In January 1945, William Primrose commissioned a viola concerto from
Béla Bartók–a simple act that set in motion one of the
great musical mysteries of the 20th century and has resulted in a
legal tangle that persists to this day. At that time, the composer
was already gravely ill, yet he began the work without delay. In early
September, Primrose received word that a rough draft of the work had
been completed. Bartók had produced 14 pages of material, essentially
the complete solo viola part and sketches of the orchestral accompaniment.
In a letter to Primrose, the composer wrote, "only the score needs
to be written, which means a purely mechanical work, so to speak."
However, Bartók’s health deteriorated shortly thereafter, and
he died in a New York hospital on September 26, leaving the concerto
unfinished.
In the 57 years since then, the story of Bartók’s Viola Concerto
has developed like a work of fiction. Today, at least four versions
completed by others are in circulation, but due to copyright restrictions,
only two are available in the United States, for now. One of the others,
realized by Hungarian-born violist Csaba Erdélyi, has met with
praise from numerous Bartók scholars. Erdélyi performed
his version last year at the 29th International Viola Congress in
Wellington, New Zealand with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He
returned a few months later to record the work with NZSO. A CD and
a printed edition will be available soon, from Concordance Records
and Promethean Editions, respectively. These items may be sold legally
in New Zealand and Australia, where copyright protection expires after
50 years, not 75, as it does in the U.S. (See the
resource guide to Bartók for contact information.)
The Revisions Begin
Shortly after Bartók’s death, his widow Ditta and son Peter
gave the draft to composer Tibor Serly to complete. Serly had been
Kodaly’s pupil, and had befriended Bartók and transcribed some
of his work. Serly also had written his own viola concerto and a Rhapsody
for Viola and Piano, so it was no great surprise that Ditta Bartók
turned to the man then regarded as the foremost Hungarian composer
in America.
At the outset, Serly and dedicatee Primrose—the celebrated Scottish
violist and music scholar—balked at the task. (See "Primrose Speaks.")
Their immediate feeling was that there was too little to go on. The
viola part was challenging enough, but interpreting the composer’s
complex and at times puzzling notes on the orchestration, though perhaps
a "purely mechanical work" for Bartók himself, would prove
a daunting task for his followers. Serly collaborated with Primrose
and at one point, consulted Emanuel Vardi, the violist regarded at
that time as second only to Primrose. There was even talk of turning
the work into a cello concerto. But Primrose rescued the work for
the viola, using the composer’s letters to him to secure the rights.
The work that Bartók had estimated would take him "a few weeks"
went on for four years before the concerto was brought out in public.
The Serly/Primrose realization was first performed on December 2,
1949 in Minneapolis with Antal Dorati conducting the Minneapolis Symphony
Orchestra (today’s Minnesota Orchestra) and Primrose as soloist. Boosey
& Hawkes, Bartók’s longtime publisher, printed the Serly/Primrose
version in 1950 in a piano reduction, and with the orchestral score
and parts.
But Bartók scholars were quick to claim that Serly had departed
from the composer’s true intentions in both the scoring and the solo
viola part. Most notably, the opening of the concerto calls for a
duet between solo viola and timpani. Serly’s orchestration assigned
the timpani notes to cellos and double bass, perhaps in consideration
of smaller orchestras that might not have enough timpani to execute
the composer’s intentions. In addition, nearly 200 notes were changed
in pitch, and there were adaptations incorporated to suit Primrose’s
playing style. Furthermore, the last movement included a section raised
by a semitone (from A flat to A natural) to allow use of the viola’s
natural harmonics.
One could argue that had the composer lived long enough to complete
the work, he might have implemented some of these changes to suit
his patron. However, one can only speculate about what he intended
based on 14 enigmatically scribbled pages.
Although Serly thought he would get to keep the manuscript after
he had completed his arrangement, apparently it was taken from him
by the Bartók estate. The original manuscript was reported
as lost by Peter Bartók in 1953 and its whereabouts remained
unknown until 1978, although apparently there was a photostat in the
Bartók archives in New York throughout that period.
The disappearance of the original manuscript meant that there was
no way for Bartók scholars to compare the composer’s handwriting
with Boosey & Hawkes’ published score, which was based on the
Serly/Primrose realization. The copy at the archive was not readily
available for study.
The manuscript mysteriously reappeared some time after Tibor Serly
died in 1978. (Accounts of exactly where and when it reappeared vary
wildly. One intriguing theory that it was "found in a shoebox" remains
unverified, and probably apocryphal.) The Bartók estate remained
under trust administration until 1985, at which point Peter Bartók
sanctioned two copies of the manuscript: one for the Primrose International
Viola Archive at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; the other
for the Béla Bartók Archives in Budapest.
When copies of the manuscript became available for academic scrutiny,
numerous violists and scholars around the world began to develop their
own interpretations of the work, including Atar Arad,
former Primrose student Donald Maurice, David Dalton (another Primrose
student and now curator of the Primrose Archive at BYU), Paul Neubauer,
and Csaba Erdélyi. But Erdélyi’s remains most controversial.
Erdélyi’s Edition
From the age of five, Csaba Erdélyi sang and read Hungarian
folk music, and he spent much of his youth immersed in the music of
his countryman, Béla Bartók. His supporters say Erdélyi
is uniquely qualified to revise Bartók’s Viola Concerto. Till
the age of 19, he played the violin, but when he enrolled at the Liszt
Academy, he learned that he was to study viola instead.
In 1968 Erdélyi took third prize in the first international
viola competition. While still at the Academy and at a time when the
famed Carl Flesch Competition was open to viola entrants (1970), he
was the third prize winner. In 1972, he placed first. Soon he was
in frequent touch with Yehudi Menuhin, president of the Carl Flesch
adjudication panel. Erdélyi says, "Menuhin became my mentor
and teacher and he invited me to give master classes at his school."
The great violinist described his young protege as "an invaluable
link between the great musical cultures of West and East Europe."
Menuhin arranged a scholarship for Erdélyi in England and
largely due to the former’s prestige, the then-communist regime in
Hungary let him go. In 1980, he became a British citizen. Six years
later, Erdélyi moved to the United States to teach viola at
the University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he occupied the studio
Primrose had used. He is currently professor of viola at Butler University
in Indianapolis, where he established a new course: The History of
Viola and Viola Players, a two-semester class for private players,
gamba and viola makers, viola students, and others.
Back when Bartók’s original draft of the Viola Concerto resurfaced
in the late 1970s, Erdélyi took the Serly/Primrose score, compared
the two, and quietly began pencilling discrepancies onto his copy
of the 1950 edition. He sought the advice of world-renowned scholars
Elliott Antokoletz and Laszlo Somfai. In addition, he discussed Bartók’s
intentions with many others, among them Menuhin and Zoltán
Székely. Erdélyi first performed his own version of
the concerto in 1992 with the Budapest Philharmonic, conducted by
Erich Bergel, at the Budapest Opera House.
Bartók experts, including Antokoletz and György Kurtag,
and renowned violists Benjamin Suchoff, Emanuel Vardi, Walter Trampler,
and Michael Tree have offered praise for Erdélyi’s reworking
of the concerto. However, Erdélyi and other scholars have been
legally restrained from performing or publishing their own revisions
of the work, due to copyright restrictions observed throughout most
of the world.
Revised Yet Again
In 1995, four decades after the composer’s death, the second officially
sanctioned version of the concerto came from the joint efforts of
the composer’s son, Peter Bartók, and little-known composer
and arranger Nelson Dellamaggiore. Violist Paul Neubauer premiered
the revised concerto.
But Erdélyi says that Peter Bartók and Dellamaggiore
declined his scholarly advice on problematic sections of the work,
gleaned from such experts as Antokoletz, Somfai, Janos Karpati, György
Kroo, and Janos Kovacs. (However, Somfai was commissioned to write
the preface to Peter Bartók’s edition of the manuscript facsimile,
published by Bartók Records.) So while the 1995 version resolves
some of the fundamental questions that have plagued the work since
Bartók’s death, in some scholars’ minds other pieces of the
puzzle remain unsolved.
Witness the 1997 Viola Congress in Austin, Texas, at which a two-day
panel discussion was devoted to the work. Participants included many
of the major players cited here: Maurice (who moderated), Antokoletz,
Dalton, Erdélyi, Neubauer, and Malcolm Gillies. The experts
discussed the strengths and shortcomings of the various editions in
a lively but inconclusive exchange. On many counts, they agreed to
disagree. (A transcript appears in the Journal of the American Viola
Society, Volume 14, No. 1 [1998]. JAVS also published an article by
Peter Bartók about his revised concerto in Volume 12, No. 1
[1996].)
The Future?
The debate about Bartók’s unfinished Viola Concerto raises
more questions than it answers, some legal, others purely philosophical.
As it was the final work of a now highly regarded composer, shouldn’t
scholars who wish to study the master’s techniques be permitted to
perform and record their own interpretations? Or, as Bartók
himself didn’t finish the concerto, should it just damned well be
left unfinished?
As noted earlier, in New Zealand and the other countries of Australasia,
copyright protection expires after 50 years. So it’s possible that
we’ll soon see a flowering of revisions from that part of the world.
In fact, in addition to Erdélyi’s soon-to-be-released edition,
Donald Maurice plans to publish his findings in a book on the Bartók
Viola Concerto in 2003. Whether these works will resolve the questions
definitively or merely raise more topics for discussion remains to
be seen. At least until then, the story remains if not strictly a
whodunit, perhaps a who-ain’t?
Editor’s Note: We contacted both the publisher and the composer’s
son to invite their comments on this article. Carolyn Kalett, director
of business affairs for Boosey & Hawkes, responded, "We can make
no comment as we have not seen the Erdélyi edition." Peter
Bartók suggested we read his article in JAVS, and inspect the
facsimile of the autograph draft published by Bartók Records
in 1995 and the revised score published by Boosey & Hawkes the
same year. To our questions about other versions of the work, he responded,
"We can not comment on the versions by Donald Maurice and Csaba Erdélyi,
as we have not seen either of them." For further reading on this topic,
visit our online Bartók resource guide.
