minor, B flat major, E flat major), as exemplum for his own library, was Haydn's intention; there is no reason to assume that scores of the other three got lost. While the compositional tour de force in the D minor is the opening movement, in the B flat and E flat the adagio movements accomplished a carefully designed pair of compositional essays. Among other „tertiary rhetoric" (Elaine Sisman's term) pairs of movements (see Table 1), the E flat adagio of the B flat major quartet and the B major Fantasia of the E flat, both in 3/4 time and emphasizing the same motivic starting point, present two diagonally opposite learned-style strategies; even the rhythmic vocabulary and the use of ornaments shows premeditated contrast (music example 4). In the „Sunrise" the space and time, register and pulsation is in focus (including subtleties like per arsin et thesin entries, see music examples 6-7), in the much-analyzed Fantasia the modulation and the tonal surprise-shifts.

Clever Orator Versus Bold Innovator
Rhetoric Performance and the Notation of Haydn’s String Quartets
László Somfai

Notwithstanding Haydn’s interest in rhetoric and the creative use of the practice of oratory on different levels of the composition, this study takes the case of the string quartets into consideration. In contrast to keyboard music (cf. Tom Beghin’s essays), in this genre not the complete text of the music but only four individual parts were available in the contemporary performance practice, thus a preliminary study of the piece for detecting rhetorical figures and making a plan of the interpretation could not be part of the preparation for the delivery. A disciplined prima vista first reading and rendering, followed by a deeper understanding with chances of a reinterpretation of the same music in the repeated sections, a spontaneous memoria situation, were essential characteristics of the promuntiatio. The master orator was Haydn himself; he included the necessary instruction in the text (i.e. in the notation) of the music. In fact the surprisingly rich variety of special instructions written in Latin, German, or Italian words or expressed with fingering, etc., directly served the intended rendition. Even when Haydn encoded sophisticated messages in string quartet movements (cf. Somfai, “’Learned Style’ in Two Late String Quartet Movements of Haydn,” 1986), he simply produced a careful notation so that its proper execution, without knowing what it actually was, enabled the musicians to deliver the message to the Kenner.

Fifty Years in Haydn Research
A Personal Account
László Somfai

Presented as the opening address at the Haydn 2009: A Bicentenary Conference (Budapest & Eszterháza, 27-30 May 2009), this is a critical review of Hungarian Haydn studies primarily based on the sources of the nationalized Esterházy private collection in the Széchényi National Library and other public institutions in Budapest. The reviewer worked in the music collection of the library from 1958 to 1963 among others scrutinizing the operatic material once conducted by Haydn. The first period of researches focused around the Haydn Year 1959 with the presentation of new scholarly achievements at the International Haydn Conference in Budapest (17-22 September 1929), including the publication of a catalogue of the primary sources of Haydn's music in Budapest, followed by two major books printed a year later (Haydn emlékére, collected studies by Hungarian authors, and Bartha & Somfai, Haydn als Opernkapellmeister). During the 1960s Dénes Bartha became an internationally recognized Haydn scholar, among others editor of several operas in the series Joseph Haydn Werke, and the volume Gesammelte Briefe and Aufzeichnungen; in the following period mostly the reviewer published documents, facsimile editions, studies. The survey ends with a short and personal view on the achievements and shortcomings of the last decades of Haydn scholarship.

Traditional and New Research Tools in Bartók Sketch Studies
László Somfai

With reference to a forthcoming longer essay (”»Written between the desk and the piano«: Dating Béla Bartók’ Sketches,” to be published in 21st-Century Perspectives on 20th-Century Sketches, edited by Patricia Hill, Cambridge University Press), this study gives a glimpse at the complex methods used I dating Béla Bartók’s undated either not genuine but pseudo-sketches (cf. Facsimile 1: two incipits taken from already existing drafts, dated 20 March 1908 and sent as a “musical letter” to Emma Gruber), or an originally undated sketch, the beginning of String Quartet No. 1, was later cut out from Bartók’s pocket sketchbook and, with the date fixing the birth of the idea, sent to Stefi Geyer as an appendix to his love letter (in January 1908).
The central example of the study is the six-page-long sketch complex of the First Sonata for Violin and Piano (drafted in October-December 1921), preserved on folios 24^v-27^r in the so-called Black Pocket-book (facsimile edition: Editio Musica Budapest, 1987). Since Bartók used the same fountain pen and for a longer time refilled it from the writing units and for unfolding the chronological layers of their notation. Here we focus on differentiating between thin vs. thick lines (produced by the still scratchy dry fountain pen’s nib vs. the normal writing), smaller and larger sizes of the musical symbols (probably caused by the lighting conditions), and the inclination of vertical lines. The physical investigation is then combined with the musical interpretation of the firstly written thematic ideas, taking into account even the potential influence of Bartók’s own music (e.g. that he was reading the proofs of his recent works at that time). Finally a close look at his travel itinerary follows, because Bartók only worked in a sketchbook when he was far from his fully isolated studio with the piano in Budapest. As a result, we suggest that the sketches for the First Sonata were written between 10 July and 6 Sept. 1920 during Bartók’s summer holidays in Kertmegpuszta, a year before the actual composition.

Stanza Structure, Quatrain, Liedform
Dénes Bartha's Concept
László Somfai

In the last decade of his active years, teaching in the United States, between 1967 and 1976 Dénes Bartha published six studies in German and English (listed on p. 386) on a special formation of themes primarily in the instrumental music of Haydn and Beethoven, but also of Mozart. As a criticism of Riemann's "period" (Periode) theory, he demonstrated that the structure of several opening themes of the finale in symphonies and string quartets - but also the contours of subsequent themes, in other genres and other movements too - were closely related to the four-line structure of a stanza (quatrain in French). This phenomenon, familiar from folk song and popular dance music already in the 18th century, often combined with the rhythmic pattern of the contredanse, was the focus of Bartha's interest. He used refined analytical methods borrowed from the vocabulary of Hungarian ethnomusicology; he marked the "lines" of a "stanza" with numbers 1. 2. 3. 4., or according to the content as AABA form, etc. (see examples 1 and 2-3). Critics of his concept pointed out that for the sake of a perfect stanza Bartha often focused on a truncated short form of the actual theme (the first phrase, the first half of a period). Another criticized aspect of his theory is that Bartha extended the classical German Liedform (a // b+a), viewed as a large-sized version of the AABA stanza, to apply also to complete movements, and suggested that a characteristic feature of the classical style was not so much the sonata-form principle as the stanza principle.