American Bartók: The Sixth Quartet in Performance

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Béla Bartók had intended to dedicate his Sixth Quartet to the New Hungarian Quartet and violist Antal Molnár borrowed the score with a view to a performance in Budapest in December 1940. However, the Second World War made that impossible: the New Hungarian Quartet were in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and Bartók stipulated that ‘while Germans ruled in Europe the quartet should not be made public’.
In the end the Sixth Quartet was dedicated to the Viennese Kolisch Quartet, who gave the premiere on 20 January 1941 at New York’s Town Hall, with the newly-emigrated Bartók in the audience; it received its first performance in Europe at London’s Wigmore Hall by the Laurence Turner Quartet on 14 April 1942. The first performance in Hungary took place at the Academy of Music on 28 July 1945, soon after which influential quartettists, violinist Imre Waldbauer and cellist Jenő Kerpely, also left for the USA.
Much has been written about the biographical significance of the Sixth Quartet for Bartók and how his experience of personal loss and emigration fed into the music’s structure and expression. This paper takes a slightly different tack, by considering the complex politics around early performances of Bartók’s Sixth Quartet as the starting point to consider intersecting representations of Hungarian and American musical identities. For the Sixth Quartet was quickly taken up by American groups such as the Juilliard and LaSalle quartets, who stressed the work’s modernity over its Hungarian origins.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Musicologist. BA Oxford 1996, MA Nottingham 1997, PhD Princeton 2002; lecturer at tthe University of Reading 2002-4, Senior Lecturer University of Manchester 2004-2014, Professor of Music University of Oxford since 2014. Elected Member of Academia Europaea 2020 and Fellow of the British Academy 2021; Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association 2021.