Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók Concerti I

MOZART-LISZT-BARTÓK

The three pieces on this CD were composed by virtuoso piano-playing composers for piano partners: sister, student, wife. In their metier, these women were obviously emancipated - measured by the level of pianistic difficulty of the pieces, the authors certainly did not reckon with a weaker sex.

In 1922, 19-year-old Ditta Pásztory entered Béla Bartók's piano class at the Budapest Music Academy, in 1923 she married her professor, and in 1924 her son Peter was born. For fifteen years she played exclusively privately and only made her public debut at the age of 35 – in Basel, with Bartók's sonata for two pianos and percussion. Bartók was an excellent pianist, familiar with Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto and his own arrangement of Richard Strauss' hero life ventured onto the stage, Liszt's Dance of the Dead and Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue is said to have played brilliantly.

He wanted to enable his wife to pursue a late career; Certainly also in view of their uncertain future together – from the spring of 1938 Bartók was determined to go “far away from the neighborhood of that plague country”, Nazi Germany, to leave Europe for the USA. The couple purposefully expanded their repertoire for four hands and two pianos, including the E flat major concerto that Mozart wrote for himself and his sister Nannerl in 1779. Two performances of the concert with the Bartók-Pásztory couple are attested, the first on February 27, 1939 in Paris (conductor: Hermann Scherchen), the second on October 8, 1940 in Budapest, at their farewell concert (conductor: Janos Ferencsik).

The fact that the cadenzas in the first and third movements were by Bartók caused quite a stir. Mozart connoisseurs may find this strange, as they know that the composer's own cadenzas have been preserved. However, they were not published until the end of 1937, and it is likely that Bartók was not aware of them. In any case, he wrote cadenzas whose autographs, which are difficult to decipher and not always clear, lay unread until recently in his son Peter Bartók's archive in Florida. Its most astonishing characteristic: the pianists briefly cancel their role as dialogue partners, which Mozart had designed so ingeniously – the cadenza of the first movement is solely intended for piano I, that of the third movement for piano II.

Both of Bartók's Mozart commentaries are – as was to be expected – more cumbersome than smooth and brilliant. The first cadence moves into the peculiarly remote key of F sharp major with the help of swish diminished seventh chords, the root of which is sustained for a dozen bars as an (uncomfortable) middle-voice trill, above and below which the first theme of the first movement is worked out. The second theme is reached via a development motif, the head of the theme is narrowed with various strange chromaticisms, the cadence is brought to a virtuoso end with parallel thirds and double trills. The cadenza of the final rondo deals first with the refrain theme, then fantasizes about the first couplet in D flat major and G flat major and finds its way back to Mozart via two-handed triplets. Incidentally, both cadenzas are twice as long as Mozart's.

In 1858 an 18-year-old piano novice came to see Franz Liszt in Weimar and caused quite a stir there: she was blonde, beautiful, spoke five languages, played sports, wrote deadly serious fugues and was already a virtuoso. Her name was Ingeborg Starck, she was a Swede who grew up in St. Petersburg, and Liszt soon cast a benevolent - pedagogical - eye on her, had her perform in his matinees at the Altenburg, even played four hands or two pianos with her. What's more, he adapted a "great concert solo," a competition piece for the Paris Conservatoire, for two pianos and dedicated it "reverently" to his pupil.

The Bartók-Pásztory couple probably had the piece in their repertoire, Bartók at any rate knew it well, having played it into a recording funnel many years earlier together with Ernst von Dohnányi. His fondness for Liszt had a strongly nationalistic aspect, after all he was once the president of the Budapest Academy of Music and Bartók was his grandson student. But Bartók also discovered Liszt's progressiveness for himself when his general assessment was at a low ebb and his bold late work could not yet be acknowledged. What appealed to Bartók about the E minor Concerto was certainly less the pathos suggested in the title than the clear proximity to the famous B minor Sonata. On the one hand, this applies to thematic similarities, but on the other hand to the form that impressed Bartók as particularly plausible: three movements in one, which are contested with only two themes that are particularly versatile.

In 1937, Paul Sacher, the billionaire Swiss patron and conductor, commissioned Bartók to write the second of a total of three Bartók works he had financed. This resulted in the Sonata for two pianos and two percussionists, one of the most coherent compositional uses of Bartók's folklore studies, a fascinating combination of constructive intellect and elements of that "instinctive" Balkan folk music that Bartók always called "peasant music". Thomas Mann or his musical ghostwriter Adorno may have had the piece in mind when they read the imaginary main work by Adrian Leverkühn aka Dr. Faustus: as "sounds that begin as mere noise, as magically fanatical drumming and the pounding of gongs and reach up to the highest music".

Bartók expanded the sonata into a »concert« in 1940 at the suggestion of his publisher Heinsheimer, who at the same time tried to act as an agent to get the piano-playing couple to perform. Bartók made only minor changes to the parts of the four soloists, who are supposed to occupy the same podium position as in the original version, while the substance and length of the piece remained the same. The New York performance in January 1943, conducted by his compatriot Fritz Reiner, was Bartók's last public appearance as a pianist.

Rainer Peters