Music/Folklore paper by Lucas, Sarah
Béla Bartók’s Piano Concerto no. 1: Corrected First-Edition Scores and the Concerto’s Performance and Publication History
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Bartók’s early performances of his Piano Concerto no. 1 (1926) in both Europe and the United States were hampered by issues in the first-edition score. As a result, on a few major concerts, most notably for Bartók’s American debut with the New York Philharmonic, the Concerto was replaced by Bartók’s Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1905), a work that was not representative of his more mature style. Although Bartók later acknowledged the Piano Concerto’s difficulty for players and audiences alike, the mistakes in the first edition also affected the success of his early performances, as well as the critical reception of Bartók’s music. Corrections of the errors mentioned above appear not only in the second-edition score, but also as handwritten entries made by at least two hands in the three extant first-edition scores, two of which are recently discovered scores associated with the conductor Fritz Reiner. This paper establishes the link of the three extant first editions to Bartók’s performances with two major American orchestras in 1928—Fritz Reiner and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Furthermore, it documents the nature of the corrections as they relate to one another, to Bartók’s corrections, and to the published second edition. Since no recording of the work with the composer at the piano is known to survive, analysis of the scores used by Reiner and Koussevitzky in performances with Bartók provides an important window into the way Bartók performed his Piano Concerto no. 1.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Sarah Lucas is a PhD candidate in musicology at the University of Iowa currently completing her dissertation “Fritz Reiner and the Legacy of Béla Bartók’s Music in the United States.” She carried out one year of dissertation research at the Budapest Bartók Archives with the support of a Fulbright Award in addition to her research in the U.S. at Northwestern University’s Fritz Reiner Collections and other archives. She holds an M.A. in Music History from the University of Missouri (2012) and her master’s work culminated in the thesis “Béla Bartók and the Pro-Musica Society: A Chronicle of Piano Recitals in Eleven American Cities during his 1927–1928 Tour.” sarah-lucas@uiowa.edu