About this Piece

In 1923, the Budapest city council threw a vast party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the merging of Buda and Pest: two rather distinct although neighboring—on opposite banks of the Danube—entities. Buda, the old city, with its imperial traditions and aristocratic residences; Pest, the commercial hub and abode of middle and working classes. The resultant city instantly became one of Europe’s major metropolitan areas.

The commemoration of this marriage of convenience also represented a return to life for the nation of Hungary three years after the Treaty of Trianon, which dismembered the Austro-Hungarian Empire after its defeat in the First World War, divesting Hungary of half of its land, virtually all of its natural resources, and most of the ethnic minorities that made it among the most diverse of European cultures.

To cap the celebration, the city fathers staged a grand concert for which the country’s leading composers, Ernő Dohnányi, Béla Bartók, and Zoltán Kodály, were each commissioned to contribute a score, all to be performed by the orchestra of the Budapest Philharmonic Society under Dohnányi’s baton.

The concert, on November 19, 1923, was a partial success. Bartók’s contribution, the present Dance Suite, suffered the dreaded “mixed reception,” neither much liked nor disliked sufficiently to create a career-enhancing scandal.

“My Dance Suite was so badly performed that it could not achieve any significant success,” Bartók wrote. “In spite of its simplicity there are a few difficult places, and our Philharmonic musicians were not sufficiently adult for them. Rehearsal time was, as usual, much too short, so the performance sounded like a sight-reading, and a poor one at that.” Two years later, the suite was performed by the Czech Philharmonic under Václav Talich at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Prague and rapturously received. Performances throughout Europe followed, building Bartók’s reputation, in the positive sense, more than all his previous works combined.

Bartók said simply that “the Dance Suite was the result of my researches and love for folk music,” which he had been studying and recording since 1905. However, in the post-World War II communist era in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the state cultural apparatus turned it into a “hymn of brotherhood of nations and people”—Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Roma, and Arab.  Nowhere had Bartók suggested its possible function as a “hymn” to anything.

The six-part suite, in which all the tunes are Bartók’s own inventions rather than actual folk melodies, prominently—but not exclusively—employs Hungarian rhythms (2/4 and 4/4 abound). The movements, played without pause, are bound together by a lyrical ritornello.

Grotesquerie characterizes the first two movements (separated by the ritornello, announced by a quartet of muted violins), the first pungently launched by a pair of bassoons playing narrow intervals: “rather Arabic in feeling,” according to the composer. The second movement, with its slithering trombones and blasting trumpets (with minor thirds milked for all they’re worth), is strongly suggestive of Bartók’s pantomime ballet The Miraculous Mandarin.

The third movement, with its 2/4 bagpipe-like opening (Eastern, rather than Scottish), looks forward all the way to 1943 and the “Giuoco delle coppie” scherzo movement of the Concerto for Orchestra. Notable, too, is the series of celesta and harp glissandos over a trilling flute, heard further on in this dance, which the composer described as “typically Romanian in feeling.” The ritornello is announced, wistfully, by solo flute.

The Molto tranquillo fourth dance begins almost motionlessly, with a menacing quiet that evolves into a foretaste of what would become one of Bartók’s most characteristic soundscapes: the haunted nocturne. The instruments enter singly: first English horn and bass clarinet, followed by flute, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, which then depart the aural stage in reverse order.  

The pulsing Comodo, the briefest of the movements, builds suspense toward a rondo that brings together most of the earlier themes of the Dance Suite, culminating in a noisy romp that suggests a mingling of the previously cited Miraculous Mandarin theme and the rowdy finale of the yet-to-be-written Concerto for Orchestra.

—Herbert Glass